Checkout https://estada.ch/

Hello everyone! I would like to make an update on my project “Nominatim QA Analyser Tool” which is progressing very well.

As a recap, this project aims to have a tool capable of analysing the Nominatim’s database to extract suspicious data from it. Then, these data should be presented to mappers through a graphical interface so that they can correct them.

Github repository

The tool is still under development, it lacks of tests, documentation, configuration etc. However, you can access the github repository there if you are interested: https://github.com/AntoJvlt/Nominatim-Data-Analyser

Suspicious data public visualization

We chose to use Osmoscope as the main visualization tool for the data we extract with the Nominatim QA Analyser.

I have setup up an instance of Osmoscope on the development server which was provided to me for this GSoC project. This instance is publicly available there: https://gsoc2021-qa.nominatim.org/osmoscope You are free to look at it and start fixing some data errors around you!

/!\ Here are some important informations to know about this public instance /!\

• The OSM data on the development server are not regularly updated. The current OSM data were imported around May 24th 2021.
• This is the osmoscope instance that I use for the development, this means that it can be down or data can be under some tests at some point so it is not fully trustable.
• If you want to follow the evolution of this Osmoscope instance throughout the development, dont forget to refresh your browser’s cache for this webpage to get the latest evolutions.
• The QA rules are not definitive, if you find data that you think are not wrong or if you want to discuss about the QA rules, please come to the Nominatim’s github page in the discussions section. QA rules suggestions are also welcomed.

How does the Nominatim QA Analyser tool work

… See full entry

• Over the course of June, I came out 🏳️‍⚧️. 😊😊 Everyone’s been really great about it. In OSM, we map things as they really are, regardless of how they were used in the past, or what the government assigned it at the start. But, you know how much work is involved in deprecating a previously used tagging scheme. You need to find all data users, and update them to the new scheme.

• CWG
  • Promotation Material Programme
  • posted envelope to DE, UK × 2, CA
• Debugged an issue why someone couldn’t post to the diversity-talk@ list (which I co-mod)
• OSMF Board
  • Possible relocation of OSMF from the UK
    • Ireland?
      • ½hr phone call with Irish lawyer about Irish legal structure
    • Advisory board
      • email AB to ask if can move to your country
      • emailed AB about what type of corporate structure would help them give us money.
  • Attribution Guidelines
    • Started community consultation: osmf-talk@ talk@, Fediverse/Mastodon Twitter
  • AOSMFBAAAoAAAA
    • email osmf-talk & board@ to tell them
  • Bank account
    • posted signed forms to again
  • Advisory Board Meeting
    • created doodle & emailed AB
  • trademark grant request (OpenSnowMap)
    • Recieved, but we probably need a board resolution

Previously:

2021: Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May 2020: Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May June July Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec.

Speaking of inclusion and participation, I do have an idea why nobody from rural Panama participates to OSM. Mind you, I’m not saying “almost nobody”, but “absolutely nobody” . . . the point is, as most Third World countries, Panama has a failing . . .

I hear voices calling to order, you say that calling Panama a “Third World country” is offensive? Oh, the very use of the concept? I should say “Developing Country”, right, nice, very politically correct. But calling it as you suggest, that’s not political correctness, it’s a lie, in my opinion it’s a lie needed when we don’t want to accept the fact, and to deal with it. So please let me insist:

. . . in this Third World economy, infrastructure suffers from low or absent public investment. We have here a long lasting rain season, from May to November, and in the rural area power fails generally a couple of days per week, may last a couple of hours, or more often until the next morning. In such condition, I still assumed I would be able to follow if not participate to the venueless SotM-2021, as I did last year from a hammock, on a 10 years old tablet, using solar power and a couple of batteries.

We are at this hotel, a beautiful place, in the middle of their own land recovery project, and because of the cloud cover their “high speed” link disappeared (one of the towers must have a power failure, not compensated by solar power), so we went to a different location within the recovery project, a higher located building where you put the phone on the roof, in a waterproof bag, and have “3.5G” from an antenna at 10km. With high humidity and low hanging clouds it may drop to 2.5G, “waiting for network” half of the time. This was less convenient than last year, mostly because I could not use my hammock.

… See full entry

I rarely visit the forums these days. Between real-life issues, activism, studying and work, on the case when I have a few minutes to map I do exactly that. Silent mapping. Probably what many of us do.

Apparently, this was not meant to last.

