One of my goals when developing note-viewer is to try various experimental features. Note-viewer started as a replacement for user’s notes pages. I could have tried changing it in the osm website code but then I’d be constrained by other things. And I want to do some things that are definitely not going to be on the osm website, maybe for a good reason because some of them will turn out to be useless and I’ll throw them away later. In fact, I’ve already thrown away some. If you were using note-viewer before did you notice that round note status icons in the table used to work as radio buttons? They don’t anymore, that was a way to select the date, now you just click the date. What does this date selection do is another topic which we won’t go into here.

Links in comments

What we are going to look into is getting links to various things mentioned in note comments. Actually when the API returns note information it sends note comments in two formats: plaintext and html. However we won’t rely on this html output because users commenting notes enter plaintext and don’t set any links themselves and in the html output everything that looks like a url gets a link, no matter how dubious the site is. We only want links to sites we trust. Obviously one of them is openstreetmap.org. Another one is StreetComplete’s image hosting. Currently that’s all what note-viewer handles, but other sites may get added in the future.

… See full entry

Finding this website, and learning of its potential, I have set off on an endeavor to map my hometown of Jeffersonville, Indiana. My first steps are of the quaint Grandview Drive, McBride Drive, Graceland Way, and Linden Road. My plans are, to put it lightly, ambitious: map, in as much detail, every home, driveway, and freestanding structure I can. So, I got started!

Learning the Ropes

As this is my first time using openstreetmap.org, I had to use the tutorial and play around with the interface to find how I was to approach this endeavor. However, I learn quickly and picked up how to effectively use the program after about 10 minutes of fiddling.

The Roads

The first and easiest fix for the map is aligning the roads properly with the given satellite imagery. After a bit of adjustment, the roads were aligned and ready! The next roads were a but trickier: driveways. They are very frequent, and although monotonous, the method of placement is suitably relaxing. It is very satisfying to successfully place the last one in a row.

The Buildings

Whereas the roads are monotonous yet satisfying to place, buildings are a whole other beast. Using google maps streetview and the main application itself to confirm house number, and street name, was a borderline unbearable process for me at first. However, after a few houses and adjacent buildings, I began seeing the patterns of numeration which accelerated the placement. It is still not fun to do per say, however that satisfaction as with the roads never ceases.

Duffy’s Landing

Duffy’s Landing is a public park and boat ramp upon the Ohio River in Jeffersonville. It is a relaxing place to picnic or sit, and just enjoy the warm air or watch boats mosey past. I updated the service roads, extents, and parking lot of the park proper.

Conclusion

… See full entry

It was a wonderful experience. We mapped our individual villages for social good.

It was so exciting to finally have a successful Monthly Mapathon kick-off in Nigeria on Saturday ,30th April 2022. One of the innovative aspect of this mapathon is the Panel session during which panelist from the Unique Mappers Community were able to discuss data use cases for data being contributed. This helped newbies to understand that we are not just mapping for fun but to drive development and humanitarian response. We also had breakout rooms for training using the zoom platform. Highlights of the 2housr mapathon includes: Unique Mappers Network -The Local Community of OpenStreetMap in Nigeria Launches a Monthly Mapathon Tagged : #MapMyVillage Campaign for Social Good Featuring Mapathon Training 1. Getting started as a Beginner Mapper in OpenStreetMap 2. Advancing your Mapping Skills in OpenStreetMap Panel Session Mapping My Village for Social Good Certificate of Participation Internet Data Support for 1-week Mapathon Since, we made it a one week mapathon ,newbies would be signed up and virtually be guided and trained to remotely map their villages in Nigeria. I sincerely appreciate all management team of Unique Mappers network for the amazing cooperation and passion to see this mapathon take off and we look forward to sustaining this effort.

I just made a theme for dog owners: https://mapcomplete.osm.be/pets.html

It has dog parks, veterinarians, pet shops, restaurants and shops that allow dogs inside, etc.

