[See Part #3 for Summary & Detail on the 2 streams that constitute the source of Ouse Dyke]

Part #3 brought the story of Ouse Dyke from it’s sources up to an old bridge across the lowest point of Lambley Lane. The bridge used to carry the Lane across the Dyke, and the stream still flows in a culvert below that bridge. That culvert follows the course of the original stream through modern housing north of All Hallows Church. I met residents living close-by that recall the original stream as lads & they confirmed each length & dog-leg on it’s way to Willow Park.

From the bridge the stream flowed at the bottom of the South Recreation Park; the culvert today (and the stream yesterday) travels under a walk between #122 & #124 that lets folks get to the Park from Lorimer Avenue.

Here is the bridge, the path of the culvert/stream through the Park & the walk to Lorimer Avenue:–

… See full entry

Introduction

In this article I want to show you how one can add information about immovable heritage to crowd sourced projects such as OpenStreetMap and some of the projects of Wikimedia.

In Belgium, the list of immovable heritage is controlled by three agencies, one for Flanders, one for Brussels and one for Wallonia. In Flanders, the agency is called Agentschap Onroerend Erfgoed. They make a catalogue of the items and decide on the protection. They also provide some of their ata as open data. In their catalogue they have churches, abbeys, castles, but also small farmhouses and villas, furthermore it includes small items such as boundary stones and pillories. Occasionally, the list contains important trees on town squares.

… See full entry

Some time ago, I noticed that the Bosnian news portal Klix.ba sometimes use drone photos to accompany their news articles. I contacted the company and the author, their staff photographer Edin Hadžihasić, and they have kindly given their permission (in Serbo-Croatian) to use the pictures for tracing.

I aligned the photos with existing map data using Map Warper:

http://mapwarper.net/maps/18372#Preview_Map_tab
http://mapwarper.net/maps/18361#Preview_Map_tab
http://mapwarper.net/maps/18422#Preview_Map_tab
http://mapwarper.net/maps/18475#Preview_Map_tab
http://mapwarper.net/maps/18483#Preview_Map_tab
http://mapwarper.net/maps/18750#Preview_Map_tab
http://mapwarper.net/maps/18805#Preview_Map_tab
http://mapwarper.net/maps/18813#Preview_Map_tab
http://mapwarper.net/maps/18816#Preview_Map_tab
http://mapwarper.net/maps/19060#Preview_Map_tab
http://mapwarper.net/maps/19332#Preview_Map_tab

My workflow was as follows:
- pick control points recognizable in both Bing imagery and the drone pictures
- map the control points in OSM as accurately as possible (or adjust position of existing OSM objects)
- align the drone photo with the updated OSM map using Map Warper

Sure you can see how inefficient and error-prone this method is but I couldn’t find a way of aligning the drone photos with Bing directly, say by zooming and rotating a semi-opaque copy of the drone photo to fit with the corresponding part of Bing imagery. Any ideas?

Another problem is that there’s a lot of distortion in places with sloping terrain - this can be best seen in the picture with Žuta Tabija.

The results aren’t the most accurate thing in the world but as of now, there is no accurate imagery offset info available for the areas in question anyway, so I guess I didn’t break stuff more than it already was. After tracing the photos in JOSM, the results are quite pretty, I dare say:

… See full entry

See the latest changesets by new mappers where:

• maps.me was used to add atleast 10 POIs
• maps.me was used to modify more than 5 POIs
• iD was used to delete more than 50 features
• iD was used to modify over 100 features
• iD was used to add over 500 features
• JOSM was used to delete over 30 features
• JOSM was used to modify over 50 features
• large number of features were deleted, modified and added
• greater than 5 features were deleted, none added or modified
• greater than 20 features were modified. none added or deleted
• greater than 500 features were added. none modified or deleted

Feel free to tweak the filters for any map area or another editor. Do share any other interesting lists.

