What I did in OpenStreetMap in December 2021

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I am going to put this on hold, until I read more of the manual, and see what else I can pull in besides wikidata. Much preferred would be Placekey and Postal lookup information to authenticate the individual effort - no commercial, proprietary information, each building is researched and is within walking - driving distance to me.

Yet another mess in Mogadishu.

The city was extensively mapped; buildings are very dense, though not every single building was added yet.

But someone opened H.O.T. tasks asking (to work in a extremely dense area) for Beginner Mapper.

Is this good for OpenStreetMap? NO, definitely

Is it good for OpenStreetMap map a soccer field 103 x 60 m (with the goals clearly visibles) as a building? NO, definitely

Who’d validate this osm.org/way/1013314708 103 x 60m building?

If anyone is following my mapping work, they’ll know that I started a tutorial series on YouTube about a year ago, in which I focus on heritage mapping, because that’s what interests me most (even if I map way more ordinary buildings during our #osmIRL_buildings campaign than I map heritage). Between Christmas and the New Year 2022, I had been wrecking my brain about what else to do tutorials about, because I thought that I had covered most things. Then I came across a Heritage Trail in County Tipperary - the Derrynaflan Trail* - and decided to take that as an example for a new tutorial series. So, I will walk along the trail described here and focus on different mapping aspects. This will give me the opportunity to talk about tags that are not necessarily heritage related, but useful for people along the trail, i.e. amenities like car parks, public toilets, EV charging points, accommodation, restaurants etc.

Luckily, the trail is only about an hour’s drive away, so even though I happen to have visited quite a few of the sites already, I might go there again for some image material and micro mapping quests. I’m also hoping to add some more photographs to WikiCommons, because this part of the country is rarely visited by foreign tourists who happen to be contributing more than the locals to WikiCommons, unfortunately.

In the first episode, I created a multipolygon relation for the trail and added the first building to it.

*The Derrynaflan Trail is named after a church site where a very famous early Christian hoard was found which is now housed in the National Museum in Dublin (I might do an episode visiting it).

Please feel free to watch along and contribute with ideas about what else to focus on in future episodes!

In December of 2021 a bi-annual International Cartographic Conference was held in Florence, Italy.

Because of Covid it was a mixed conference, however ~200 people (my estimation, I do not have an official number) have attended on site (with many more participating on-line).

OpenStreetMap was mentioned a lot. This is a good thing, but… the only good thing. It was always mentioned just as a data source. And it seems everybody is taking for granted that OSM data while being heterogenic in saturation is at least in schema (tagging) a consistent thing and slowly smartly evolving, rather than eroding. Nobody new or even expected that schema in OSM can be changed by anybody, even people who have absolutely no clue in Cartography/GIS. And this is not only a possibility, but a reality.

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This diary post is inspired by the cleaning up after a task manager task. It shows how to do the clean-up steps for a Divide and map. Now. area.

The data quality matters. The proposal in the Johnwhelan ‘s diary is to run duplicated building script and JOSM validator when an area is finished on the whole area. The rest of his diary deals with how to get the area’s border geometry and the OpenStreetMap data into the JOSM.

Here are the steps to download the area’s geometry and the OpenStreetMap data when using the damn project:

1. Load the area’s geometry by navigating to the area in the JOSM damn plugin, then click Get area geometry button.

   It’s also possible to navigate to the area in the mappy (web) client, right click on arbitrary square and download area geojson, and open the downloaded file in the JOSM. It’s good idea to right click on the created area.geojson layer and Convert to GPX layer to make it read-only, which is the same result as when using the JOSM damn plugin.

2. Download the data from Overpass API, which is the second tab on Download map data … dialog. You can get the Overpass query by navigating to the area in the mappy (web) client, right click on arbitrary square and area overpass query. Then copy the query to the JOSM’s Download from Overpass API, Overpass query: field and click Download. Be sure you have enough RAM for big areas.

That’s all. It’s kind of fun I’m writing this diary just few days after my damn project developer’s “annual report”, but I didn’t make it sooner.

In England, the Environment Agency has an extensive network of river level monitors that are used to provide flood warnings such as (at the time of writing) this one.

However, these alerts tend to be only issued when land or property is likely to flood, and there are many paths that flood much earlier. An example is here, where if the downstream station reads just over 1m, you’ll get your feet wet. The Environment Agency doesn’t issue a warning at that level because it’s well within the normal range, and the river’s still well within the levees that have been provided for it for the last 50 years.

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I wrote a module for #OpenStreetMap web maps using the #LeafletJS API: With https://github.com/plepe/leaflet-overpass-lens you can query map items around the mouse pointer.

