I know it’s been about two years since I’ve written an entry in here. Truth is that I haven’t been mapping as much as I used to and inclined to write about it even less.

That said I haven’t been completely idle:

• Added more details to Vermillion Regional Airport in Danville, Illinois. Having been a member of the Illini Glider Club allowed me to do that since I was going there pretty much every weekend. Unfortuntely I had to give it up when I became unemployed in November of 2020, but I’ve been at my new job for almost 6 months now and I plan on rejoining sometime between mid-July and early August.
• I added the bike lanes and sharrows along Main Street in Urbana from downtown to the Kickapoo Rail Trail. I did this over a year ago and was surprised no one else had done it since it’s the main connector between the rail trail and the rest of the bike routes in the Champaign-Urbana area.
• Cleaned up/added the bike lanes and sharrows in downtown Champaign. I added the bike lane along Walnut Street (which unfortunately doesn’t have one going in the opposite direction on one of the adjacent streets, unless you count State Street, which I don’t), added the bike lane along Clark St/Logan St, removed the bike trail marking along Clark St west of Randolph since it’s not marked with signs or pavement markings (it’s marked as one in the Champaign County Bikes map only)
• Added more maxspeed and minspeed tags in Iowa and Illinois. Besides the motorways I’ve been paying attention to US 30 in and east of Cedar Rapids, IA 38, and IA 130. A hint for other mappers who want to add maxspeed tags for highways that go through small towns: like Pennsylvania the speed limits in Iowa tend to change in or near the city limits of these towns, though Iowa’s a bit more flexible than Pennsylvania is. Also, adding minspeed tags to the Interstates in Iowa and Illinois is easy since you can just download and select all the members of the route relations for them and add them that way.

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Recently there have been well-reasoned calls to give users blunt feedback when they have strayed. It came to my attention that the wiki has no built-in feature for this social interaction, only the reverse. I have implemented a user script that allows you to chide another user for an edit. For example, I stridently disapprove of this edit from a year ago:

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finished my school project.

The OSM Help Desk of the Open Mapping Hub Asia-Pacific is slowly and steadily continuing while we discuss different matters with different people every week, both online and offline, when scheduling and connectivity doesn’t allow us to meet online. And I am also personally enjoying these discussions since I am too, refreshing or expanding my knowledge on some topics along the way. So please keep the appointments coming via this online form.

Discussion Topics:

• ”I am part of an organization and we want to be advanced OSM contributors.”

There are lots of entry points to get to know about Openstreetmap: Wiki being the main one and LearnOSM another very good resource for this purpose.

But if you’re also aiming to gain expertise and become trainers in your community, or planning high-impact mapping projects and activities and want to build capacity on those, please let HOTOSM or the Open Mapping Hubs in Asia-Pacific, Eastern and Southern Africa, Northern and Western Africa or Latin America to learn how they could help you achieve these goals.

• ”I would like to learn how to map properly. Especially on Tasking Manager.”

Again, the Tasking Manager section of LearnOSM is going to provide almost everything you need to know on how to properly contribute to OSM using Tasking Manager.

Additionally, please feel free to use and distribute this little cheat-sheet we’ve recently put together at the Hub. Squeezed in and packed up knowledge for you, bragging rights for us :)

You can access the cheat-sheet here

  Hello Mappers
                   I caused a few routing errors when I first started mapping because I didn't check that the final node of a path I had mapped was connected to another path, track or road. I didn't know about routing then. Seeing an image of a dotted path at a road looked to be an obvious connection. But when using a routing engine routing would fail.
     Since I started to use routing engines more. I have discovered more faults. They are often caused by tagging omissions.  Unless a way allows the mode of transport that you have selected the routing engines will not use that  way ( path track or road).   Some mappers in England know that a Bridleway is a legal right of way for foot, cycles and horses and  they assume routers will use these ways, But they don't.  For any rights of way we need to add foot=yes for footpaths.  Bridleways  need all three tags,  foot =yes, cycle=yes, and horse=yes, to get routing engines to work as expected.   Potlatch and iD editors have these  tags built-in but you will have to select  each one of them.   When we edit the map the database is changed instantly,  the drawn map will maybe need a refresh to renew the display however. (ctrl  F5  on my Win PC)   We would hope we could quickly test the routing after our mapping or correction, but we cannot. OSRM and GraphHopper only update their copy of the map data every few days.  For this reason we will have to check a few days later.  see this please https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/83945/foot-routing-failing-bridleway-alone-doesnt-let-it-work-it-needs-footyes
                                                                                                                                              Happy Mapping and Routing
                                             Andy                                                                                                                                            

Hello Mappers I do a lot of walking in the English countryside. Sometimes I plan routes and find these two “engines” very useful.  GraphHopper https://www.graphhopper.com/    and OSRM https://openrouteservice.org/  These two routing engines are on the main map page and use openstreetmap data. Try them out, click on the bent arrow and select a couple of points, select mode of travel. for example  osm.org/directions?engine=graphhopper_foot&route=52.3099%2C-0.3175%3B52.2873%2C-0.3173 move the point a little and you have osm.org/directions?engine=graphhopper_foot&route=52.3100%2C-0.3158%3B52.2873%2C-0.3173 You now have a route, a distance and elevation trace of almost the whole circuit  of Grafham Water Reservoir.    Sometimes two points will generate an odd route. My next diary entry will cover some of the problems and how to fix them.                                Happy Mapping and Route Planning Andy

I’ve fixed some of the limitations of my note viewer that were discussed at the end of this diary post.

