It seems to be quite interesting here. I’ll try to spend more time here.

Recently OSMP has established contacts with the community of blind people in Poland. Thanks to that we got to know their needs and learned how much OpenStreetMap data helps them in everyday life. It turned out that most of the applications they use to move around are based on information obtained from OpenStreetMap.

Currently I am preparing assumptions of the program directed to editors of OpenStreetMap, so that they would pay special attention to marking objects during mapping, which will facilitate movement of blind people.

The group of such objects includes among others: doors to buildings, markings of pedestrian crossings including crossings with bicycle paths, stairs and communication barriers.

We also intend to collaborate on marking public transportation stops at OSM so that this information can be used for voice navigation. Such a pilot program of indexing bus stops in Katowice has already been prepared by one of Polish editors (Let’s praise Luktar!) and, thanks to his persistence and huge amount of work, has been implemented. I invite you to read it in this thread on the Forum. He is currently preparing a similar project in Krakow, OSMP intends to assist him in it and at the same time organize such projects for other Polish cities.

Information about the progress of the projects will be published here, on the OSMP website and on our Facebook groups. I invite you to follow and actively participate in the project.

Dear board members, it has come to my attention that many community members feel that openstreetmap-carto is stagnating. Some feel that there is no vision, no project goals, and that maintainers don’t care about the community instead trying to follow their own agendas. I am concerned that it may negatively impact long term health of the project.

As the first/default style that is visible on https://openstreetmap.org openstreetmap-carto can be considered one of core OpenStreetMap projects. While it may not be as important as the backend API and database it is the first thing that anyone going to OSM’s site sees. It is therefore of great interest to the entire project that the style is maintained and community is involved and proud of the results.

OpenStreetMap grew as a project and right now it is one of the largest open datasets of geospatial data. Many researchers as well as companies from startups to FAANG rely on OSM. There are more mappers than ever. For a very long time it was all serviced by volunteers but with that growth there is a need for more time and professionalism from maintainers.

As the project grows so does the responsibility. We know that OSM Foundation is trying to help by e.g. hiring new SRE, hiring iD developer, organizing committees and working groups, creating grant programmes. I believe that openstreetmap-carto should at least get involved in Software dispute resolution panel and if possible start leveraging paid resources to help with maintenance and design.

… See full entry

Hey, i want to calculate the area of trees in a city (Zürich, Switzerland), but when i do this (Python or QGIS) the result is 0. When you take a look on the map, there are many trees found with “natural=tree”. How does the calculation of Nodes work? And what is the area of the tree that is calculated - only the trunk? And maybe it’s just a really small number that the output is 0? Thanks for your help.

28th May, 2022. I trained the beginner’s mappers on how to use create an account in osm, and map using the iD editor tools and the RapiD. The participants were so excited and grateful for the training. Some catch up very fast and some demanded for the manual/slides so they can practice it.

Today, I was able to map about 133 builds as part of my contribution to the ongoing project organized by the OSM local team UniqueMappers Nigeria. All thanks to my coordinator @vicksun, for his encouragement and support as we voluntarily contributed to the social good of our local communities here in Nigeria and the world at large.

Fellows Cattle Farm

Hello there! So excited today. I was part of the “Let’s Map Aguata LGA for Social” project launch/monthly Mapathon of the Uniquemapper team Nigeria; an OSM local community. It was an exciting one as I was privileged to receive my second but most impacting and interactive validation training as an advance mapper. God bless UniqueMappers Nigeria. God bless OSM.

2022-05-28 16:30 GMT [1] Organised Editing/Activities URL = osm.wiki/Organised_Editing/Activities#Sample_activities suggest the Activities be alphabetically listed

[2] Using British-English on the “wiki.openstreetmap.org” page, distracting to see ‘Organised’ highlighted as a spelling mistake on this “openstreetmap.org” page!

Hi:

This is just a quick update to address all the CCI who believe it is essential to have comprehensive and descriptive comments.

What do they really do, and who are they for? I spent a little time scanning a few hundred, and they are all basically useless. Additionally, a comment could be in an indecipherable language and totally unrelated to what was actually changed.

I have over 12 thousand edits maybe averaging 300 members. With maybe 10 members per documentable change, at 2 minutes to document each change, that is 12 000300/102/60 equals 12 000 hours. Anyone possessing even a minimal IQ can appreciate that the task is insurmountable for any productive mapper.

If obstruction and obfuscation is the goal, commenting is part of that solution.

thanks, Baden

To the Three Commenters who provided feedback to yesterday evening’s Diary post: “Thank you!”

It feels a bit counterintuitive, but I am not overly familiar with Social Media. I haven’t logged in to Facebook in over 4 years… I’m on a computer all day, and the last thing I want to do when I get off work is stare at another screen. That being the case, I am surprised at the speed of replies to my post. :)

And thank you for the recommendation of “Key:protect_class” ~ Looks like what I was needing!

============

GeoJSON

So, it turns out that JOSM can read JSON files. (Yay!) But it is not happy if I try to import a multipart polygon from a JSON file. And I really don’t want to make the OSM Community or JOSM unhappy.

So I built a little model in ArcGIS last night. It steps through my WMA boundaries feature class, splits multipart polygons into single part polygons, and transforms the latter into GeoJSON files projected into WGS_1984. There’s some fancy renaming too (honestly, it isn’t very fancy, but it keeps the output from being a total mess).

I now have GeoJSON files for 407 singlepart polygons. The 4 representing Broken Bow WMA have already been used to replace my hand-digitized attempt from earlier in the week.

Worries

My current worries revolve around topology.