See the short screencast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTzVa9E0Yo8

Demo application: https://xover.mud.at/~skunk/leaflet-overpass-lens/

I wrote a blog post to show and explain the many improvements to the “Straßenraumkarte” that Alex @Supaplex030 worked on for the last few month: https://supaplexosm.github.io/strassenraumkarte-neukoelln/posts/2021-12-31-micromap-update

With this public space map for Neukölln, Berlin Alex continues to push the boundaries of the level of detail that can be rendered based on OSM data.

The blogpost shows many interesting details like cycleways, turn lanes and junctions and explains how the data is processed to allow this rendering.

One conclusion is, that a collaboration on pre-processed OSM data for streets would be a huge benefit.

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Please use this place here to comment on the blog post.

In the ideal world all tasks would be validated to a high standard but unfortunately this doesn’t happen.

I’ve seen HOT projects with nearly two thousand duplicate buildings, I’ve seen some with two or three hundred untagged buildings. Some are well mapped and have no errors.

So this a method to clean up after the event. Basically you load up the area into JOSM and run the duplicate building script and JOSM validator. It won’t catch everything but it’s a lot faster than validating each tile. The todo and Mapathoner plugin are required.

select the errors then add them to the todo list and work your way through them.

The key is aoiBBOX”: [6.473334,5.172193,6.870011,5.730142] which is found here: https://tasking-manager-tm4-production-api.hotosm.org/api/v2/projects/10756 for project 10756. You’ll need to search the text to extract it.

You can either feed these coordinates into JOSM and download the area directly or feed them into an overpass query or extract them from an off line version of the map. https://osm-internal.download.geofabrik.de/ is one source. If you work with the off line version you can locate the errors then just directly redownload the tiny bit to ensure the map is up to date before you correct the error.

An example of a .bat file to extract the area from an offline file is osmconvert64 e:\downloads\nigeria-latest-internal.osm.pbf -b=6.473334,5.172193,6.870011,5.730142 -o=f:\maps\nigeria10756.osm Just load nigeria10756.osm as a local file into JOSM.

Note this is not validation since no feedback is given in task manager to the mapper. It is recommended it is used when there are no active mapping taking place so a month or so after the mapping has petered out is a good time.

It’s two years since the Divide and map. Now. has been published. I would like to summarize the second year of the development.

What is it about? Divide and map. Now. – the damn project – helps mappers by dividing some big area into smaller squares that a human can map.

Why should I care? Divide and map. Now. is proven to handle a mapathon with 200 mappers. There are four clients available for mappers and multiple mapping workflows. There is deployment guide for admins. You may create new or modify existing areas, use RSS to track areas’ changes, and check abandoned or overlapping areas by Python3 scripts.

In 2021 I’ve refactored the server and load tested it. There is the API documentation that is stable for more than half a year now. The web clients were also refactored: the light is text-only web client for beginners, the panel is for advanced mappers and looks like it’s integrated into the iD editor, and the mappy web client has square-based graphical interface. The web clients include improved statistics that can show OpenStreetMap contributors that haven’t used Divide and map. Now. when mapping in the same area. The damn JOSM plugin was updated to the new API and loads temporary data stored in the server when available.

I’ve got inspired by the Tanga Building Footprints Import, mapping highways’ radars and mirrors, and documented the mapping workflows available in the different clients.

I’ve implemented Python3 client with the scripts to find abandoned or intersecting areas based on the potential HOT tasking manager improvements and looked at the competing HOT Tasking Manager and SimpleTaskManager issues from the damn project point of view.

I’ve created the finished areas read-only service and announced the policy for finished areas.

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My annual diary post from last year is here, for which the summary of the targets set back then is now:

• I definitely stayed in the top 10 #osmIRL contributors for the whole year. There was more to that of course, as in 2021 I contributed more mapping days than ever before, missing only 16 out of 365.

• In August 2021 I reached 200,000 contributions in 60 days, this is the most intense contribution to OpenStreetMap I have ever achieved, and i wrote about that here

• I undertook “as an extra kick” to build a tool to visual osm for the whole island. This is here, but needs a bit more work, especially a process to keep it up to date. Thanks to Rusty and Amanda for helping plan and execute this.

• I set myself a “not hard target” of raising my mapillary contributions to 1.5 million. While I did add around another 100k images mapillary changed a load of things about their upload process and web app in the year, making it nigh-on impossible for me to report exact numbers, and also leaving me with an upload queue that I carry into 2022.

• I met my StreetComplete Target of raising myself to be #3 in Ireland. For most of the year I was #2 with huge early progress in the first #8 months. I am now #3 so this target is achieved.

