OpenStreetMap
Interesting article came to my attention thanks to a friend–a discussion of tools and a product called CalTopo that seems rather intriguing–multilayer topographical maps of backwoods areas (I am a hiker when I can get back to the States). I’m wondering who out there in the OSM realm has experience with it, and what you think of it:
The article URL is https://www.outsideonline.com/2229756/your-navigation-outdated-heres-how-fix-it
CalTopo is here: https://caltopo.com/
Motor vehicle traffic was banned in Ashgabat on Saturday, July 29, in an effort to promote use of bicycles. Since I have no bicycle, I walked up the median strip between the new extension of Mollanepes kocesi and Seydi kocesi in Ashgabat, and used Mapillary to geolocate the bus stops. It was a toasty 42 degrees Celsius (107 Fahrenheit) so I wore a hat and rehydrated on return. I also collected the names of all the buildings using Pocket Earth. No building numbers have appeared yet, however.
So we’re on Rügen; the beatiful island on the coast of Germany. This used to be a part of DDR during the cold war. Of course there are still many things left from this period. One such thing is the Dwasieden castle. There is no english wikipedia page for it, unfortunately, but at least a short german one: Dwasieden on german wikipedia
In short, the castle was used by the Kriegsmarine during WWII. After the war, the Red army destroyed most of the castle but used the area for military purposes. There are industrial buildings (more or less ruins) left in the area, what seems to be bunker entrances and many remnants from military and industrial activitivies. I would love to know more about it, but it seems hard to find info in english.
I am visiting General Santos City for some research but, unexpectedly, we completed our tasks much earlier. I had lots of time to kill, and reached to a local university (Notre Dame of Dadiangas) and offered to conduct a workshop on FOSS/Participatory Mapping for their community. Unfortunately, because of the short notice, and their other commitments they were unable to accommodate the request.
Diligent RAs made quick work of our tasks
Today I finished verifying the TIGER data for all the roads in a neighboring town today, and I am patting myself on the virtual back. That is the second one under my belt, including my home town. I am picking away at these local roads bit by bit, and I am even making a serious dent in the nearby city.
One day last week, I made a trip to the well-mapped university town nearby, and decided to do some additional mapping there. I was shocked to discover that the vast majority of streets are still tagged TIGER:Reviewed=no , even while the university foot paths and buildings are documented in ultra-fine detail. I understand people do map the details that they find interesting, but I would have thought these interests would be built upon Main Street, at least. It is disappointing to see this vital road left unreviewed. Perhaps communicating with some local mappers would encourage further road review.
A local resident of Ashgabat’s 4th Microdistrict was kind enough to take a FieldPapers printout and mark it up to indicate with which street the buildings with numbers are associated, so that we can assign routable street addresses to the buildings. Just finished the first session of adding these data to the Ashgabat map. This resident also provided corrected boundaries for the microdistrict, so I moved them.
Did you know that the community voting for the OpenStreetMap Awards is open right now? We have chosen many nominees that did a great job last year, 45 of them! Not as many as the total number of active community members, but still a lot. And nine will receive the award at the Stat of the Map in August.
All nominees will be features in the series of OSM Blog posts: https://blog.openstreetmap.org/tag/awards2017/
Help translate the website and project descriptions to your language: https://www.transifex.com/openstreetmap/osm-awards/dashboard/
The voting closes on 16th of August. Vote now — you can change your choice at any time. Nominees would be glad to hear they are supported by hundreds of voters, so we would need at least a thousand people to vote.
Promote the Awards in your local communities, and if you are nominated, do encourage your subscribers to vote for you :) That is okay, provided you don’t pay for votes or anything like that.
This is a review test
Hello all, Namasthe! 🙏 We had an amazing HOT Mapathon on July 21st at Mapbox India office. We had the local OSM community along with folks who were mapping for the first time adding approximately 3000 buildings in Cambodia for Eliminate Malaria task.
When we started mapping public transport stops, some people insisted on mapping them on nodes next to the way, others thought the right way to do it, was to add them as nodes being part of the highway, thereby losing the information on which side of the road the bus stop was.
Then somebody came by with the idea to unite both ways of mapping. In itself that sounds great. But where do we add the details then? On both? That doesn’t really make sense. It’s a maintenance nightmare.
So we still have some people adding the stops as stop_position nodes on the highways and others mapping them as isolated nodes next the ways as public_transport=platform. But of course a node is not a platform, so others map those as ways and areas. Nothing wrong with that, but why do we need to add all the details to these ways?
For some reason it was decided that both these stop_postion nodes and the platform ways/nodes need to be added over and over again to the route relations. These route relations represent each and every variation of the public transport lines, so there are thousands of them. Another maintenance nightmare.
Why can’t we have a node next to the way, with all the relevant details and add those nodes to the route relations, then followed by a continuous string of ways? The node gets tagged public_transport=platform/highway=bus_stop.
The node isn’t always representing an actual platform. If there is a platform, nothing wrong with representing it as a way or an area. But there is no real need to duplicate all the details like name/ref/route_ref/zone to these ways. And there isn’t really a need to add them to the route relations.
For the simplest bus stops a node next to the way public_transport=platform/highway=bus_stop is all that is needed. It contains all the relevant information and it has coordinates, which makes it convenient to compare it to data from operators.
