This year’s OSMF board elections are open now and if you are an OSMF member you will be asked to vote (if not - you might want to consider joining the OSMF).

OSMF board elections are done with Single transferable vote (STV). Since this has caused confusion and misunderstanding in the past occasionally here a quick and politically neutral helper how to vote with STV:

The name says it already in fact: Single transferable vote. You only have a single vote and you cannot split it. But you can specify an order of priorities who to give this vote to. In almost all cases your vote will go to the candidate you put on top of your list. Only in the rare cases where your vote for this candidate would be wasted it is transferred to the next highest candidate on your list (and subsequently possibly even further down the list). This happens in either of two cases:

• your top candidate does not stand a chance because he/she has too few votes overall.
• your top candidate got so many votes he/she does not need your vote to win.

To help your decisions you can find the list of candidates and their manifestos on the wiki as well as questions by the community and answers of the candidates - where you also can still ask questions if you have any.

Dear all,

Today, v2.45.1 of the openstreetmap-carto stylesheet (the default stylesheet on openstreetmap.org) has been released and rolled out to the openstreetmap.org servers. It might take a couple of days before all tiles show the new rendering.

This is a bugfix release restoring two icons:

• memorial
• tobacco shop

Thanks to all the contributors for this release.

For a full list of commits, see https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/compare/v2.45.0…v2.45.1

As always, we welcome any bug reports at https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues.

‘MPG’ = “Middle-Class Paranoid Guy”

These are the previous ones that I’ve documented:

August: Tracked & Mapped
July: Exeunt stage-right, pursued by a bear
March: Middle-Class Paranoia

Today, it is:

‘MPG’ = “Middle-Class Paranoid Gal”

For me, ‘Mapping’ is a process of:

1. Survey & collect info
2. Order the survey info on paper
3. Use JOSM to transfer into OSM

I have found it very easy to get confused when back at my desk as to exactly where I was at particular points when surveying, so I make a habit of photographing every street-sign. That gives me continual, solid reference points as to my location throughout the survey.

Yesterday I was mapping Welbeck Avenue in Gedling. The Welbeck houses at one end of the street are semi-detached houses which lie at an angle across the corner; one house is numbered on one street, whilst the other is numbered on the other street. It’s a confusing practice which is common locally.

I was at the Westdale Lane end of the street, and was getting myself clear as to the reference of each of the houses in the corner. I then took a photo of the Welbeck street-sign (see bottom). As I completed that, our female MPG burst out of her car and started shouting at me. It was difficult to decipher what she wanted, but it seemed to be on the lines of “what do you think you are doing?”. Calmly, I explained that I was taking a photo of the street-sign & turned the smartphone around so that she could see the screen (I hadn’t yet saved it). She grabbed hold of it & pulled it out of my hand!

There was a short tussle as I grabbed it back. She then started hitting me. I informed her that if she did that again then I would deck her. She hustled away into her house (I think to telephone the police).

… See full entry

I’d like to announce my candidacy for the OpenStreetMap US Board election. I’ve posted my Position Statement on my OSM wiki page. I’m especially supporting Local Communities. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

This is my translation of Sarah’s text in German. Any misrepresentation is my fault.

Who are you?

My name is Sarah, I am from Germany and live in Dresden. I studied computer sciences and work fulltime as software developer for a small local company. In OSM I am known as lonvia, which is a word play with the Latin form of ‘long journey’.

Where and when did you discover OpenStreetMap ?

… See full entry

Mapping within the St James ward of Gedling today, and in particular a set of flats on Beckett Court. There are gardens at the rear of the flats. So often in these circumstances, the fact that no single family has responsibility for the gardens means that they end up derelict. That is not the case here. This garden is immaculately maintained.

This is the garden for you to judge for yourself. Personally, I’ve never seen another garden like it. The section on the left that you cannot see is plain grass (and, in spite of the colour, I swear that this is natural grass rather than some kind of synthetic variant). I’m not qualified to make any judgement on it, so will not even try:

Just up the road from that garden are yet more of those plaster creatures that I love to find:

… See full entry

Being unfamiliar with OSM, this is the beginning of exploring it. As long as a connection lasts!

