During validation on HOT’s Tasking Manager giving feedback to mappers is crucial to enable improvement and encourage them to continue mapping. Beginners make the most errors, catching them as early as possible to provide constructive feedback can limit the quantity of errors and steer them in the right direction. This can lead to an overall increase in data quality.

I’ve outlined some of the most frequent feedback that I give to mappers while validating projects that involve mapping buildings as well as explaining the importance of intervening. Please feel free to use these comments in your own validation efforts on HOT’s Tasking Manager.

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Today, we had an online meeting HOT Consultation on Measuring Our Collective Progress Towards Enabling Change. It was impactful on how to measure our collective program. Letting the government, private sector and humanitarian communities to see the need why they should help the actors(contributors of the open data source).

I loaded the Plum Creek Timberlands, LP - commercial Forest relation, but I am struggling with tagging, something the Mapnik renderer will accept and recognize. From my reading of the wiki the boundary=Forest seems to have been the compromise to mapping recognizable Forest ownerships that might not fit in boundary=protected_area, leisure=nature_reserve. I gather the idea with the boundary=forest tag allows one to continue mapping natural=water, =wood, =wetland or land use=forest within the boundary. If I could find a conservation easement documented I would change to boundary=Protected_area, the more common tag. But the Mapnik renderer doesn’t recognize the boundary=Forest tag (osm.wiki/AreasTab) making it tempting to add or change to land use=forest and just excluding natural=*, water areas etc.

Anywho I added all the other tags I could come up with. This commercial Forest data came from the MDNR but for at least the large ownerships doesn’t seem all that up to date, it included some MDNR parcels probably recently acquired. Maybe the larger ownerships are too complex and small changes are hard for the MDNR to stay on top of since they rely on a legal description in the commercial Forest application process. The MDNR comm. Forest data includes owner, so in QGIS I pulled out the corporate owners and dissolved by owner for their holdings, figuring those might get imported first since they are biggest and most likely to remain in the program longer. Since they are adjacent, I got back into fixing up the Escanaba River State Forest and Copper Country State Forest units- I created one for Baraga, Crystal Falls for Copper Country and the Gwinn unit for Escanaba. I did some fixing while ways were in the Escanaba main relation, but got a glitch and it dumped them all out of that, so I went ahead and created a relation for Gwinn rather than reload them all back in to Escanaba. Wheh!

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I’ve recently completed 365 days mapping and went past my 400,000th map change and thought I would reflect a little on it.

I never actually started out to do a year of mapping. I had signed up to OSM way back in 2016 but never made an edit. I don’t recall why, but the project probably seemed impenetrable to me back then. Fast forward to the middle of Covid I started to think about how I could volunteer my time and so I started editing on OSM.

It was only when I noticed I had gone over half a year that I thought a year of mapping was achievable and set it as a goal to myself. Some days were just one edit, some large edits.

Being honest, I would not recommend people to do a year of mapping as it became somewhat forced towards the end. Especially when I had missed a couple of days when I first started mapping so had to keep going for a few extra months to fill them in! I also went through phases where it looked to myself like substantial progress had been made and then periods where there I realised how much was still to be done in my area.

My initial OSM journey started with doing general StreetComplete and OSM editing/tinkering and then I settled on a main objective to map as much residential buildings in the large blank areas Aberdeen, Scotland. Why? To be honest, I don’t really know. Possibly because if they had not been done in over 11 years then they would never get done as people may not see them as a priority or fun to do. I also felt getting the main foundations of an addressable city would have many use cases. Along with the building outlines, I wanted to put down as much addressing as possible leaving just a street side survey to add the house number which can easily be done by anyone using StreetComplete or OSM.

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After some discussion we at Open Mapping Hub Asia-Pacific have decided not to limit both you and ourselves with weekly fixed time slots, and to support you on your OSM-related issues in an in-need basis.

So, whenever you need support on an OSM-related issue, feel free to contact me by sending a message, an e-mail or by filling out the appointment form and I will get back to you quickly. We can discuss the topic in writing, or set up a short call depending on our calendar availabilities and tackle the challenge together. I’d be very happy to support you in your learning process, and for most of the times the topics discussed are acting as refreshers for me, too.

Here are what was discussed during the past week:

Discussion Topics:

• ”How can I download OSM data within a specific area of interest using Overpass Turbo?”

You can directly write the name of the region as available in its name=* tag in OpenStreetMap in your queries since overpass syntax supports geocoding.