Recent events with bans of Ukrainian users seem to clearly violate the Ban Policy, and from what I’ve seen, DWG can’t (or doesn’t want to) provide a reasonable explanation. It remains a “closed circle” with zero transparency. Usually I’m fine with that. I can’t fix all the things in the world, so it’s about priorities. However, this particular case seems serious enough to break my seclusion.

I could present it as bias or discrimination (as I probably should), but as the discussion about the issue in our Ukrainian community progresses, I came to understand it had more serious implications than merely suppressing people from a certain group.

From what it currently looks, DWG is currently trying to play thought police and persecute people for the content of their OSM profiles based on personal opinions of DWG members. In doing so, DWG is overstepping their borders and misusing their power.

We came to think that OSM is community driven, and all the overarching structures are in place for our convenience. However, if anyone can be expelled and permabanned (to be more precise, banned for 10 years) from the platform without clear ramifications and rules of dispensing these bans, it is the beginning of the end. This threatens the future of OSM project as a whole, a tangled community I am fond of.

I will try my best to spare time and go into details as we struggle with finding a reasonable solution that will benefit OSM and hopefully prevent any future issue of this kind from happening. I will also try to avoid calling names at this time as I’m still studying the situation. I am hesitant to point fingers unless having solid understanding first.

Introduction

Hi everyone! As the first evaluation period is closing in, I am writing this diary entry as an update on the progress of my GSoC project for OSM, the OpeningHoursEvaluator.

Using the test-driven development approach (which, by the way, works wonderfully with this project), suggested by one of my mentors, Simon Poole, my project OpeningHoursEvaluator, an evaluator for the opening hours tag defined by OSM, is progressing fairly well, with the evaluator supporting almost all the syntaxes defined by the specifications, ranging from something as small as time and a wider range such as year, except for certain syntax where the OpeningHoursParser have yet to cover, variable time (dawn, sunrise, sunset, dusk), and also country-specific public holidays and school holidays (PH, SH). This is something I intend to complete in the second period of GSoC.

Current project location

GitHub repository: https://github.com/goodudetheboy/OpeningHoursEvaluator

Timeline

… See full entry

At Facebook, we’ve been releasing our Daylight Map to the public since March of last year. Daylight is a version of OSM that has been quality checked and validated to ensure that the resulting map is safe and of high quality. It is the map data that is used on Facebook maps. Our goal is to make OSM easier and safer to use which will then expand the use of OSM.

When building Daylight, we employ automated validation processes to find bad data. That bad data is then either deleted from the map or corrected in the OSM database. This diary will go over the map validation efforts we’ve made to the map to make Daylight safe to use.

The map validation efforts includes three parts: vandalism and profanity cleanup, relation repair, and Atlas Checks fixes.

Vandalism and Profanity Cleanup

In the last couple years, our engineering team has spent a lot resources to research how we can identify vandalism and profanity more systematically and more accurately. With these improvements to our detection tools, we were able to fix over 360 examples of vandalism and 16 instances of profanity on feature names all over the world.

… See full entry

A number of areas in the UK (and the world) have painted crossings in LGBT+ pride rainbow colours to support LGBT+ rights.

In the UK at least, these are often referred to as ‘rainbow crossings’. They don’t always look the same, with some using different colours/pride flags.

Image of rainbow crossing by Matt Brown used under Creative Commons CC-BY-2.0 license.

Here’s a recent example from Bristol, a city in the South West of England: https://www.bristol247.com/lgbtq/news-lgbtq/bristol-gets-its-first-rainbow-crossing/ .

Here’s two in a London borough: https://www.richmond.gov.uk/first_rainbow_crossings_unveiled

and another: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-51446121

one at Surrey University: https://my.surrey.ac.uk/news/introducing-our-new-rainbow-crossing

And here’s one in New Zealand - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba_Street_rainbow_crossing

… See full entry

Seale-Hayne is a former university located in Devon, UK. It was one of the first purpose-built agriculture colleges in the country, the foundation stone was laid back in 1914 and the construction finished in 1918 when the site was lent for the army to treat shell shock victims from the first world war and in 1920 it would finally receive it’s first agriculture student. The university functioned until 2005 when it was closed and the site was sold. Today it functions as a business centre, hosting different business and charities offices, artists studios, a well-being centre with a pool and a café. It still has a active alumina community which maintains a Heritage Room with objects from the university’s time.