1. Now you can use this tool as a more general interface to /api/0.6/notes/search OSM API requests. Providing a username is no longer required, and it’s possible to do comment text searches and limit the results to date ranges.
2. Search queries are encoded in URLs. That opens some additional possibilities.
3. Earlier you could accidentally load too much data that would slow down your browser too much. There weren’t an obvious way out of this situation because the tool always tried to restore the results of the last request. Now it shouldn’t be a problem - just open the page without the query in the URL (without everything after #). Or press the (x) button on the top.
4. You can open several different requests in different windows at the same time. There’s still one problem left: opening the same request in different windows is not guaranteed to work.
5. Since queries are stored in URLs you can share links to them. Also you can generate links without typing stuff into the search form. For example, you can use OSM Smart Menu browser plugin to switch to user’s notes as shown by this tool from any webpage that the plugin associates with the user. You need to add this URL template in OSM Smart Menu settings: https://antonkhorev.github.io/osm-note-viewer/#mode=search&display_name={osm_user_name}

The OSM community in Ireland is engaged in another multi-year mapping project, to map all the buildings in Ireland.

By March 2022, there were over 2,000,000 buildings. Which caused someone to ask “What was the 2,000,000th building?”. So who added #2,000,000? 🥁 drumroll…

The 2,000,000th Building was added by Boggedy on 1st March 2022, and is in An Bhealtaine Íochtarach, Gort a’ Choirce, Co. Dhún na nGall! Technical OSM details: It’s way 1,036,394,489, added in changeset 117,996,721.

Here’s other milestones:

datetime	rank	changeset_id	changeset_url	osmtype	osmid	object_url
2018-01-08 10:31:43	500000	55260556	osm.org/changeset/55260556	way	551628233	osm.org/way/551628233
2020-02-13 23:54:27	1000000	80979131	osm.org/changeset/80979131	way	772271829	osm.org/way/772271829
2021-02-14 22:04:19	1500000	99268589	osm.org/changeset/99268589	way	907155474	osm.org/way/907155474
2022-03-01 22:14:16	2000000	117996721	osm.org/changeset/117996721	way	1036394489	osm.org/way/1036394489

Installation

If you want to calculate this data yourself:

• Download the latest full OSM history file from Geofabrik for Ireland (ireland-and-northern-ireland-internal.osh.pbf currently 381 MB).
• Create a local PostgreSQL database.
• Install the latest version of osm-tag-csv-history (technically ≥ v0.5).
• Download the code from Github amandasaurus/osm-two-million-buildings-in-ireland
• Run ./calculate.sh. results.csv has the output.

The second 2,000,000th building

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In the U.S. mapper community, we often joke about how tagging dictates by out-of-staters or people from overseas amount to saying, “Fix your state!” We’re such contrarians over here, probably because we live in such a messy place. In fact, my home state of Ohio exists primarily to give mapmakers heartburn and keep data consumers up at night, especially when it comes to boundaries. At least in this state, making assumptions about boundaries is almost as bad as making assumptions about names.

Administrative boundaries in an ideal world

OSM represents administrative areas as boundary relations that geographically encompass other boundary relations with higher admin_level=* values. In the early days before boundary relations became well-established, some mappers used to represent boundaries as multipolygon relations. The inner and outer relation roles stem from this usage. Data consumers often use similar code and tools to process both boundaries and multipolygons because so many well-known boundaries follow all the same topological rules.

The illustration that accompanies the wiki documentation for the admin_level=* key suggests a simple hierarchy of administrative areas, in which a larger area completely contains a smaller area and so on:

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Will be out of town this week with a trip to Orlando, Disney/universal studios. I which is already micro mapped nicely, but will still be keeping my eyes open for anything that might need fixed. ;-P

I want to explore new places threw portals I believe portals are real I want to help our planet threw tec from out this world

I need help mapping gardens of houses in Iłowa, as the title says Please help I do not live in Iłowa anymore, I can’t drive there as I don’t have a car. Even from the highest quality satellite images I can’t find some fences.

Why tho? I want to make Iłowa more detailed, like Eastern Ełk in Warmia-Masuria Voivodeship.

Every minute of 2021, 8 women were beaten in Brazil during the pandemic of the new coronavirus. Psychological violence, which leaves no physical marks, also hurt the dignity of many who needed to isolate themselves with abusive partners in the context of the health crisis, so the Mapa do Acolhimento was created to help women suffering from gender-based violence.