For more completely mapped bus stops, benches and waste_baskets can be added.
ref = FS xx
A few weeks back I gave a talk in London which was a sneak preview of my “Diagrams Of OpenStreetMap” SoTM talk Yes! I’m heading to Japan for the conference soon! I’m the only one from the London crowd going, so this wasn’t a spoiler for anyone in the audience, but this diary entry is a small spoiler. I thought I’d give some details of just one diagram from the talk. This one:
You may recognise it although I think its “Component Overview” home on the wiki is a bit hidden away these days. But anyway you wouldn’t recognise the right hand side because this is newly redrawn as of last night! In fact I’ve done a few iterations which I am unveiling as part of the talk. The left hand side editors were given an update, but last night I was tackling the more tricky right hand side where we try to show different rendering stacks and map display approaches available and used in the wider ecosystem.
Technology and innovation have opened up tremendous amounts of opportunity for surveyors, map users and the GIS industry. but there is a lot of incorrect info about what is changing and how it’s changing. Nonetheless, there is a huge opportunity for surveyors that recognize the advantages associated with being early-movers. That’s just part of what’s so exhilarating about the future of the industry.
I wanted to get to know my new neighbourhood better and try some new tools . So this weekend I tested Opencamera to take photos and good old OSMTracker for GPS traces. I took a peek on to the map, set camera to burst mode to click every 10s and set out to the direction of Bellandur lake. After passing HAL airport, the terrain seemed to change quickly. I went from paved roads to dirt roads and tracks (later I realised I cut right through the dried part of the lake). I wasn’t checking maps and ended up on the outer ring road, took a U-turn and managed to reach to the other side of the lake.
Spent some time enjoying the view and started back. It was nice to see calm and green place not far from the city, but felt sad that construction and pollution is eating it up.
If you are an owner of a Garmin 520 device, you may have discovered the device has the capability to use custom maps in the standard Garmin .img format. Unfortunately the device has quite limited internal storage (up to around 100MB) and no external SD card capability.
Storage space can be increased by removing the default Basemap and maps of your choice (e.g. your local area) can be acquired via the excellent [OSM Garmin Maps] (http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/) website.
Further information about doing this can be found via these blog posts:
However consider the needs of the long distance cyclist - such as a participant in London Edinburgh London, the premier Audax UK event - in this scenario the above available maps needed to cover the area being travelled will be too big to fit on this device.
One can use OSM data directly and process the data yourself using Open Source tools to generate a gmapsupp.img file that covers your area of interest. My operating system is Debian Linux so the tools needed are available, of a modern enough version and easy to install via the standard operating system ‘apt-get’ manner:
Those using Windows or Mac OS’s can run these tools but installation is normally more intricate and one will need to refer to the individual websites for specific instructions.
My method for generating a suitable gmapsupp.img is thus:
All these steps can be easily scripted to be able to run with different parameters, such as adjusting the data being used or for a newer dataset.
Today I spent about 4 hours cruising the Täze Köşi, Parahat 7, and Gaža neighborhoods of Ashgabat to collect GPS traces of new streets and to identify new schools, kindergartens, and other public buildings. As the onset of the Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games looms (due to begin September 17) a final big push is underway to commission new construction, so there are large numbers of changes in the city every week. In addition to GPS traces on my Garmin Nuvi, I collected imagery using Mapillary and am presently uploading it. There is also a new headquarters building for Rysgal Bank, plus two buildings flanking that building that include a shopping center and supermarket. I mapped them, too, along with the alleys and parking lot serving them.
After a short break I put in another couple of hours driving. I buzzed up to Choganly to collect house numbers in the new development that was commissioned last week, plus finished off the search for street names in Gämi, at least for now–there are a few streets with no signs at all on them, so they will have to wait. I also checked out the new apartment buildings in Anew and added the alleys behind them, now that they have been occupied. I finished with a run down Kulyyew to collect GPS traces on the newly opened frontage roads between Bitarap and Baba Annanow. All in all it was a productive Saturday. The Mapillary upload will take a while.
The mystery building in the middle of Täze Köşi now has a sign, Saglyk Öýi, which identifies it as a clinic (what in Russian is called a поликлиника or in English an outpatient clinic). One more puzzle solved!
I thought I would use the user diary as a means of introducing myself and my research activities. I am a Research Fellow in the Nottingham Geospatial Institute at the University of Nottingham interested in participation biases in geospatial crowdsourced projects such as OSM and other Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) projects. I am also interested more broadly in biases in citizen science. My current research project is concerned with the way in which participation biases in OSM may potentially affect the usability of the data that is collected and subsequently what is available to location based service providers which use OSM as their primary geographical database.
It is my belief that a better understanding of participation biases in VGI can give us improved potential to contribute to the future sustainable planning of our urban environments and improve services in rural communities.
Having said this, my diary entry here is also an opportunity to set the scene for those of you who may be interested in getting involved in this work through participating in a survey which I will soon be publishing online.
My proposed survey will be aimed at collecting some brief demographic information about the OSM contributors who respond. I then intend to perform an analysis of the OSM database to try to identify differences between the activities and contributing behaviours of male and female contributors to OSM. This is of major interest to me. I hope that the results will enable me to make some important conclusions and observations about current VGI contribution practices and make useful and meaningful recommendations back to the OSM community and other crowdsourced data stakeholders around gender issues in participation. A key part of the dissemination of my research results will be making the outcomes of the work available to the OSM community via my OSM diary, the mailing list and hopefully an open-access journal paper.
I can’t believe I’ve been walking past this construction site and now new roundabout for about two months, and it only just occurred to me this morning that I should update the map!
Anyway, done now.