• I didn’t clear up all the gaps I mentioned, because a demon keeps asking me to help with bits of rural Ireland. However, I addressed a huge number of gaps in buildings that I didn’t already know about. From now on this task has the gaps and if you feel like helping me jump in there :)

My rating: Looking at these, using mild re-interpretations of the targets I am giving myself 4.5 out of 6. I didn’t fail completely in any area.

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Created location on osm, but it’s showing up in Instagram

I’m getting close to finishing all buildings south of Corbin Street, which would mark about 65% of the town’s buildings mapped, hopefully the suburbs in the north will be easier and I should hopefully finish all those buildings if I continue at my pace of work by February

2021 has been a challenging year in many ways, but Crowd2map’s amazing volunteers have kept on mapping, for which I am extremely grateful.

Over 1000 new mappers joined us, and added a further 15,700 km of roads, an additional 435,000 buildings and over 3,300 schools. This means almost 17,000 volunteers have added over 5.4 million buildings to date. We continue to give feedback and train new mappers via our Slack channel, which anyone interested is welcome to join.

As we approach the year end here are some of our highlights.

Although opportunities for face to face meetings were few, we continued our twice weekly training sessions via zoom and managed to speak at HOT summit and various other online conferences including SOTM Africa, where Herry Kasunga talked about our Health Centre mapping project

We were delighted that many of the groups we have trained were awarded microgrants from OMDTZ in June, and we are continuing to work with them in mapping areas such as child labour at informal mines, school gardens to improve nutrition, and gender based violence projects.

The Digital Champions programme we started in 2019 in Serengeti has now been extended to the neighbouring districts of Butiama and Tarime. There is a FGM cutting season in progress now in Mara and these activists have been vital in protecting the community and the maps necessary to find girls at risk quickly. Cutters continue to escape across the porous border into Kenya, highlighting the need for better mapping and cooperation.

In November we celebrated our 6th birthday, with an amazing range of speakers, as you can see here. The recording is here.

In December we celebrated the graduation of our first cohort of interns. Eight women from Tanzania and 3 other African countries joined us for a 12 week training session with HOTOSM interns, as part of the Everywhere She Maps Youthmapper project.

So thank you to everyone who has helped us in 2021 and Happy Mapping for 2022 and beyond!..

So this is the user diary. Intresting feature.

              MY GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEM (GIS) JOURNEY

I am AKOR DANIEL ENECHOJO, an under graduate student of Geography Department, University of Nigeria Nsukka, a volunteer at humanitarian OpenStreetMap (HOTOSM), a member of the YouthMappers, Unique Mapper Network (UMN) and Lion Mappers Team(LMT) Nsukka Chapter. Due to my quest and passion for GIS and it application after my first and second semester GIS courses which I took at my undergraduate course modules, in the year 2020, I enrolled for a GIS training with Mr. Malachi Eze a GIS Expert and I also applied for GIS online courses which sharpen my knowledge of GIS and gave me an in-depth understanding of geospatial application into diverse field. June 2021, I came in contact with Mr. Anointing a GIS expert who introduce me to some tool of GIS, OSM and geospatial analysis during my Industrial Training (internship) at the Nigerian Meteorological Agency Yola –Airport, I undertook some visual training with him (Mr. Anointing) during the training he recommended a visual seminar which I attended, Theme “World Youth Day”, it was so amazing, an eye opening workshop that led me to know about “Unique Mapper Network”, at the cause of the workshop I introduce myself and my interest to join the Unique Mapper Network which I was guided by Mr. Victor N. Sunday ( Team Coordinator) on how to join the team. Due to my passion for OSM, after the workshop I opted for Unique Mapper Network, am happy to be part of the member of organization.

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check

I am in the process of removing all fiber internet poles, listed as “converge”. A local internet company. All these are marked as “mail box”.

This is commercial use of the platform in an inappropriate manner.

Recently I have worked a bit on the web app “Latest Changes” (https://rene78.github.io/latest-changes/) in order to make it more mobile-friendly. Hope someone finds it useful.

Quick reminder to the ones of you, who don’t know the app yet. The purpose is to check recent OSM changes within a certain cartographic boundary, for example your home town. It is very simple and powerful:

1. Open the Latest-Changes web app.
2. Zoom to the area of interest
3. Check and validate the changesets of the last 7 days (1 day, 3 days, 1 month).
4. Bookmark the URL to regularly come back and monitor your area of interest.

The link on top leads to my version of the app. The original one can be found under https://tyrasd.github.io/latest-changes/