A few days ago a few mappers in the UK noted that Bing imagery seemed somewhat out-of-date. I noticed it because it appeared not to show recent housing developments until zoomed in at z20. I found a development just outside the village of Llanbedr Dyffryn Clwyd whilst mapping rooftop solar in Denbighshire. My workflow for solar mapping uses Josm. As all the new houses had solar panels I wanted to add the buildings themselves, and I find the way in which imagery can be aligned easier to use in iD than in Josm (particularly as the offset needs cancelling in Josm which does not fit task-based mapping over several thousand square kilometres). So I did it a little crudely in Josm, only to discover that at z20 the imagery was available in iD, so I tidied things up a bit.

I didn’t think much about it until a local mapper in the area commented that Bing seemed a bit behind. This seemed a bit more significant, so I looked at my local university campus which is under continual development and therefore has lots of features which enable one to age imagery. To my consternation the zoom levels down to z19 showed a building which was demolished at least 7 years ago. Whilst looking at this area just now, the z20 imagery appears to be disappearing from cache.

A short distance South of the University is the Nottingham tram line which was well under construction in 2013 because a major bridge was put in place in September of that year. The ‘updated’ Bing imagery now pre-dates the tram development, and any construction work on the Chinese Studies building which opened in January 2013. It does show a new lecture theatre on the main campus which was built post-2009. It therefore appears that the imagery has reverted to a state around 2011 or 2012. Co-incidentally or not, this seems to be the same as ESRI Clarity.

I’ve looked at a couple of other places where I know construction work bridges this period:

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The Osm Go! team is looking for translators & developers:

• Translations are done on POEditor, just read the instructions here.
• Developers feel free to make some PR. Guidelines available here.

The team is focused on the next 1.6.0 version, for more details, you can find an up-to-date changelog here.

StreetComplete v45.0 now has overlays! Finally!

You can load the alpha version from GitHub, the beta and release versions will be rolled out in a few weeks, when the bugs are ironed out. Please report any issues you find!

Overlays are a new way in which data is represented and editable on the map, additional to and orthogonal to quests: Display and edit just one aspect of OpenStreetMap, but allow it to be edited in an easy and efficient way.

Overlays help contributors to comprehensively record the kind of data that has the most value if it is mapped area-wide - for example addresses, POIs, sidewalks, cycle lanes, smoothness and other properties that are used as part of a network (e.g. for routing). In particular, overlays make it easy to identify where the information is missing and see at one glance if the information is (still) correct.

The initial version just includes two overlays to select from, “sidewalks” and “street lighting”. More will follow in the future but can also be contributed by others, just like quests, see the overlay guidelines.

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Projects that can be made using the Open source street Map

Cyprus

In May I visited Cyprus and crossed into the UN Green Zone, Northern Cyprus, and Dhekelia (the UK Sovereign Base Area). This is a rare case where the Mapnik style is the one which best shows the true boundaries and situation on the ground. Here it is in between screenshots from Google and my MapsME app.

Businesses were under-mapped in the capital (Nicosia) and a Cypriot enclave inside of the UK base area (Ormidhia). Only roads and bus stops were well-mapped. There were similar problems on Google. As I walked along the main street in Ormidhia, I added a bunch of grocery stores and hairdressers.

Estonia

I visited Tallinn. At the Estonian History Museum I spent several minutes near closing time, walking around a park trying to find the old Soviet statues described in a Google Maps review. In retrospect I should have looked at OpenStreetMap, where they are all mapped and labeled!

Maldives

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We the Unique Mappers Network Coordinators had a meeting, planning for our monthly marathon. During the meeting, different task was assigned to the Coordinators for the training of the members of the network.

Four years ago on May the 25th 2018 the, then new, EU-wide General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) went in to force. It is therefore quite fitting that nearly to the day 4 years later, the OSMF has given up any pretense of ever fulfilling the legal requirements arising from the regulation and, perhaps more important, undertaking the ethically and morally indicated steps to protect the privacy of our contributors.

It isn’t as if the OSMF was caught by surprise in May 2018. The topic was by far the best researched, documented and planned change in its history. And it isn’t as if the quality of the work or the conclusions were in doubt, completely independent and unaware of what had been prepared by the LWG three years earlier, at last years SOTM there was a talk by Robert Riemann that came essentially to the same conclusions.

But, four years later, with the sole exception of new users having to accept the OSMF terms of service on sign up (added by yours truly), none of the required changes to the APIs and data access have even been started on OSMF properties.

To make the situation worse, OSM isn’t simply static, new services, third party and OSMF operated are being added, existing operations are changed and rarely are the data protection impacts and consequences considered.

Ironically some organizations in OSM-space have taken required steps, for example Geofabrik, OSMcha and Pascal Neis’s HDYC, that the OSMF has not.