English Version (Spanish version below)

Last week on November 24th, one day before starting the 2nd State of the Map LatAm (#SOTMlatam2016) taking place in the vibrant city of Sao Paulo, a group of women interested in Open Data and Open Mapping, decided to gather and to start a discussion to make OpenStreetMap more integrate and increase the female presence. According to some statistics from VGI only 3% of all editions is made from women in the community. Having the largest data base in the world with not enough diverse groups will give not enough data and will be representing only one reality.

… See full entry

Having discovered that the part of Gedling south & east of Mapperley Golf Course that I am currently mapping is called Phoenix Farm Estate (not true, see below), I’ve wanted to know where that farm is, and have finally found it, with bonus extras.

Thanks to a post in nottstalgia.com I located Phoenix Farm on Arnold Road opposite the junction with Jessops Lane.

The farm supplies a surprising connection for Gedling with JRR Tolkein and his most famous writing (“Lord of the Rings”) - see the BBC website, although the link to Andrew H Morton’s talk is defunct. The farm was bought by his Aunt Jane Neave in 1911; it was called Lamb’s Farm in a Tolkein drawing (below) (named after the previous farmer) although was called “Church Farm” at sale. The farm was close to Gedling Church (a long-range view is here), but Aunt Jane swiftly changed the name to Phoenix Farm. It is said to have been demolished in 1954. I still do not know why Phoenix Farm Estate was named after the farm.

Contrition

… See full entry

As a follow up to our previous reviews of Maps.me user edits, these are the Maps.me issues we have observed during the month of November during validation using OSMCha. Documenting the errors observed can initiate a conversation on improving user experience, information to the users, characteristics of mapping activity from users. This in turn improves OSM.

Summary

• Reviewed: 1078 CSV
• Suspicious changesets: 46
• No issues: 1032

We commented on these changesets:

• Added my home in the name tag: 1
• Added 76 fuel_stations: 1
• Added ton of outdoor shops: 1
• Added attractions for address and buildings: 1
• Added amenity=school for bus stops, canteen, parking lot due to the presence of an adjacent school building: 1
• Added Korean names in the name:en tag: 1
• Added attraction tag for addresses: 1
• Added description in the name tag: 1
• Added ton of sports shops and other POIs: 1 - Cleanup
• Added 101 benches: 1
• Added 133 confectionery shops: 1

… See full entry

Asian University for Women, situated at Chittagong in Bangladesh, is the first and so far only all women’s university chapter of YouthMappers. AUW is an international university. This university and Texas Tech University, USA organized a training and mapathon on OpenStreetMap on 26 november 2016.

I am Ataur Rahman Shaheen, a youth mapper form Dhaka College YouthMappers chapter. I’m enrolled as honors in statistics at Dhaka College. GIS and RS Data Mgt specialist Ahasanul Hoque gave the opportunity to me and Tasnia Ahmed, another mapper from Independent University of Bangladesh to assist him in this training.

… See full entry

The fixme=* tag is often used to give other mappers an indication that something needs more research (or it is a “note to self”) .
All too often it stays at that point and no one ever cares any more about such a request for improvement. I found out that roughly more than half of the fixme’s is at least 2 years old.

I wrote a simple overpass query with some stylesheets attached which shows the text of the fixme immediately on the map.
Click on the link above, locate the map to your neighbourhood and hit the run button.
Is there something you can fix? Please do so and remove the “fixme”

For the centre of London, this is the result:
(this screenshot is from 2016, most likely it is different when you look it up now!)

The overpass query searches for nodes with a fixme=, but you can easily change it to finding ways instead.
And if you want to locate all note= tagging, simply replace “fixme” with “note” in the script.

Continuing to work my way through the Phoenix Farm Estate today, catching up in late-afternoon, with a late-Autumn sun low on the horizon at England’s high latitude & damn cold, on houses missed on Stanhope Road. And yes, it turns out that there used to be a “Phoenix Farm”, though I have zero hard information on that to date.