I spent last months slowly mapping the place, adding buildings, names, paths and a few of the business. With the help of StreetComplete I could add a lot of detailed info such as number of steps, building floors, surfaces, etc.

… See full entry

I’m about to begin working on mapping out every building, Business, and missing information to Wood River and Bethalto.

Currently I’m going to switch between working on Wood River, and Bethalto, mostly focusing my efforts on getting zoning areas and buildings in place. Thus I will follow those by adding the smaller details, like shop names, addresses, and trees.

My May 2021 in OSM

… See full entry

(original post in Portuguese here)

Introduction

In the last weeks I focused my efforts on adding vaccination facilities in Fortaleza/Brazil. At the moment of writing, there are in Fortaleza exactly 113 vaccination sites, being (if I’m not mistaken) 100 clinics and 13 other places (such as shopping malls and huge infrastructures like a stadium and convention center).

The method I used for this was to use the open data of the Fortaleza City Council (don’t worry, dear warrior of licenses, we have explicit permission for this) for the locations and details of the clinics, along with the other 13 locations that have been manually updated.

Methodology

Preliminary Step

… See full entry

My April 2021 in OSM

• Kept on mapping of course. Usual day to day mapping.
• Saw a new project to map public toilets in Ireland (Pee.ie), and tweeted at them @pee_ie, to explain OSM (no reply yet)
• Attended a meeting with some Irish OSMers & other Irish Open Data activists about possible new Irish Open Data policy
• Reported a bug in Nominatim, where it depending on certain software that it didn’t claim to depend on
• OSMF Board
  • Discussed with the board, and proposed a AOSMFBAAAoAAAA session at State of the Map 2021.
  • Trademarks
    • OpenSnowMap
      • [3] email recv, open ticket, DMed Simon & Packi
  • Take over protection
    • emailed all 27 corp members to seek advice, nothing too detailed.
  • Local Chapters
    • emailed about AB reps: Oceania, DRC, AR
    • emailed FOSSGIS new contract & resigned for mistake
  • Board chat about Attribution Guidelines
  • Renewed the OSMF’s BigBlueButton server with Cloud68
  • email an OSMer to follow up about AoA change ideas.

(Sorry for the delay, I’ll try to catch up, which might result in less detail for this month)

Previously:

2021: Jan. Feb. Mar.

2020: Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May June July Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec.

Things I’ve done recently:

• Renamed a couple of new roads in Congleton - the new “Back Lane” is now Somerford Lane, and what was labelled “Viking Way” is actually Barn Road all the way to the bypass, confirmed by a new road sign at the north end (Viking Way is actually just the short road leading to the Airbags plant)
• Surveyed some of the shops in the town centre to see what has changed in the last year
• Named a couple of localities, namely West Heath, Mossley and Hightown - I’m not entirely clear where they should be placed but they’re on the map at least
• Extended the Mersey Valley Timberland Trail between Runcorn and Warrington - this was partially mapped as two separate relations which I have merged

This diary post is a follow up on the one I did last week here where I was looking at how much, and for what the Ireland OpenStreetMap community uses the StreetComplete(SC) app.

The StreetComplete creator Tobias replied showing an interesting worldwide trend for SC usage. The trend here shows that there has been an upturn in SC usage worldwide in the last couple of years in terms of the users and edits contributed:

In particular Tobias shows that co-incidental with the Covid-19 months that there was a big upturn in the changesets contributed, starting gradually in May 2020 with a doubling on the previous month, but continuing to rise until the changesets remained at about 4 times the normal level for the forthcoming year. Most users are in the Northern hemisphere, so to see the higher level of changesets sustained through the Northern Hemisphere’s winter months is impressive.

In Ireland the changes, as in the big upturn are also reflected in a little bit of analysis done here.

… See full entry

I’ve just reached my first OSM milestone by confirming all my contact addresses are in OSM. This took considerably longer than expected. I wanted to add the addresses of all my contacts from around the world to OSM so that those addresses will appear in the next map update for the Magic Earth app.

My first step for this milestone was to cull my contacts list for the first time in 20 years. This step took several hours. My next step was to add the addresses of my contacts to OSM if they did not already exist. This step proved to be a very time consuming and frustrating experience, although there were plenty of learnings too.

The first learning which came quite early on was that when postcodes are introduced to a country, parts of the old address are incorrectly removed by the postal service. In one example, my brother was given a new suburb. Unfortunately, people have a tendency to retain the old address and just add the new post code, rather than using the new address in full.

