ID or JOSM may be useful Map editor software, but I still prefer Potlatch 2 for “landscape painting”. For me finding out and correcting the differences between aerial picture and state of the map is really great fun, as Potlatch 2 makes it possible to do the corrections with just a few mouse clicks.

For correcting the edge of a forest or a highway I used to highlight the way and the Shift + Click for a new waypoint at the correct place. Since a few days this no longer is possible, what a pity!

Is there a possibility to restore this feature?

In the current version the Shift + Click can lead to a marked rectangle, and then you cannot avoid zooming in, and later manually zooming out. Very annoying! “Mach’s weg!” please!

Best whishes! Geofalke

Turbo is the Southern-most municipality in the Caribbean coast of Colombia, yet poorly known nation- and world-wide. Such invisibility contrasts with the beauty of tall mangroves in wild areas and with the numerous fishermen settled in small villages along a ca. 200km-coastline. In addition, the urban area of Turbo, with nearly 50,000 inhabitants, is sustained by both the services provided by mangroves in the proximity and afar, and most importantly by the small-scale fishery providing over 50 species of fish and shellfish. Turbo is a vibrant small city populated by african-descendants coming from the Pacific (Chocó) region of Colombia, amerindians from the Panamian Darién and the northern Andes, and mestizos from the european arrival. Fishermen and their families by far may account for a 1% of Turbo’s population in both rural and urban area.

Despite the foundation nearly two centuries centuries ago, the urban area has sprawled since the 1970’s as a consequence of peri-urban settlements promoted by migration from rural areas as a consequence of the armed conflict in Colombia (1,2). Such settlements occurred in lowlands, usually in the intertidal fringe, at expense of the native coastal wetlands (1, 2). Therefore, mangroves and freshwater grasslands and forests were decimated in the vicinity of Turbo. In contrasts, these types of wetlands remain as fringes or large patches in the rural areas, and coexist with small fishing villages.

… See full entry

Just did my 10000th changeset. Yay! osm.org/changeset/46685591

http://hiu-maps.net/hot/1.0.0/ashgabat-17oct2016-flipped/{zoom}/{x}/{y}.png

I attended the unveiling of the monument to the late first president of Uzbekistan in Turkmenabat, Turkmenistan on March 7, and got a photo of the street sign attesting to renaming of Arkadag köçesi to Yslam Karimow köçesi. osm.org/way/451769822

A small tutorial on how one can export a CSV of all the cities in the world with their associated Wikipedia and Wikidata pages. This is useful if you want to do some spreadsheet analysis of data from OpenStreetMap.

Overpass Turbo is a great way to quickly extract data from OpenStreetMap by querying tags. An easy way to generate the query is to type “city” or the specific tag “place=city” in the wizard. Since most cities are tagged as just a point node, we can remove the query for ways and relations.

Also instead of the default geojson output, you can use the CSV output format and specify the the data columns to export. The end query looks like this:

[out:csv(::type,::id,name,”name:en”,wikipedia,wikidata)][timeout:200];

( node[“place”=”city”] ({{bbox}}); );

Try the live query (takes around 2 minutes to run)

View results

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Most Restaurants/Cafes & Shops; etc will have a web presence, sharing their address, opening hours, etc.

Named Restaurants/Cafes or Shops without a Website http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/nkh

Named Restaurants/Cafes or Shops with Website but no opening hours: http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/nki

Named Restaurants/Cafes or Shops with Website but no street name: http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/nkj

I’m running again for Chair of Voting Members for Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.

My outlook on the role is similar to last year.

I’ve been busy with the Governance Working Group, and the Election Committee – for both the new member nominations and Board / Chair elections. These seem to be going smoothly! Working on these has helped further refine our processes and documents. We now have a new member “Welcome Pack”.

Happy to continue with this responsibility next year. Please get in touch if you have any questions or ideas for the role of the Chair.

how to import geonames data to JOSM (SD.txt)

Maptime SF/MaptimeOAK and Mapbox SF are hosting a Mapathon on March 14th, Tuesday at 6:30 pm PST to import building heights. Please RSVP to SF OpenStreetMap Community to be a part of this awesome project.

Image from Wikipedia

San Francisco has building footprints, Points of Interest, and traffic signals for the entire city in OpenStreetMap. All these map features makes San Francisco as one of the well mapped cities on OpenStreetMap. In 2016, the San Francisco city Government published LiDAR-derived building footprints that include both geometry and height information. One of the goals of the SF OpenStreetMap community is to add height information to existing buildings in OpenStreetMap.

To jump in quickly into the project, do check the OpenStreetMap wiki to know more and talk to the community on Gitter to get involved. Also, make sure to create a dedicated OSM import account before jumping into the task and post it here.

Tasking manager link

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It has been a year (or thereabouts) since I obtained a Vodaphone SmartFirst6 to replace my dearly-beloved Motorola L7 when it finally died after ~15 years due to the central bevel suddenly detaching. That caused me to come across OSM & OSMTracker & hence the last 12 months updating the map.

The Vodaphone SmartFirst6 was only £20 GBP together with a PAYG SIM. It was a good intro for an Android newbie who doesn’t play games, although a little slow & with a limited camera. Although the SIM was locked to Vodaphone, the phone allowed a £25 GBP 64GB microSD card to be fitted (which could be mounted via USB connection to Linux/Windows) plus allowed .apk files to be transferred to the SD-Card & then installed into the phone. So, it would have been £100 GBP a couple of years ago and really, at £20, who can complain?

F-Droid supplied OSMTracker 0.6.11 FoC (2015-08-21 & still the latest ready-compiled version) (see the wiki for compile instructions on the latest update). I make use of the GPS breadcrumbs (basic tracker feature), voice-notes & photos, and that is it.