The Mapa do Acolhimento is a national solidarity network that connects women who have suffered gender-based violence with volunteer lawyers and psychologists throughout Brazil. Since its inception in 2016, the Acolhimento Map has made more than 5,000 referrals and has a base of 5,000 registered volunteers in more than 800 cities, in addition to having the mapping of public services of the safety, health and social assistance network. The project is carried out by NOSSAS, an activism lab that believes that a more just and democratic world is only possible if the powers of some do not suppress the power of others.  Now all the data from the Mapa do Acolhimento will be available on OpenStreetMap as a joint effort to make women’s services even more available.

There are about a thousand service points between shelters and specialized police stations, besides clinics and hospitals, and soon these data will be imported to OSM so that more people can have access.

I would like to thank everyone at the Mapa do Acolhimento for making this data available and believing that we can help.

The Open Mapping Hub Asia-Pacific’s OSM Help Desk had got into a small break just one week after it had started due to international travel. Between 5 and 14 March 2022, the Hub gathered in Nepal for its first in-person gather for co-working sessions and meet-ups with the local OSM community. We were able to meet with enthusiastic student groups from the geomatics engineering departments of Kathmandu University and Tribhuvan University Western Regional College and conduct workshops and training sessions on field mapping tools, disaster management with InaSAFE, and JOSM troubleshooting on March 11 and March 14.

Although we didn’t organize an online Help Desk session after returning, there were still non-synchronous communication on OSM-related questions or issues from the community. Yes, I’m asking you to go ahead and book an online session here, but you can also get in touch with me via can.unen[at]hotosm.org or shoot a direct message here.

Discussion Topics:

• Is there any way to download OSM data from past, for a certain area?

Yes, you can access and download the history dumps of OpenStreetMap via Planet OSM, going back until 2013. Similarly, GeoFabrik also has historical data.

If you are looking for a specific date interval, you can use Overpass queries for relatively smaller regions. You can build queries on timestamps: newer filter would enable to look for objects which have been changed since the given date, changed filter would allow you to query data between two specific timestamps. Alternative to the “changed” filter, you can run two “newer” queries and compare the differences.

Alternatively, Osmium would also allow you to query data for certain time intervals.

• On Tasking Manager, when I click to map the task, the task area is not automatically downloaded in JOSM.

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From Canada - Open Data: As of 2018/10/18 the Open Government License for the City of Calgary was said to be incompatible with the OSM license.

• Impervious Surface 2018
  • An archived dataset containing city sidewalks. GEN_SURFACE='Curb_Gutter_Sidewalk(Concrete)'
• Parcel Address
• Water Hydrants
  • Location of fire hydrants in the city. Note: The Calgary Fire Department states the colour of the hydrants are either red or yellow, however, what they call yellow looks more like green to me.
• Public Trees
  • Location and types of public trees in the city

This event was initiated by YouthMappers Bangladesh Community, Special mentioning Mr. Sawan Shariar, Regional Ambassador. The workshop is under Skill Development focusing on natural features (Waterbody).

#WWD2022 #WWDMC #WWDMC2022 #KUMappers #KhulnaUniversity

Sometimes you add a bunch of notes and need to look at them later. Or someone adds notes and you need to look at their notes. Or someone does something with a lot of notes like closing without a good reason or leaving useless comments and you need to look at them. How do you do it? There is a link from the profile page to user’s notes. You go there and you’ll see a list of notes with their opening comments and current statuses. The problem is it’s cumbersome to use. You don’t get to see where the notes are located unless you click each one separately, then you’ll see only that one note.

What if we want to see all of the notes? Actually, how about we just see everything known about the notes on one page? That’s what I’ve done here. You can enter a username and load as many notes as you need. They are going to be displayed in a table with all their comments and status changes. Also their markers are going to be added to a map on the same page. You can find the marker corresponding to a table entry by clicking it and vice versa. There are also some commands available below the table, like loading selected notes into an editor with remote control.

Another problem with the notes page on the osm website is when we don’t want to see all of the user’s notes. What are the user’s notes anyway? Note records in the database don’t have direct references to users. The references are found in comment and action records. So the user’s notes are the ones opened, closed or commented by the user. But what if you only want to see only the notes that you’ve opened? On my notes page you still have to load all your notes because that’s how the OSM API works. After that you can use the filter to hide unwanted notes. To see only notes you created yourself, use this filter expression:

user = YourName, action = opened

It’s possible to do more elaborate filtering. Maybe you want to check if someone closed notes opened by you. Here’s a filter for that:

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While I never expected I would put so much work in to the Chugach mountains, it does look very nice I believe. But I have to think about where I want to end it or what’s a good place to take a break.

Capturing the biome-like areas from woods to shrubs to heath to scree to bare rock, it’s a bit of a approximation when there are hybrid areas. I’ve browsed different mountain areas around the globe but it’s not clear who else is thinking of capturing all these together.

My first priority is to finish the Eagle River valley and valley in north west Girdwood valley where they follow the Crow Pass trail.

My second priority is to finish up the area around penguin creek and then the missing middle section.

Then, I think I should map the Baldy area in Eagle River from the top to heath and shrubs.

And finally, when I can finish the Peters Creek and Eklutna valleys, I’ll think I’ll feel like I can put a wrap on it.

Made 32 edits to the map. I’ve added roads and houses to Settle, Ilkley and Cassongue, Angola.