• Areas managed by my Agency don’t always match up with other areas’ boundaries by conscious/cooperative design

Within my Agency, we use a Conformal Conic projection (NAD 1983) since it minimizes area/shape warping, and keeps distances comparable. But even when I reproject my data to Web Mercator, it doesn’t match up well to other’s boundaries even when that is expected.

… See full entry

To whomever is reading this, my apologies.

I work for my state’s Dept. of Wildlife Conservation, and help make maps of agency-managed lands for public use. I’ve noticed a few projects geared towards community-development of basemaps.
At a recent Division-wide meeting, one of the Field Biologists brought up that they were surprised to find one of the WMAs (Wildlife Management Areas) depicted in an online vector basemap. At which point, I decided that I needed to take it upon myself to add/update our areas in those community-driven basemap projects.

I began by using the osm.org basic iD Editor. I was surprised to learn that shapes could not be imported directly. But happily began playing “connect the dots” with gpx files rendered from my shapefiles’ vertices.

We use Esri tools, so I made use of Dan Patterson’s “Poly* features to points” tool to create numbered points for each WMA.

This was okay for the first week.

I found myself losing patience with all those dots… Why couldn’t I trace another editor’s lake boundary? Why are this area’s boundaries linked to the roads? Why is this one area treated as two… is it not possible to dissolve them into one area along the shared boundary?

I don’t want to anger the rest of the OSM Community, but nor do I want to spend the rest of the month connecting the dots over some million-and-a-half acres and fiddly boundaries along man-made reservoirs.

So I found JOSM. It is horrendibly confusing to me, but I hope to get it right. …I note there is a ‘trace other feature’ tool. ^_^

… See full entry

(I’m publishing it now, I will review, and might add screenshots.)

rationale

Here in Panama I’ve occasionally noticed bursts of name contributions by foreigners who do not know the language, or by local people who copy from official information where the accents have been purged, or contributed long ago when non-ASCII character became a question point.

Whatever the case, we have textual mistakes in the database, so that when from time to time I browse the database, I still stumble on “Simon Bolivar”, “San Jose”, “Canaveral”, “la Compania”, and the commonplace terms Panaderia, Pasteleria, Fruteria, etc.

If you’re not familiar with Spanish, you haven’t noticed anything wrong, or have you?

Those familiar with the language and/or fixated on formal correctness like linguists, philologists, and mathematicians, have felt pain, because the correct Spanish form of the above words is “Simón Bolívar”, “San José”, “Cañaveral”, “la Compañía”, “Panadería”, “Pastelería”, “Frutería”, etc.

Just for reference, at the time of writing, “Simon Bolivar” in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela returns 32 objects, while “Simón Bolívar” gives 200, possibly giving a measure of some national pride. Colombian “Fruterías” however score 56 vs. 64 against “Fruteria” without the accent.

the task

Here I only focus on what are obvious orthographic mistakes, skipping any data that might look wrong only because it’s in a different language, and I want to fix the mistakes only looking at the textual information, not to the geographic or geometric characteristics of the object.

This spares me downloading object coordinates, and the base map, but still I will advise checking every single instance we’re fixing, no automatic blanket fix.

the tools

I suggest using overpass-turbo, level0, the standard unix stream editor sed. Then correct the data in the level0 html interface.

the procedure by example

… See full entry

Nice to belong to this community.

I nominated the new voting members about 49 of them to become HOT voting members.

I supported my Chapter members with internet data subscription through the help of Mr. Victor Sunday.

I am a co-founder of Oyomappersteam of Uniquemappers network Nigeria. I have trained participants on Missing Map and how to use id editor to map in Open Street Map.

This is my first journal entry on OSM diary. Exciting. Alright, RTK GNSS units are amazing. You can use them in so many different applications, both professional and hobbyist (try doing a quick search on your favourite search engine for example applications)… but they are expensive.

This is how you DIY your own real RTK! You will need to have some knowledge of bash, python, the fundamentals of GNSS, and some interest in troubleshooting.

You will need

1. Two U-blox ZED-F9P GNSS receivers. This is the module behind the processing. You can configure this in many ways, i.e., using a board of your choice. I will be using an ArduSimple board.
2. A radio module. This will be used to communicate between the rover and base over some distance.
3. Power supply. You can use a power bank here.
4. A Raspberry Pi. I will be using a Raspberry Pi Zero W. You can use any device given that it is capable of connecting to a WiFi network.
5. Jumper cables. Male to male and female to female.
6. OTG cables.
7. USB A cables and maybe USB C cables depending on the type of Raspberry Pi you will be using and the type of smartphone you will have.
8. An android smartphone. …we are almost done with the list…
9. An SD card.
10. Two multi-band antennas.

Last, I should mention that this project will be considerably cheaper than the commercially available options. More on this in the coming sections. I will detail how to make the connections to all the devices and maybe the software setup.

Hello everyone.

Recently, I’ve been trying to map National Recreation Trails in OSM. the NRT program will designate a ‘system’ as a national recreation trail, generally meaning all of the trails within a park or other public land.

I want to represent this on the map, but it seems to be beyond the scope of the type=route relations.

I’ve been considering using this: osm.wiki/Relation:network to try and represent these, but I ran into problems with this as well. I tried interpreting the documentation, but it was written so confusingly that I could not understand how to use this relation on the map at all. I asked on the talk page, but I’m still confused on the meaning of this relation.

Additionally, there are National Recreation Trails designated to places serving ATVs or ORVs. I don’t know if this is some redneck thing that the Europeans don’t have or what, but there was no documented tag for ATV or ORV paths on the wiki. so I also created the page osm.wiki/Tag:route%3Datv. I’ve been working on expanding this page as well.

Right now I’m using type=route for these system NRTs, but I feel that it’s probably incorrect and I’d love input from others.

Thanks, SherbetS

This is an osm.org logout link. Don’t click it:

osm.org/logout