My own puppy was bitten or scratched by another dog a late afternoon this week. Our normal vet had closed for the day, but I had the newest version of the pet theme open and spotted the one veterinary in the neighborhood that was open until 19:00 only on Mondays. And we made it just in time. It turned out not to be too bad and we just got some disinfectant, but our family all slept better that night. So please add more veterinarians and include their opening times.

Whether you can bring a dog inside when eating out varies wildly form country to country. Here in Denmark very few restaurants and cafes welcome dogs, so it more important to tag those that do.

Yesterday we were having lunch outside on a cold day in Ribe. There was a dutch couple with a dog next to us and they said they were surprised that restaurants in Denmark did not allow dogs inside and we wrote down the address of a few dog-friendly restaurants in Copenhagen for them because that is where they were heading. From now on I can just refer to MapComplete

Do you have more ideas for the dog theme? I am considering hotels and guest houses.

Unique Mappers Network Nigeria MapMyVillage Mapathon Campaign For Social Good.

Time: Apr 30, 2022 12:00 PM West Central Africa

Join Zoom Meeting https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87344792348?pwd=RHBzM3pha2NITzdBeFVJZ3ZxbG1oZz09

Meeting ID: 873 4479 2348 Passcode: BfDJTGkeYs

Event Link: https://mapmyvillage.eventbrite.com/ .

Event Flier:

In the session, our objectives are to:

• Gain an understanding about OpenStreetMap (OSM)

• Discover various use cases or applications of OSM and its data.

• Introduction to ID editor

• Mapping with AI (RapID)

• Use of JOSM

The Training Covered How do I contribute in OSM like;

• Going out and surveying (Fieldpapers, gpx traces, etc)

• Use of Mobile application (Mapillary, MapSwipe, Maps.me, etc)

• Digitizing with computer software editors (iD editor, JOSM, Potlatch, etc)

Still trucking along on the state Forest re—import. Thanks to my partner mappers reviewing for errors, tags and such.

Traverse City Forest Management Unit is re-uploaded. Baraga and Crystal Falls are done. Gwinn still needs attention to migrate ways from the Escanaba River State Forest relation, to become a super-relation. MDNR offices need added with tagging of amenity=ranger_station ad admin_centers roles in those relations. I figured out I could drop the address node in the building and tag that with the amenity for the fun little ranger station symbol to show.

Commercial Forest lands- I learned I was using an older data set. Plum Creek Timberlands has since been bought off Weyerhaeuser by Lyme Timber Company to form Lyme Great Lakes Timberlands. They also have a separate Lyme Timber Realty company for which some lands are enrolled, but I am putting all of it under Lyme Great Lakes, one relation. They also bought holdings from Heartwood-GMO. And TRG is another player now too, seems to have bought the holdings from The Forestland Group?

In the updated 2021 commercial Forest data from MDNR, there also are holdings of The Nature Conservancy for the Slate River Forest and Two-Heart River Forest Reserve. Of course i jumped at that opportunity and imported that straightaway. I dumped in the commercial Forest data into qgis, dissolved by owner name, split by type, then split those by owner name, so now I have separate GEOJSON layers that should speed up import by quite a bit.

Deleted diary.

I have very exciting news to share, but a disclaimer first: I am not an archaeologist; I have only picked up a bit of knowledge here and there through my interest in the topic. As I am working my way through the task of mapping all the buildings in County Tipperary in Ireland, my process usually involves switching from the Esri World Imagery (Clarity) Beta satellite imagery to the British War office map layer to see whether there are any historical things I can add as well. This is not part of the task (apart from the odd housename or name of a ruined church or castle), but it’s what keeps this tedious job interesting for me. A common feature I can add are ringforts (Wikipedia link), an early medieval settlement form in Ireland, often enough easily identifyable on the satellite imagery as a circular group of trees or a crop mark.

… See full entry

Summary of mapping in Alameda, Petaluma, Elfland, and some code in iD.