[If any of the following does not make sense, then read Part #1 / Part #2 first]

Another survey yesterday (Thursday 30 March 2017) & I think that I can now say that the trace from source (or rather, both sources) & the beginning of the line of Ouse Dyke can be established. I needed to return to determine the line of the dyke from the Southern Basin to the beginning of it’s culvert, and then it’s passage between Lambley Lane & Jessops Lane. I’ve not only done both, but have met residents (and in particular a former Gedling Colliery miner) who have told me their memories from 40 years ago (1970s) as children or young men when the Ouse was placed in a culvert, and thus where it now travels, confirmed it’s course within Gedling Country Park and some have expressed concerns that the many streams that fed it may currently be undermining the culvert.

Below is a summary, and then horrible amounts of detail, of those findings:–

Summary

There are 2 streams that are the source for Ouse Dyke:–

1. A stream to the west (name currently unknown) that originates within Mapperley Golf Course, empties into a culvert just north of Kneeton Close, and then travels south and east along the line of a stream which was part of the northern boundary of Gedling Village. After crossing at the dip in Arnold Lane the stream (now culvert) ran almost due east-west and met the 2nd stream in the middle of what is now Lambley Lane Recreation Ground.
2. The eastern stream originates now as a Northern Retention Basin, which overflows into a Southern Retention Basin, which itself overflows into a dyke, which enters a culvert at it’s southern end and flows down to the original line of Ouse Dyke to a bridge across the lowest point of Lambley Lane, then south to Willow Park.

Detail

… See full entry

Just received this PM:

Hi alexkemp,

Fatty200 has sent you a message through OpenStreetMap with the subject Good morning,: > Fatty200
> 31 March 2017 at 11:30

My name is Fatima, please lets talk very well with my email address[ fatimaabde23@gmail.com ] for good friendship and i will send you my pictures if you want. Thanks and take care.

(someone with the necessary admin clearances, please delete this idiot)
(he has gone - thank you)

I’ve seen a lot of mistagged roundabouts lately in Texas (with the help of Keep Right). Please review the definition on the wiki: junction=roundabout should have at least three roads coming from it (two directions of a through street and a side street). Not everything round is a roundabout, and routing tools will give incorrect and/or confusing directions if something is mistagged as a roundabout.

OSM has some more or less clear criteria to decide if a certain information should be added to it or not. However, these criteria only take a nature of it into account. For example, there is no doubt that store operator is verifiable once it is known. Anyone could confirm that using the same source (store nameplate that refers to a company, open business registry, etc.) But will they do that?

I mean, time passes, store changes its owner. How possible it is that someone will update this kind of information? Definitely, less possible than, say, in a case of changed store name. Simply because it is harder to notice that change than to find out all details when you just going to create a POI.

It doesn’t mean that we should avoid adding this kind of information, but it does mean that an ability to keep a certain fraction of information up to date should be taken into consideration before adding it.

This diary entry is inspired by a question I came across today: “How to/ should we add time zone information to OSM?” My own short answer was “no”. A longer answer is: while OSM is not an authority on keeping reliable time zone information (IANA tzdb is), nobody who uses this information for something important will look for it here. At the same time, OSM can not be an authority exactly because of its nature: “anyone can edit it” (and nobody is truly responsible for data quality, unlike with tzdb, where Paul Eggert is an official responsible person).

So, theoretically, time zone information meets general criteria for data that could be added to OSM database, but it just doesn’t make any sense to add it since nobody can guarantee that it will be up to date and more or less accurate/complete. Here, I’d suggest using another OSM principle that usually refers to new tags: “don’t propose (here - don’t add) anything that you aren’t going to use (here - to keep up to date) by yourself”.

Hello everybody. I just mapping in Peru for add jungle and river via Bing satelite. This to monitor some weather event Also, this help to the citizens for disaster prevention.[1]

Thank you for considering the note. [1] http://unasolafuerza.pe/

P.S.: Sorry for mapping in Brasil, too.