Regular readers will realise that I constantly seek to alleviate the boredom of collecting endless lists of house numbers by spotting & photographing good examples of art on the houses that I pass ([1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]). Here is the latest: –

Coda:

Phoenix is actually the next estate and not the current one.

open street map is very useful. Few days ago i was travelling to mumbai and didn’t get the exact location where i wanted to go then i login to openstreetmap and got to know about the exact location.

The only House Museum in Venice where to live the artistic effervescence of the 50 ‘60’ 70 ‘80’ and find out how born Torcello and the lagoon of Venice.(guided tour)

Gobichettipalayam is the second largest urban city in Erode district, Tamilnadu, India. It is known for the green rice fields, because of that many Tamil movies were shot here. It is in human nature to start any task from a place you already know, since I was born and brought up in this town I started my mapping here.

Quality of map before mapping:

When I started mapping most of the roads in Northern part of my town was already mapped, but some roads are named wrong. In case of POIs, there is little to no information on the map and most of the schools, Banks, Petrol pumps, community centres were not mapped. So I planned to proceed by matching the road density in the southern part of my town to the northern part and then concentrate on adding the POIs.

Things I mapped:

… See full entry

I found another misplaced overlay of streets in the wrong area and deleted them. Corrected names of streets, deleted non-existent streets and tomorrow will drive around to confirm streets (and their order) before doing those such as the little courts off Cedral.

Weather Underground (aka Wunderground) wrote me today to confirm that they did just recently switch to using OpenStreetMaps for their personal weather station maps. When I am done cleaning up my area, I will go across the big road and clean-up the area for the 3rd weather station in our area.

Oh yeah!! Once I get the confirmation of our hill name from USGS, I will be adding it’s name as well. We sent the name proposal to the USGS in 2014. It has since been sent to our state, then to our county, back to the state (all approved) and is just waiting for it’s finalization at the federal level. I was told it should be finalized within the next 30 days. Our nameless hill (which is a distinguishable landmark from afar) will finally have a name. I can’t wait! That will be fun to be able to enter. Kind of like the dessert after all this road clean-up.

Today, Mapillary released a set of online raster tiles that show all traces (and if you zoom in enough, all individual photo locations). The tiles are transparent PNGs, and can be used on top of other map layers.

The tileset address is https://d6a1v2w10ny40.cloudfront.net/v0.1/{z}/{x}/{y}.png

Note that various mapping software use different formatting for the x, y and z parameters. For example, OsmAnd uses {0}/{1}/{2}.

A demo page is available at http://mm.mapillary.io/raster_tiles.html

For more information, see this Mapillary GitHub issue. Also for reporting problems with the tileset, please use their GitHub repository.

OsmAnd

Here are some step-by-step instructions to add the tileset to OsmAnd. This way you can have a map showing all Mapillary traces with you on your phone, even offline if you cache the tiles before the trip.

1. Go into “Configure map” (either from the menu, or from the globe icon).
2. Select “Map source”.
3. Select “Define/Edit” to define a new map layer.
4. Name it something like “Mapillary traces”, and as URL enter “https://d6a1v2w10ny40.cloudfront.net/v0.1/{0}/{1}/{2}.png”.
5. Click “Save” to save the new map.
6. Now, back in the “Configure map” screen, select your new map as the “Overlay map”, and select an opaque map as the “Map source”.

Just define a new layer with this URL : “https://d6a1v2w10ny40.cloudfront.net/v0.1/{0}/{1}/{2}.png”

Posted originally at: https://plus.google.com/+WinOlario/posts/8jtE5JdaKeJ

It appears people are using some overlay and just copying it. I live here. They are wrong. There was literally 4 or 5 duplicates of our roads all within a mile or two. Some going east-west and some north-south. Some even diagonally through houses! Several duplicates went straight through mountains. MANY roads were misnamed.

I do hope that people double check before editing in the future.

Go look at what the county GIS maps show!!! Go look at your own street signs. Just don’t trust the overlay here. It is WRONG.

I still have many many hours of work to do on my area. This is NUTS.