I saw an OpenStreetMap diary recently “What I did in OpenStreetMap in March 2022”, and Amanda is on the right track. This is such a good idea to post about OpenStreetMap on a regular basis - I know that a monthly book blog has helped me read more often. I don’t know how to borrow this idea without outright stealing. For now I can maybe post a quarterly update?

Petaluma, CA

The map has building footprints, but almost none are labeled. I added restaurants, gas stations, a Whole Foods, and sculptures at the train station.

Alameda, CA

I walked from the ferry dock to my place, and looking back added some crosswalks (or converting footpath to crosswalk). A school in the neighborhood added a one-way pick-up/drop-off area and rearranged their sports fields to fit the remaining space, so that was a more complex edit.

Elfland, Somerville, MA

A colleague looked up Alameda on Google Maps and we started talking about which businesses and parks show up. She told me about “Elfland”, a collection of tiny buildings which appeared on a vacant lot in late 2021. After looking on Twitter to confirm some details, I removed the old gas station from OSM and added a sculpture marker.

Code in iD

In 2016 I added some code to iD for right-to-left language layout. In 2017 we discussed a notable weirdness to how street labels in many scripts showed up in Chrome. SVG textPath is really obscure so the Webkit bug goes back a long way. I was able to use Unicode presentation forms and JS to improve how Arabic and Hebrew appear in Chrome. Unfortunately other South Asian languages have multiple combining characters which can’t be faked like this.

… See full entry

It’s heartening to know that multilingualism is so valued in this community. I’ve enjoyed being able to kind of get the gist of posts on the new Discourse site that were originally written in German, Spanish, and soon other languages, thanks to the new 🌐 button. More recently, the proposal to install the Translate extension on the wiki has drawn quite a bit of passion both for and against.

Language diversity is important both on principle and in a practical sense. Supporting languages as first-class citizens can be an important tool for growing the project, reaching into untapped sources of new mappers who will improve the map and evangelize it within their communities. But there are strong opinions on how to manage translations, informed by years of pain from both inadequate software and poor translations. One way or another, I hope the buzz around this proposal will translate into a renewed interest in translating the wiki’s guides and tagging guidance, fixing unintended discrepancies across translations, and making it easier to find wiki pages in your language among search results.¹ If this extension isn’t the right tool for the job, I hope we can find one that is.

Regardless, I take comfort in knowing that most of the wiki’s translations will be handcrafted by skilled language speakers who understand OSM – with or without this extension.² Whatever concerns we have about eliminating or preserving semantic differences across translations would pale in comparison to the accidental misunderstanding that would arise from machine translations of the same technical documentation. Machine translations always fill the vacuum when hand translations are lacking.

Voting is open through May 6. The proposal needs 75% support to pass, since it adopted the wiki’s tagging proposal process. Please take the time to carefully read the proposal and its comments before jumping to conclusions. Voting has been suspended.

… See full entry

As you remember from my last diary entry, I tried to make note-viewer communicate with editors. It was relatively easy to do with JOSM because JOSM supports remote control. If I want to open a bunch of notes in JOSM, I can make a remote control call for each note to open its url which JOSM understands. But with iD I had to concede a defeat. The easiest way to open selected notes in iD seems to be exporting the notes to a GPX file and opening it as a custom data layer.

map parameter

But since then you may have noticed that iD has appeared in note-viewer’s toolbar. That means I had a rematch with iD and although I didn’t win it either I got at least something. That something is opening a given map location in iD without losing the edits. That doesn’t seems like much and last time we could open iD at the coordinates we wanted. The difference is that now we can tell the already running iD instance to go there. If we look at the location bar while panning the map in iD we’ll see that map in the hash part is being updated with current coordinates. That’s not surprising, map is one of the documented parameters, we can open iD with map set to the place we need and iD will zoom there. But can we update the location ourselves while iD is running? We may try to edit it right in the location bar. For example, the first number of map value is zoom. Let’s change it and press enter. Nothing seems to happen…

… See full entry

I’ve just started OSM editing, so I figure I’ll make a diary entry. I don’t expect to contribute a great deal of data, just things that I find relevant to my own usage of OSM (like most OSM contributors, I’m sure). At the moment, I’m numbering the buildings on my street and correcting building shapes so that Google Maps might hopefully pick up the improvements and so my own pet tracking app is a lot easier to comprehend.