Suppose that you are interested in the parks of Istanbul. Writing leisure=park in Istanbul to the wizard will generate you this query:

[out:json][timeout:25]; {{geocodeArea:Istanbul}}->.searchArea; ( node["leisure"="park"](area.searchArea); way["leisure"="park"](area.searchArea); relation["leisure"="park"](area.searchArea); ); out body; >; out skel qt;

You’ll see the use of geocoder to define the search area in the line:

{{geocodeArea:Istanbul}}->.searchArea;

• ”Cannot get data within the area of interest.”

One reason for it might be that your area of interest might be having the same name with other places in the World. It might be that the query brings data for a different place with the same name, or an empty dataset.

Another reason might be that the place name would consist of multiple words like New Orleans. In that case, while using the wizard, you must write the place name in apostrophes like:

leisure=park in ‘New Orleans’

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Here is my attempt at mapping additional commercial forest lands in Michigan that are open to public access for hunting, trapping and fishing- starting with a relation for a blob of Plum Creek Timberlands, L.P., operating subisidary of Weyerhaueser: osm.org/relation/14051942

I am uncertain about the best course of tagging - these do not fit the boundary=protected_area, or leisure=nature_reserve tags for public lands. Maybe boundary=forest (osm.wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dforest). Currently tagged with landuse=forestry per- osm.wiki/Tag:landuse%3Dforestry

It appears with the approved new tagging scheme of boundary=forest, areas within would be mapped landuse=forest (plantations, managed forest), and natural=wood (unmanaged wood), natural=water, natural=wetland, eg.)

Anyone care to weigh in?

Recently I have been improving the coverage of pedestrian accessways across Auckland. I wanted to document this process and felt that an OSM Diary entry is a suitable location to do so

Background

Auckland’s suburban street networks feature many pedestrian accessways, as pointed out in this area on Auckland’s North Shore:

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I Have used only sources accepted by OSM

I like to reach out to mappers who are new to the area where I live, just to say hi and make them feel welcome, and invite them to our local meetups. I use a tool called Meet Your Mappers to identify the mappers who are new in my area, and use a spreadsheet to organize the work to contact them. Pretty low-tech :) and I know there are some tools that can help organize this work, but this works for me! So a quick explanation of how I do it:

Meet Your Mappers is a web based tool that retrieves a list of mappers in a given area and classifies them by their activity patterns. You select an area or enter an OSM relation ID for an area:

And after a while you get the result, a list of mappers with some interesting data, that you can save as a CSV file:

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I finished up with Seney NWR, putting it on the right side of the Creighton Truck Road and the state forest on the other. Pictured Rocks- I pulled the ownership tracts from the NPS open data portal, loaded into QGIS, extracted those tracts with “Status”=”FED”, dissolved those and ended up with only a handful of ways. Those went into OSM, subarea within the main relation, tagged boundary=protected_area, ownership=national. The designated National lakeshore boundary I kept but with boundary=national_park (sure why not), similar to what was done with the administrative boundary of the Manistee National Forest (which is still a throwing JOSM validator error for missing admin_level). That’s the park boundary, but not the protected area boundary since the NPS only has jurisdiction over the federal land holdings. Just like the USFS, drop an entrance sign along the road to indicate you are entering the designated lakeshore/forest, but not the ownership/protected area just yet necessarily. Anyhow, mapping the actual ownership separately enabled me to match up the Shingleton unit state forest holdings with the federal ownership, resolving the overlap issue. The Shingleton unit has been getting a total rework too that has taken some careful checking since lots of phony parcels that were previously loaded that are incorrect, not reflecting the current state ownership.

As far as the private timber lands with NPS conservation easements, that may take a little head-scratching to resolve if worth mapping or not. Already someone created a precedent of inputting a few DNR-enrolled private commercial forest lands into OSM with tags landuse=forest, description “Commercial Forest land”. Now if we did the same state-wide, that would sure add a lot of stuff, especially in the UP. Maybe after the state & national forests are resolved.

Cadillac unit is all re-imported: osm.org/relation/14031776; working on Traverse City unit now: osm.org/relation/14043348. Getting there slowly.

Wow https://hdyc.neis-one.org/?syntex

Contributed/volunteered to identify oil spills areas in Niger Delta region of Nigeria organized by Citizen Science.

I am glad to be a member of the HOT community working group.

As a corps member, I represented the mind the gap CDS group of the Ife central to address other fellow corps members on the relevance of maintaining digital well-being, and I emphasized how they can be digital citizens, by using their digital assets/products responsibly and effectively. I also addressed the digital product being either an asset or a liability, it either adds value to you or devalues you depending on how you use it.

