https://revolutionarygis.wordpress.com/2016/12/15/cyprus-road-network-shapefile-data/

Cheers!

OpenStreetView? You are no longer hostage to Google’s car-driven vision
(14 Dec 2016, The Register)

One of the great bright lights of open-source software and user-driven community projects is OpenStreetMap, which offers an open-source mapping platform similar to, but also very philosophically different than, Google Maps.

This review is about Telenav’s OpenStreetView. I find it a little odd, because it mentions OSM at the top of the article (extract above) and also has a link to Mapillary and yet, does not contain a single link to either the topic of the article (OpenStreetView) nor to OSM. Most odd.

Coda:

(with thanks to mmd (see comments)):

The Register review is already well out-of-date as, after OSV attracted the wrong kind of attention from Google, OSV changed it’s name to OpenStreetCam on 25 Nov 2016 and can now be found at openstreetcam.org.

Hey I just posted to my diary! Where’s the checkbox on this form that says “Share with Twitter” or “Share with Facebook”?

In fact, where the link on this page that says “Provide Feedback on the Diary Feature of OpenStreetMap”?

Brian

This is a tracing guide for people mapping Aweil in South Sudan for MSF with Missing maps (see tasks here). Aweil is the capital city of the state of Northern Bahr el Ghazal. The city’s infrastructure is relatively developed. Aweil now has a functioning railway station, hotel, airport, soccer stadium, and public hospital. [1]

As we are mapping the suburbs of Aweil, you will see rather sparse settlement. Here are some photos of the structures that are visible on the satellite imagery. Very detailed information on what MSF is doing in this area, along with many useful photos (some published in this tracing guide) can be found here: One Day in Aweil: An MSF Team Portrait

Residential areas

… See full entry

Three years back I started sending welcome messages to new mappers on behalf of SOSM, using a simple tool chain based on the RSS feed of new mappers from Pascal Neis.

The message is not customised as from the beginning it was seen as a replacement for the welcome message that had gone away with the web site redesign. The text (in 4 languages, no Romansh version though) is designed to welcome the new contributor and give pointers to the resources available nationally.

Has it worked? Difficult to say, as the whole point was a replacement of something that existed before, we didn’t expect drastic change and we didn’t get it.

And, no, I’m not stopping :-)

The Main Roads department of Western Australian recently released quite a few datasets under the Creative Commons Attribution licence. We have explicit permission to use two of these in OSM: the Road Network (MRWA-514) and Road Hierarchy (MRWA-515).

I’m part of a local geogeeks group that meets fortnightly in Perth, and with the help of some people far more knowledgeable than me about spatial stuff I’ve been attempting to derive a comparison between the Main Roads data and what’s already in OSM. That’s a work in progress (eventually it’ll spit out an OSM file containing only correctly-attributed roads that are missing from OSM), but for the time being I’m going down a much more manual route:

1. Download shapefile from the data.wa.gov.au site linked above

2. Use ogr2osm to convert it to OSM format:

python ogr2osm.py RoadNetworkMRWA_514/RoadNetworkMRWA_514_1.shp -o mrwa514.osm`

3. Create a JOSM style file that makes the names stand out:

way[cwy=Single] {
text: auto;
width: 3;
color: #c0c0c0;
text: "road_name";
text-position: line;
text-offset: 14;
font-size: 16;
font-color: lightyellow;
}

4. Mostly, road geometry is actually already in OSM, but the names and road types aren’t. To make it easier to find where to work, I apply filters in JOSM to hide everything apart from roads with no names. Then it’s just a matter of clicking a road, adding its info, and as soon as it’s got a name it disappears (thanks to the filter).

This is still pretty slow, but it’s safe. I’m sure there’s going to be lots of better ways to work with this, but at least some missing names (and geometries) are being fixed.

I’ll use source:name=Main Roads Western Australia to designate where the name has come from. The geometries I’m double-checking against Bing.

Every now and then OSRM users report routes that take puzzling, unrealistic detours. For example, a user reported this route that went to extensive means to avoid going over Flottsundsbron, a narrow bridge with alternating direction of traffic in the south of Sweden. Investigating this strange route led us to the oneway=alternating tag in OpenStreetMap.

… See full entry

Back in July, we talked about the Los Angeles building import hitting > 1 million mark for LA City and last month, we already imported 2 million buildings covering the rest of the county. We are not finished yet ;)

Read on for what we are doing in the last couple of months.

Downtown LA City in 3d

MaptimeLA in Catalina Island

The local community through @MaptimeLA has also been busy validating the data on the ground. A few of them took a ferry to Catalina Island for an awesome mapping weekend! Aside from validating the imported buildings, they added local features and Mapillary street/trail level photos across the island.