Needless to say people giving out the wrong addresses like my brother makes life difficult for address search engines. A good address search engine needs to be very clever in accommodating this human behaviour. I found the OSM search engine wasn’t very forgiving, while Google search engine was too forgiving at times by giving me the wrong location.

I decided to edit the addresses of my contacts so that the OSM search engine would find the correct location. I didn’t mind changing the address when it was clear that part of the address was wrong like with my brother.

It was obvious to me that Google tries different permutations of the address to find a result, while OSM expects the address to be perfect. I imagine Google’s first permutation in the UK would be to use the post code and street address as that is all that is needed for a location in the UK. If that permutation failed it would try other permutations with the full address until it got a result.

… See full entry

There are multiple mapping tasks in OpenStreetMap that people still have to do old-style, like we did in 2010. But with current technology and with current funding of OSM research, these can be automated, improving mapping quality over the world.

If you work on OSM-related projects for a company, like in Facebook or Apple, please ask your manager if they can spare your time on projects useful for the community. For example:

1. Imagery alignment! People from the US and Western Europe won’t understand, but in most parts of the world, imagery is offset up to hundreds of meters. Mappers need to shift it to start mapping, otherwise different people would map with different offsets.

   We have plugins for automatically tracing roads, buildings and rivers. Why not create a button for JOSM and iD that looks at GPS traces (rasterized or not) and finds the best offset for an imagery layer?

2. okay I had just that one idea and struggle to come up with more

3. please share your ideas in comments

tl; dr:

Firms like Apple, Facebook and Amazon are paying (their own) mappers for OpenStreetMap (OSM) edits. You are an OSM editor making the same type of work the paid editors are. Shouldn’t you be paid for your edits too? Let’s start sending these firms a collective invoice for our work and use the received funds to benefit the OSM ecosystem. There is an easy way to join if you use JOSM, but users of other map editors can participate as well.

The problem

The OSM project is governed by a license that allows its geo data to be freely used by anybody, including the most wealthy global corporations. Regardless, firms like Apple, Facebook or Amazon are paying for improving the OSM data. They do so mainly by hiring mappers, but also by directly sending money to the OSM foundation, albeit with grants that seem rather small in comparison to market capitalization of these firms. These developments - while good for improving the OSM data, raise also some issues. One concerns fairness: if the firms pay their employees/contractors for map edits, shouldn’t they pay to all who make the same kinds of edits? After all, the edits they provide are not special in any respect - volunteer editors have been supplying such data to the OSM database for years. A more subtle issue is, that emergence of paid map editors dramatically changes character of the project, which for most of its existence has been a purely volunteer affair. Increasingly, volunteer mappers can no longer point to “the Map” and say - we, volunteers did this. Others raised this issue as a problem, but no way out of it has been suggested so far.

The solution

… See full entry

As I’m not yet sure what will be included in the alpha version of the damn project, I’m getting inspired. This time by Tanga Building Footprints Import announced on the imports mailing list.

It looks like the buildings are already imported in the Tanga city, e.g. this one, but I’ve never done the import thing, so I can’t say.

In this diary, I’m going to introduce the example mapping workflow with the prepared data based on Tanga Building Footptrints Import using the damn project. Not everything is yet fully automated, so this diary is more like describing the proof of concept. However, I’m open to the needs of the future.

Create area

There is the dataset of the buildings available on the wiki page. I like that idea of huge GeoJSON file that includes the features with the corresponding geometries. As I’m not the import guy, I’m confused with _key_s in the properties (I mean these underscores of each key.) I need only building:yes tag, so I’ve renamed just those (note that notepad’s “Replace All” would do the same:)

sed -i 's/_building_/building/' buildings.geojson

I’ll create new area to work on. Therefore, I need the geometry of the whole area, where the buildings are. For that, I’ll use the damn-client.py scripts. (The shapely must be installed.)

cd damn-client.py
./convex_hull.py buildings.geojson > ch-buildings.geojson

The command took about a minute on my laptop. The ch-buildings.geojson can be used as the GeoJSON boundary file in the damn project’s manager.

Buildings of the squares

So I’ve area to work on divided to squares. Now, I need the GeoJSON files containing all the buildings of each square. I’ll use the damn-client.py scripts once again:

cd damn-client.py
./prepare_tmp.py https://server.damn-project.org 2351 buildings.geojson

… See full entry

Albany marine base. .. Albany marine base