The SmartFirst6 runs Android 4.4.2 (custom Kit-Kat) and I was worried about the lack of security updates in addition to a lousy camera. The SmartPrime7 runs Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) and should be good for now (it was released last December 2016) (£65 GBP + £10 GBP for PAYG credit). Here are a couple of issues I’ve managed to overcome:–

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Hi, my name is giacomo faiella.

I design peculiar maps of the world.

i would like to know if is possible to create a way to see different projections of the planet Earth? As a default map, OpenStreetMap has used the mercator projection, just like google maps. It would be interesting to have the opportunity to choose from maps with different projections, perhaps in the form of a list, and be able to make transitions between one map and another.

like this example

If this is possible, it would be fantastic to integrate “artistic” projections of the world as well; maps of parallel worlds to navigate your way around the planet. I would like to start a work team to create this possibility, in perfect creative-commons style. I have 4 world maps that I designed and that are the exact example of what i mean, and could make the base to start this project.

1) is the “Planisphere Palindrome” and is readable upside up or upside down, like an ambigram. You can see that land masses and oceans have exactly the same shape.

… See full entry

When OpenStreetMap started, open geodata was basically unavailable. Some governments were quicker than others to release their data. And so some places had huge imports from the start. Whether that was a good idea or not is slowly becoming irrelevant: the map is too full for big new imports anyway. Imports are ever more exercises in conflation: merging sources and using them to validate and improve existing OSM data. The good news is that it means that often the same tools for the “initial” import can be used for keeping the data up to date. Continues synchronization between datasets changes the relation between data provider and OSM.

For a government, a complete and reliable OSM becomes a more valid tool for their projects. The synchronization processes we set up, can form the basis for an extra quality assurance (QA) channel for governments. It might even convince some agencies that there is little to be won by managing some of their data on their own.

To try and capture this changing relation, I started a thread on the talk mailing list. Mikel suggested creating a Wiki page on the subject: here it is. Meanwhile, several people have improved upon it!

During the course of the research for that page, I met Tomas Straupis. I wanted to share what he told me about what they do exactly with government data, and what their relationship is with the government.

Interview with Tomas Straupis

Here’s a general idea what we’re doing in Lithuania.

Government has datasets d1, d2… dn. OSM has one big dataset O which could be split into datasets o1, o2… om. We take datasets dx and oy which could be mapped (have similar data, like placenames, roads, lakes, rivers, etc.)

Automated importing to either direction is impossible (or not wanted by both sides). Government datasets need strict accountability (sources, documents) and responsibility. OSM has different data and simply overwriting it with government data would be bad in a lot of ways.

… See full entry

OSM2go has always been my favorite editor when I’m doing live mapping. Even if I have a Jolla 1 meanwhile I still carry around my N900 for the mapping things. There have been quite a few things that annoyed me nevertheless, like when I wanted to apply the tags of the last object to the current one it would ask if I want to overwrite the current tags. Even if there were none. So one day in April 2013 I sat down and hacked something together that would just fix that. Then I tried sending them to AMDmi3, who forked OSM2go on GitHub to give it some love. I failed to actually attach the patches, so nothing happened.

At the beginning of May 2016, I already had created an account on GitHub to throw some PRs on rurseekatze to beat OpenRailwayMap into shape. I found my old OSM2go patches on my disk and decided to finally get them upstream.

It took a few weeks before they were accepted, but then AMDmi3 probably feared that I would cause him more work with PRs, and he decided to just give me push access. Guess what, I did some commits.

… See full entry

Hello I’m new

… which stands for True Colour Imagery.

It’s really wonderful! I used to download all separate three visible bands and took significant time to make them into RGB ones. Because I lack the hardware and skills to georeference them properly using suitable applications, I had to rely on Mapwarper(‘s precious bandwidth and storage). Very pleased with that: now I could use it, like, almost in an instant.

Now I can’t wait for the launch of the second Sentinel 2 satellite l̶a̶u̶n̶c̶h̶, and I’m hoping it will be a̶ successful l̶a̶u̶n̶c̶h̶.

EDIT: OMG, my English; or what Malaysians would say, “oh my English”

Referring to the OSM map of part of BLK 1324S on Mt Arrowsmith / Mt Cokely at the location

osm.org/?mlat=49.2676&mlon=-124.5756#map=16/49.2676/-124.5756:

Previous versions of Bing aerial imagery available through Java OSM editor clearly showed a harvested area and related roads surrounding the reference point, which were mapped and tagged as farmland. Tree farm that is, a concept with legal meaning in British Columbia.

Current available versions do not show the harvested area, indicating a change in the aerial photos, possibly to an earlier date.

Mapbox satellite views of the same area clearly show the harvested area.

What has happened? Why the change in Bing Satellite imagery? An explanation is desired, and a revision to Bing aerial imagery if necessary.

In a bid to speed development of self-driving cars, Geely has called on the Chinese Government to relax strict laws on mapping (Reuters, 2 March 2017).

This is relevant to OpenStreetMap, because the Surveying and Mapping Law bans all private surveying and mapping activities in mainland China.

The law means that OpenStreetMap is illegal in mainland China, and there have been cases where casual mappers have been prosecuted (see WikiProject China on OpenStreetMap Wiki).

I didn’t know you can do diary entries on here…..

I’ve been a member of the OSM community for several months with sporadic contributions to the map. Now the time has come for me to get serious about improving my area’s representation and honing my mapping skills with a little project of my own. My goal is simple: put every business in Phoenixville, PA on the map. It’s not my home town, but I spend a lot of time and do most of my business there.

The data for my most recent changeset comes from a GPS trace that I made on a whim a few days ago. I took pictures of the store fronts, but the app that I’m using doesn’t seem to link pictures to coordinates. Learning as I go.