Why have we ended in this fraught with legal and financial danger place? On the one hand there are no brownie points to be won with championing the changes to the OSM website, the API and data distribution. Since Frederik has left the board no director has been willing to show any support for the matter.

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Ayuda a quien más los necesitan

This article is also available in Taiwanese Mandarin (台灣華語) and Taiwanese Hokkien / Taigi (台文)

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Yes, you heard it right. It’s about the 2nd mapping workshop. Shouldn’t it follow by the very first workshop, since the last article is about the first expedition? Let’s not get bogged down with the series ordinal, that’s another story for another time lol. Some say that it’s possible to notice from the last article, and we can chit-chat about it physically at the next meetup if some insist… All we know is, it's not called the Stig!

2nd Mapping workshop in MozTW Space Taipei

In brief, OpenStreetMap Taiwan Community (OSMTW) utilised data collected from surveying in the 2nd mapping workshop at the MozTW Space Taipei after the junket tour maiden survey expedition. Oberserved physical attendance has dropped due to the recent increasing communities infections of the Coronavirus Omicron variant. Be that as it may, the workshop warmly welcomes two enthusiastic geography teachers to join.

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Hello World!

Hi everyone, I’m Chris Park, a Computer Engineering student studying at the University of Toronto! I’ll be working on Valhalla, the multi-modal routing software based on OpenStreetMap, on my project for the Google Summer of Code.

I’m an active explorer, and I love searching for new experiences. I enjoy playing the viola, trekking, and traveling in my free time.

I first ran across OSM on a pathfinding GIS project to map cities around the world, leading me to dig deeper into how the mapping tool was built and eventually apply to contribute through GSoC.

Project Goals

The aim of the project is to re-enable transit pathfinding support to Valhalla. The routing app no longer supports transit pathfinding because of updates to a dependent API, although it originally had the functionality. Therefore, the goal is to import raw GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) and format it so it functions with the existing code, so that transit support can be re-introduced without third-party dependencies.

Since Valhalla previously had transit functionality some of the code can be re-formatted to match the new data form rather than writing fresh code. This will allow for transit data to connect easier to the rest of Valhalla and help complete the project in a timely manner.

To achieve this, there are four broad milestones to meet:

1. Importing GTFS data and ensuring it is readable in Valhalla

2. Converting the data into tiles to match the format of roads and features.

3. Connecting the tiles into the road tiles such that transit tiles are integrated with the rest of Valhalla

4. Testing the connected network with Valhalla’s gurka tests to ensure functionality

By the GSoC midterm evaluation period at the end of July, I hope to have completed creating the transit tiles so that the latter two months can be used to connecting and debugging the data.

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Hello!

Hi, everyone! It is so glad to be in this community starting a new challenge this summer.

My name is Zhengyi Cao, a Chinese student at Boston University majoring in Electrical and Computer Engineering. I touched OSM by the chance that one course project required the achievement of finding shortest path by using OSM resources.

I am very interested in doing something like building maps, exploring unknown area and planning trajectory using point cloud data or other helpful approaches. It's challenging and addictive, and that is why I apply this project and be so eager to do this.

JOSM route visualisation

That is the topic I choose for this project. A plugin that can clearly display the full picture of the public transport route and show the relevant information about the designated route, which is convenient for users to query and greatly improves the efficiency of map modification. I am responsible for the improvement of UI to interface.

Points needs to be Improved (initial idea)

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1. Understand the difference between point addresses and Polygonal features

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Hi. I have an application which I made. I want to use your map on my mobil application. I need to contact with you. What is your e-mail address?

Urban road classification is hard. OSM’s highway=* classification scheme is defined nebulously using “importance to the road network”, and the examples given to illustrate importance are often more suited for rural roads. Generally, road classification seeks to identify the important destinations in an area, find the routes that best link adjacent destinations, and rank these routes based on the importance of the destinations. But this is difficult in urban areas, where there are often many closely packed destinations, and many parallel possible routes. Since the distances covered are often short, a local may choose a different route between two destinations based on the time of day, expectations of traffic, or simply on a whim, without great time differences. However, a hierarchical road network certainly exists in all cities, though it may not be entirely apparent to a non-local, or even a transplant until they’ve lived somewhere for many years.

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In the OSM wiki there are some templates (KeyDescription and ValueDescription) that are used by Taginfo to show some useful informations to the user; since the same information is contained in the Data Item linked to the feature page, some wiki users, in good faith, shorten these templates to their minimum (e.g. “{{KeyDescription}}”), thus preventing Taginfo from fetching the data.

This is what ref:mise on Taginfo currently looks like:

I think that this issue is on Taginfo side but, for the time being, it doesn’t seem to be on their To-do list; for this reason, I believe that we should preserve (or restore if removed) the information stored in these templates (even if this means maintaining the same information in two separate locations, i.e. the Wiki page and the Data Item page).