Tldr;

• We finally got some real life in-person meets!

• Welcome to Emilio. Our new Sr Engineer!

• We are hiring! We are on the hunt for a new Senior front-end designer/developer.

• New TM deployment false start. New deployment Wed 12th April

• Mobile mapping ‘ease of use’ experiments are underway.

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Happy days, all!

Back for yet another month and wow did that month fly by! Literally, I boarded a plane for work purposes for the first time in 2 years!

First stop, Dakar, Senegal, where a few of the tech team members supported the launch of the new West and Northern Africa Open Mapping Hub. It was super exciting to see the way the hub will be leading with OSM community needs and how our tech can support. …

Read more here »

Looks like my diary here is going to turn into a development blog for my note viewer, which I’m going to call note-viewer in this post. I haven’t came up with a fancier name because I wasn’t sure what this thing was supposed to do other than being an alternative to user’s notes pages. Now I’m adding features that are not strictly for viewing notes. After all, you don’t want to just view notes, you want to do something about them.

Editing the notes along with the data

One of the things that you can’t currently do from my note viewer is to manipulate notes, that is you can’t comment or close them. You have to do those things either on osm note pages or in editors. What you can do is to go to a note page by clicking its id in the table, then you can do anything with the note that the osm website permits. It may not be very convenient though because you have to work with that note in isolation, without seeing related notes and other osm data. This lack of note editing functionality is there because I wanted first to implement a replacement for user’s notes pages. You can’t edit notes from those pages either.

But of course you want to edit the notes, usually along with related data. A note may tell about an error in the data, you edit the data, then you close the note. After that you move to another related note. Related notes are the ones you selected with note-viewer based on some criteria. That could be your own notes for some period of time made about some kind of objects. An example of such kind of use is described in my earlier diary entry. Another kind of note manipulation would be mass commenting/closing/reopening of selected notes, but the tool is not yet ready for that and we won’t look at this usage here.

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Map

Its been crazy trying to edge match to natural water features, adjacent DNR and USFS properties, so I appreciate any help with the alignment problems after public land boundaries have been imported.

I started on the Cadillac FMU of the Pere Marquette- osm.org/relation/14031776

The Cadillac unit involved lots more crazy edge matching with the Gladwin Unit and Manistee NF units. I also started on the Kirtland’s Warbler Management Area (US Fish & Wildlife Service ownership), osm.org/relation/14032242, mostly nested within the Gladwin Unit and others. The Seney also has been mangled as I worked to resolve countless shared nodes with a road, so it will need a fresh import from the USFWS open data portal (https://gis-fws.opendata.arcgis.com/) and a relation created as well for the whitefish point area included in the national wildlife refuge.

Interesting to see someone put in Commercial Forest lands, MDNR property tax program enrollment that enables access for hunting and fishing. I am included to do a mass tagging of those already imported with an owner=private, access=permissive, hunting=yes tags. General access is not allowed, only hunting/fishing/trapping access.

As always, I am documenting status at: osm.wiki/Michigan/Parks

To help me procrastinate from mapping the buildings in Co. Tipperary and because I came across one of them recently, I’ve decided to go on my own pursuit of Diarmuid agus Gráinne on OpenStreetMap. There are a couple of instances on the British War Office map all over the country that are marked as “Dermot & Grania’s Bed”. According to Irish mythology (to cut a very long story short), Grainne made Diarmuid flee with her from her engagement party, and they fled across the whole country, sleeping out in the open (first separate, later not so much).

Throughout history, secretive or mysterious places like caves, dolmens etc have been given that name. The legend is mentioned a couple of times in the Schools Collection on duchas.ie, so that is what I’m using now to track them down, because I cannot search the British War Office map. Unfortunately, I can only read the English texts… But their journey will be trackable, once I am done.

Maybe I’ll get to see one of them at some point.

I’m using the hashtag #Diarmuid&Grainne for my changesets, if anyone wants to check it out. Check for yourself on overpass-turbo. (Thanks, Daniel!)

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The state of Texas is locally governed by Counties and not Parishes as in some countries. In Texas, if you see a road designated on the map as Pr 1111, that means Private Road, not Parish road.

The equivalent of a Parish Rd (a road maintained by a local government entity) would be CR 1111 which stands for County Road.

CR roads are often gravel or similar surfaces, especially in rural areas which are not near a major metropolitan area.