Hi all, my name is Pete Masters and I am the outgoing Missing Maps coordinator at MSF UK (I change jobs in a few weeks).

I would like to be considered as a HOT board member because I have a lot of respect and admiration for what HOT does in the humanitarian sphere and I think my skills, experience and networks can be of value to HOT on a strategic level. For me, it represents a chance to contribute to a community that I have come to be very proud of in a different way. This would be my first board position and I am eager to prove to myself and to the community that I can operate at this level and help to take HOT forward.

In my eyes, the future of HOT is very interesting. On the one hand, local communities are growing strong in places where previously HOT would have been only mapping remotely. The size and diversity of the community behind the first State of the Map Africa this year is testament to this growth. On the other hand, NGOs, large and small, are coming to rely more and more on OSM data and HOT through activations, and initiatives like Missing Maps. These are serious organisations with short timelines and specific needs. In my opinion, HOT must continue to walk the line between these two vital elements; the bottom-up, grassroots communities and the top-down, humanitarian actors. I do not have the answers to how HOT does this, but I believe I have some good ideas.

The most important in my eyes, and the one I would like to discuss here, is credibility, and this works both ways.

… See full entry

(If any of the following does not make sense, then read Part #1 first)

It’s raining heavily this morning so no field survey (it kills the smartphone), but some most valuable desk-surveys using NLS - OS 1:25k 1st Series 1937-61 imagery within JOSM + a phone-call (+44 (0) 800 783 4444) to Severn Trent Water.

The culvert from Mapperley Golf Course was (badly) mapped using one of the NLS maps — probably NLS - Bartholomew Half Inch, 1897-1907, which is very low resolution and, in any case, few of them help much in accurate mapping. I’m going to trim the line of the culvert from Mapperley Golf a little to match the higher-res NLS maps; one of the reasons for this is that this brings the line of the culvert not only into line with the stream on those maps (one of the points where the earlier mapping went bad) but also with the point where that stream crosses Arnold Lane. At the moment the culvert passes straight through some houses on both The Fairway and High Hazles Close (not very likely) then across Arnold Lane north of the Village boundary. It is far more likely to have followed the original line of the stream, which would also have been Gedling Village boundary at that point. That would have taken it under the line of The Fairway (a private road) and across the bottom of the High Hazles Close’ gardens (that is almost due East-West, with the gardens to the north & a playing field to the south, a line of hedges in between. The old stream/OSM culvert then pops out close to the signpost on Arnold Lane that says “Gedling Village”, which also the lowest point of Arnold Lane on that section of road and thus where you would expect a stream to flow:–

… See full entry

Looks like a small bridge for pedestrians to cross a drain - that’s what I perceived from Bing imagery. Nope! It’s an advert sign for an automobile shop.

with the roads they only have one speed. Alot of roads in Australia have different speeds on both sides of the road. Is it possible to have a speed for the left side and right side of the road

Entire Local government

Maproulette challenges have become fairly popular recently, especially due to Jochen’s Area fixing project. But it seems this has gotten out of hand now and creates serious damage to the OpenStreetMap project.

In general this kind of tool is prone to inviting mechanical work. But with the recent Island and Shoreline Alignment challenge this really gets over the top. I first saw this when various edits turned up in remote areas of the world by various mappers in very high frequency editing islands in changing locations far apart within minutes, often without factual basis and often factually incorrect.

This challenge does everything wrong that can be done wrong with a fixing effort:

• there are no useful instructions to the mapper what to do and what problems to consider. It only says: ‘‘Align the highlighted island to match imagery’’.
• there is no documentation who created this task and how the allegedly misaligned islands are detected.
• and most importantly: the task covers areas where the global images routinely available offer no basis for improving the existing data.