There is chaos happening in the OpenStreetMap Hong Kong community recently. Someone keeps changing peak name into its old name and sometimes changing hamlet into its old name too. There are some senior OpenStreetMap contributors who remind him

and changed the names to old names. Some old names are original from Hakka people, which use different Chinese characters compared to Hong Kong Cantonese names.

The community members reverted his edit, and included the name he added as alt_name or old_name. But he doesn’t accept it, and changes back to the name he added. And of course not listening to others’ concerns. There are so many Hong Kong hiking apps using OpenStreetMap data. His edits made things worse for people who rely on apps’ map data.

He and the community members have edit wars for months. I use my Data Working Group privilege and hope to solve the chaos. I block several accounts and hope they could listen and discuss with the concerned community members. But soon we find out he has multi-accounts or a butch of coordinated accounts. And I have to block those accounts too.

Taiwan hiking community relies on OpenStreetMap data too, just like in Hong Kong. But fortunately, Taiwanese Hokkien origin names have just a few differences from Taiwanese Mandarin, compare to Hong Kong Hakka and Hong Kong Cantonese. Just a few years ago, the OpenStreetMap Taiwan community have an agreement with the Taiwan Hiking community, we will map the survey points and peaks separately. And will not upload survay GPS traces to the OpenStreetMap database.

OpenStreetMap Taiwan’s biggest use case is hiking. And the hiking trail is drawn and maintained by the hiking community in Taiwan, making the hiking trails very detail compare to roads network, POI, buildings and landuses in Taiwan. Taiwan situation is quite different compared to Africa, South Asia, or South East Asia, we didn’t have much use case of emergency.

… See full entry

After a pleasant email chat with another OSM user, I’m saving here three useful custom URLs to use as a background layer when editing maps on OpenStreetMap website with integrated iD editor. Just click on the “Background Settings” icon in the right vertical menu, scroll down the list of available backgrounds and choose the last item labeled “Custom”, click on the three dots on the right, copy and paste one of the custom URLs you can find below and finally click on the “OK” button to save changes and start using the newly added map layer.

1) True Ortofoto EagleFVG 2020

http://irdat-ortofoto.regione.fvg.it/geoserver/ows?FORMAT=image/png&TRANSPARENT=TRUE&VERSION=1.3.0&SERVICE=WMS&REQUEST=GetMap&LAYERS=ortofoto:trueorto_FVG_1720&STYLES=&CRS={proj}&WIDTH={width}&HEIGHT={height}&BBOX={bbox}

2) Vector CTRN (Carta Tecnica Regionale Numerica) 1:5000

http://irdat-ortofoto.regione.fvg.it/geoserver/ows?FORMAT=image/png&TRANSPARENT=TRUE&VERSION=1.3.0&SERVICE=WMS&REQUEST=GetMap&LAYERS=ortofoto:CTRN5000&STYLES=&CRS={proj}&WIDTH={width}&HEIGHT={height}&BBOX={bbox}

3) Hillshade

http://irdat-ortofoto.regione.fvg.it/geoserver/ows?FORMAT=image/png&TRANSPARENT=TRUE&VERSION=1.3.0&SERVICE=WMS&REQUEST=GetMap&LAYERS=ortofoto:Hillshade&STYLES=&CRS={proj}&WIDTH={width}&HEIGHT={height}&BBOX={bbox}

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.

… See full entry

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!

… See full entry

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.

… See full entry

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’

… See full entry