Here is a sorted list of the OSM Wiki pages (tags or key related) which contain the text “{{KeyDescription}}” or “{{TagDescription}}”:

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For my work at anyways.eu, I’ve been tasked to make sure that all schools are in OSM - especially with capacity.

No better way to do this by making it easy for contributors to add the correct data… So, I wanted to create a MapComplete theme for education. Normally, I would open up the wiki to see what tagging is needed, but for schools there is very little tagging available at the moment, which is a mess.

As it turns out, schools are diverse and this is reflected in the tagging.

This diary entry serves two goals:

1. I want to organize my thoughts on how a tagging model could look like
2. It is meant to stir up some discussion.

Hopefully, some tagging proposals will come forward from from this post.

So, what is a school (or educational institute) anyway?

This is already a hard question. The openstreetmap-wiki on ‘education features’ states:

Education features are map objects and object features which relate to educational activities

Well, thanks, captain obvious.

Let’s turn to the International Standard Classification of Education (from Unesco) instead:

As national education systems vary in terms of structure and curricular content, it can be difficult to benchmark performance over time or monitor progress.

So, in other words, it is difficult as this can be highly different amonst regions. The ISCED-document however does a good job to draw some lines and to give some definitions.

What does a standard school curriculum look like?

In most countries, the school trajectory for most people (according the the ISCED, page 21) looks more or less as following (but the precise ages can vary with a few years):

Before formal education starts, kids younger then about 4 or 5 go to preschool/kindergarten. This is optional in most countries, and some education takes place, often to prepare spelling and simple math. ISCED calls this level 0

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Thanks to Bryce Cogswell for developing this cool apps. I’m having a fun day mapping during my leisure time from my iPhone device. It runs really smooth and easy to use. Try it guys !!

Search it on playstore “Go Map!!”

MapYourPlace

OSM Calendar
With open source maps providing access to map data, The Future of Maps is Open!

Organized by: CSE-IT Department, LBS College of Engineering Kasaragod collaborated with Kerala State IT Mission and Kerala State Spatial Data Infrastructure as a part of 14th edition of Teranis.

Event Coordinator: Vipindas K ( •OSM ID: VIPINDAS K, •Mapillary ID: vipindas3927 )

Number of registration: 30 (from 9 Colleges)
Total number of changesets: 1130
Total number of features added: 3194
Total number of shops & amenities added: 2208
Total number of valid shops & amenities added (with Mapillary Photos): 2010

Date : 28th May, 2022 - to - 2nd June, 2022

Tags: “shop”=” * “ with “name”=” * “, “amenity”=” * “ with “name”=” * “

Hashtag : #MYP2K22 #TERANIS2K22

Program Details: Click Here
Score Board: Click Here

Special Thanks

Kerala IT Mission, Kerala State Spatial Data Infrastructure, Mapathon Keralam, OpenStreetMap India, OSM Kerala

Winners

1. Anjas A S ( •OSM ID: Anjas A S, •Mapillary ID: Anjasasok )
2. Smijo Saji ( •OSM ID: Smijo Saji, •Mapillary ID: Smijo_Saji )
3. Jithin S ( •OSM ID: Jithin Sreedhar, •Mapillary ID: jithinsreedhar )

Top 7 Mappers

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Here are a few edits I’m interested in making in the coming months. I’m hoping to get feedback and discussion here.

Use of Directional Prefix on Streets

The proposal here suggests a system that would change street names such as “East 200 North” to just “200 North” and moving “East” to name:prefix. This system is already in use in Salt Lake City and in my (limited) testing seems to work fine with geocoders. example

Some streets in Logan have already been changed to this format. Personally I think consistency throughout the city is more important than the tradeoffs between each way of doing things.

This change seems relatively simple to update all at once using an automated edit.

Address Import

Address data is available from UGRC, and according to the Wiki it looks like the license will work with OSM. Other than a few exceptions sprinkled here and there, the vast majority of Cache Valley does not have address tags.

Challenges

• I don’t have experience with making automated edits, but am moderately confident at scripting, so I’m confident I could figure it out especially since there are a few wiki pages describing the process others have used.
• Because of mostly hand-traced building outlines, there no doubt will be hundreds of conflicts or corner cases that will require manual review and possibly in-person survey. I’m happy to go in person to check an address in the valley, but one guy can only do so much of this. I’m not sure what system (if any) is best to queue up manual review cases and mark them as solved. Notes? fixme=* tags?
• Building outlines have not been completed in Cache Valley.

I’m open to any criticism or comment on anything discussed here, or on other edits that might need to be made to improve the map!

Edit: Additional info from community

In addition to comments on this post, here are a few other things brought up on OSM US slack:

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