… See full entry

ramyaragupathy asked me recently how well I thought Seattle was mapped. One of the areas was very broad, POI’s which makes answering the question very difficult. Thinking about the question lead to what outside data source could we compare to OSM to get a sense of completeness.

I stumbled across the King County Health Department Restaurant Inspections. Every restaurant inspection, going back many years, is available in the counties open data repository.

The data needed some massaging, food inspectors seem to think that they shouldn’t limit themselves to just restaurants but any business that serves food, including schools, company cafeterias, the fried chicken (ugh) found in mini marts and food trucks. After removing businesses that didn’t match amenity=fast_food or restaurant or cafe it appears that OSM has 1,714 food service businesses vs. 3,680 inspected by the county or 47%, slightly less than half.

The actual results are most likely somewhere near 47% but OSM many have some closed businesses and the county’s list may be over stated (I may have keep businesses that should have been excluded.)

That brings up the question - what to do with all of the county’s data. It’s definitely not something I’d like to see imported, but it would be nice to see better coverage. What are your recommendations?

Clifford

Here is the latest from the MapRoulette world! If you want to get this newsletter in your mailbox, you can sign up here!

MapRoulette was featured in the JOSM message of the day!

MapRoulette has seen a lot of activity in the past month! A total of 407 mappers have logged on and fixed more than 32000 tasks. That is really cool.

New and notable challenges

Also, lots of new challenges! 539 to be precise created in the last month. I know that challenges can still be hard to discover (working on that, I would welcome ideas and help there!) so I want to just manually highlight some challenges that look interesting. If you want your challenge highlighted in this newsletter, please write to maproulette@maproulette.org!

• Clean up AND import (Netherlands) – help clean up additional tags on nodes that were added as part of the AND import.
• Add Wikipedia / Wikidata tags in India – A couple of challenges where you can help add Wikidata tagging to districts and railway stations in India

… See full entry

Oh yes! History is full of the names of famous Explorers, searching for the source…

• 1804 Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark (source of the Missouri River & also the astonishing Lewis and Clark Expedition)
• 1856 Captain Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke (source of the Nile)
• 1866 David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley (source of the Nile)

…and so, in honour of these & other, similar noble exploits, on Sunday 26 March 2017 your mapper selflessly set forth into the wildlands of the heights of Gedling Country Park to discover the source of …, erm, Ouse Dyke (I do wish that they could have given it a bit of a more romantic name) and …, erm, got my Clarks muddy. So yes, no trouble nor expense shared to nobly & selflessly bring the wonders of Gedling slag heap to your door.

A short length of Ouse Dyke was marked up in those heights on the Nottingham City Adopted Highways Register, and I’d noticed obvious signs of a bridge across Lambley Lane that should contain Ouse Dyke (although now culverted), plus manhole covers for a culvert North-South across Lambley Lane Recreation Ground, so I was confident of a result.

Here are some highlights of that mapping session, using my new-new smartphone for the first time:–

A northern basin (mapping), fed by culverts & natural drainage from the surrounding hills. As best as I can tell, this is NOT a source for Ouse Dyke, although goodness knows what Severn Trent does if the rainfall is too large (correction: see later diary with photos of the overflow channel that allows the upper, northern basin to drain into the lower, southern basin and the way that the latter basin overflows into a culvert that is at the head of Ouse Dyke):–

… See full entry

Olivio Di Biasio owner of Carrelage Mozaik which is licensed tilling company based in Greater Montreal Area, Canada. Olivio Di Biasioh having 25 years of experience in the field of tiling and providing their unmatched services in and around the area. They are very experienced and providing work all according to client’s requirements. They are providing work from simple to detail-oriented projects with new technology. They are always focusing on using new technology to provide best work to their client. Olivio Di Biasio is very nice, down to earth, and simple person who is always ready to help people.

The Pokemon Go mappers can strike anywhere, converting buildings into parks or pools of water. Check any changeset with ‘Pokemon’ in the changeset comment using osmcha.