… See full entry

This is a blog post on my efforts to connect with new users. OpenStreetMap adds new users at a surprising rapid rate. If only they would stick around. So what can we do to increase their longevity? Not have extra money, bribes are out. So is swag, not that I have any of that either.

Right now I’m giving new users thumbnail information on OSM and inviting them to join an OSM Meetup group. After the new year when I’ll pull together some statistics to see if information alone is useful or if I should try another approach.

What else can I try?

• Challenges
• Suggestions of what to map
• Survey for new users

Last Friday 9 December I thought that I’d spotted yet more Khazis on houses near the head of Perlethorpe Drive but in fact it was more interesting than that. These 1959 houses had been built with combo Wash-houses and Coal-Sheds.

These two are in superb condition:

(if you get a broken picture then try another browser)
(for me, this page is broken in Chromium though fine in Firefox)
(2016-Dec-12: upgrade to 55.0.2883.75 fixed the broken Mapillary photos)

The gender gap in technologies and information’s world is a commonplace, so assumed that few solutions are sought. This reflection appeared through an internal debate in the regional chat of OpenStreetMap Latam, allowing that the concerns of several people could concretize in a work line within the community. This text could also be a reflection on how to build community.

Why and how did the need to build a forum on the gender gap in OpenStreetMap appear

The OpenStreetMap community has various channels for relating, communicating information, giving directions, debating opinions: mailing lists, wikis and chats, country or region based, working group based. In the ConDatos 2014 event in Mexico City, where several people from the continent meet each other, linking the Openstreetmap community of Latin America in a more integrated way was proposed, firstly creating a mailing list and a regional chat.

… See full entry

It is soon to be Xmas and that is the starting-gun for spammers.

(15) 24 Hours since creation: 0 Edits, 0 Traces & 1 spam (removed - thank you) for a Hungarian Lockmaker: Zarkiraly (user removed)

In India, MapMyIndia is one of the biggest aggregators of commercial map data, including running their own fleet of mapping cars, so it was quite interesting to find OSM data in their map for areas i’m familiar with and have mapped on the ground.

OSM vs MMI

Its not all OSM though, will need to dig more into how they mix the data.

A volley of Winter Virus breached my defences — the first in 10/15 years — so I’ve spent a week or so indoors with Bronchitis.

At one stage I examined my phlegm in a piece of tissue & it was the colour & consistency of a mid-green emulsion paint typical from the 1980s. My more recent sputum is clear, with the odd bit of yellow stuff in it, and the earlier result may well have been a delusion caused by sleep deprivation (every time I fall asleep I cough & immediately wake up again). Well, whatever, I finally got to the point that I could convince myself that I was both strong enough to go out, that I was no longer a male variant on Typhoid Mary, plus I needed the fresh air. The boundary streets of Phoenix Farm Estate in Gedling, Nottinghamshire were waiting to be surveyed.

I actually reached a street sign on Arnold Lane, Gedling as I walked towards Gedling Church that said “Gedling Village”, which suggests that there should be some GIS for the village. The section that I’ve been doing so far is called “St James” (electoral ward), whilst the next bit on the east side of the (closed-down last September) Sherwood Academy is called Phoenix Farm Estate (also an electoral ward, although far more interesting as a physical link between JRR Tolkien & the initiation of Lord of the Rings).

Sherwood Academy is rapidly rotting on Wollaton Avenue, and it was on that same road that I first spotted today’s very fine example of Street Art / Garden Furniture. It is a miniature water fountain, and the Householder offered to switch it on, so we all have two bites of the cherry for this one:–

… See full entry

There are some that may be interested in Arohi khan (user removed - thank you), the made-up name for someone that joined OSM 10 hours ago & promptly put this comment (link removed) into my latest diary entry; however, I just want them dead to OSM:

I am Neha,Beautiful Indian Escort in Dubai having bewitching wonderful face with extraordinary smart furthermore exceedingly modern Independent Indian Escort in Dubai while looking at other Independent escorts in Dubai. Presently I am under main ten Independent Dubai escort, so on the off chance that you are intrigued on me simply know my sentimental and genuine subtle elements of me, you ought to peruse my exhibition in the on the web. [spammy-link]

This post also appears on the MapRoulette wiki

Creating MapRoulette challenges has never been easier. You can use the API or the brand new Challenge Wizard. I will cover the API in a future post. I have already covered the Wizard in general in a previous post, but right now I want to focus on creating a Challenge with a GeoJSON file.

In my example case, I have a GeoJSON file containing all the bus stop locations in Utah. I downloaded these as a Shapefile from the Utah GIS portal and converted them to GeoJSON using QGIS (there are other methods too, like ogr2ogr but I am too old for that). The result looks like this:

{
    "type": "FeatureCollection",
    "crs": {
        "type": "name",
        "properties": {
            "name": "urn:ogc:def:crs:OGC:1.3:CRS84"
        }
    },
    "features": [
        {
            "type": "Feature",
            "properties": {
                "StopId": 13840.0,
                "StopName": "HILL FIELD RD @ 1891 N",
                "StreetNum": 1891.0,
                "OnStreet": "N HILL FIELD RD",
                "AtStreet": "ANTELOPE DR",
                "City": "LAYTON",
                "InService": 1,
                "Bench": 0,
                "Shelter": 0,
                "Lighting": 0,
                "Garbage": 0,
                "Bicycle": 0,
                "Transfer": 1,
                "LocationUs": "Bus Stop",
                "UTAStopID": "101001"
            },
            "geometry": {
                "type": "Point",
                "coordinates": [
                    -111.97361202442978,
                    41.08738199558664
                ]
            }
        },
...

With this GeoJSON, I go to MapRoulette. After logging in, I go to my Project and create a new Challenge. (For more details on this, see my original post on creating challenges.) I enter the basic information for the Challenge:

… See full entry

Tracing of roads and buildings can be a difficult task if the satellite imagery is blurry or the resolution is not good enough to map. But with some interpretation techniques it can be made less difficult. This post covers my experiences with the mapping of buildings & roads and the techniques I used to do it.

Road Tracing

I tried to map some roads in Tiruchengode. The road mapping in Tiruchengode was a great experience overall. Before I started mapping in Tiruchengode most of the primary and secondary roads are already mapped, so it was easy for me to start with the tertiary and residential roads. The road map of Tiruchengode looked like this before I started mapping

Before mapping new roads, I aligned the existing roads and properly tagged the roads. After that I mapped all the roads in and around the city. The road map of Tiruchengode looks totally different compared to before

… See full entry

Inspired by Jochen Topf’s old style multipolygon writing, I have just finished manually cleaning up (most? all of?) the remaining old style MPs in Luxembourg.

The process is currently quite tedious. If we want to put old-style multipolygons behind us, we need to make it easier to find them, convert them, maybe even get editors to automatically convert them on the fly when they’re touched. QA tools like Osmose could also possibly make it a one-click JOSM remote fix.

The method I used was downloading a Luxembourg extract, then searching for type:relation type=multipolygon tags:1 in JOSM. I also had -((type:relation tags:1) | (child (type:relation tags:1))) set up as a filter, but didn’t end up using it, because the MPs would disappear as soon as I’d tag them.

For each MP I found, I would zoom to it (3), click on the outer way, alt-click on that way to select the relation, copy tags from previous selection (utilsplugin2, shift-R) from the way to the polygon, click the way again, and delete the redundant tags on the way.

Sometimes, for joined geometries, I had to select the relation by right-clicking on the parent relation in the tags list.

Since most of these old-style relations haven’t been touched for a long time, I also did some drive-by cleanups. In Luxembourg, the old-style MPs were mostly forests.

Did I get all old-style MPs, or only most of them? If there are multipolygons out there on which both the outer way and the relation are tagged, my find pattern didn’t find them. These are possibly the most ambiguous ones, e.g. conflicting tags on outer way and relation, and should be fixed. Has anyone got a good easy way to find them? I tried hasRole:outer -untagged but that found a lot of false positives.

I’m excited to be running for a board position in the OpenStreetMap US organization.

This has been a busy year for the board! Most of my work on the 2015/2016 board has been behind the scenes, making it easier for future boards to do their work. After a lot of hard work we were recognized by the IRS as a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization, allowing us to more easily accept donations from organizations and funds that require such a status. We also spent a lot of time updating and modernizing our financials and now have regular support from a bookkeeper, allowing the board to focus more of their time on moving the organization forward. Additionally, I rewrote the membership processing system so that we could send reminder emails when automatic membership renewals failed.

We ran a very successful State of the Map US 2016 event in Seattle. With the help of a really strong volunteer community in Seattle, we brought over 400 OpenStreetMappers together to share their experiences.

When I ran last year, I had lots of great ideas for how we could improve the OpenStreetMap community in the US. I still think these are great ideas, but some of them require a bit more work on our end before they’ll become a reality. A side-effect of building a board out of very active members of our community is that those board members don’t have time outside of performing board activities to plan events or send newsletters. We should encourage those outside the board to participate and lead the effort to make these things happen rather than trying to do them ourselves. This strategy works fairly well for the State of the Map US event, and I’d like to see it applied to other things like scholarships, event sponsorships, and newsletters.

… See full entry

Planning a trip to a remote area and realized it would be really cool to meet other mappers in the region where i’m traveling. Wish there was an easy way to broadcast a message to the top/recent contributors in a location. Right now the easiest way seems to be looking at the the list of top users when editing in iD and sending them message.

Any other tools that could help? Very few users are on any community communication channels here in India.