First, thank you all for improving the mapping of subway networks all around the world! In just half a year, we made more than 150 networks routable, of 180 total. That is very impressive. Today, OpenStreetMap has more data on subways than any other source, open or proprietary.

Last week, I have made a few improvements to the validator. The major one is a change to how stations are counted. We had an issue of transfer stations: for some cities they were counted once, for other — twice, depending on how they are mapped. This simplified calculating a projected total number of stations (just copy it from wikipedia), but affected mapping.

Now, thanks to disc12, it sums up numbers of stations for each line. This is more predictable and allows for different interchange mapping styles. In the spreadsheet, counts of stations have been mostly updated in form of a formula: =line1+line2+…+lineN. You can clearly see how many stations it expects for each subway line. If you find an error there, add a comment and I’ll update the number.

Having trouble with missing or extra stations? Click on “Y” near the city name, and you’ll get a YAML file with all stations, transfers and lines. What’s new is a number of stations for each line (calculated as a number of unique stations for all its itineraries), along with a list of stations. Comparing it to wikipedia is much easier.

There are some improvements planned still. For example, handling of stations under construction: you cannot add these to routes at the moment, or you’ll get an error. And there is a “nowhere near the tracks” error that is hard to track — I really should do something with it. And the preprocessor calls for a GTFS output.

Thanks for mapping, now let’s finish the last cities and then monitor the world for new subway and light rail stations. If you are an app developer, please consider using the validator output for your app. Contact me if you have any questions.

I’ve added a new page to the switch2osm guide: “Manually building a tile server (18.04 LTS)”.

Although Ubuntu 18.04 (“Bionic Beaver”) isn’t released yet, it’s due out fairly soon and daily builds can be downloaded from here. There are actually very few changes from the 16.04 version - mostly just updated versions of software (including some Mapnik fixes). Following these instructions shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours for small areas - the longest period of the setup is waiting for the shapefiles used by the style to download.

As before, the page is designed to be “the least you need to do” to get a rendering server working. As before I also wrote a wiki page which goes into a bit more detail, including other things that you might want to do.

It’s also worth mentioning than there are many more resources available now than there were a couple of years ago - see for example Ircama’s tutorials, and also this guide that covers the setup of an OSM Carto renderer within Docker.

Visited Grahame Park estate in Colindale on Saturday 17 March for an in-depth survey of the revised road and building layout. Further research of the development plan for the area indicates that there will be a lot more substantial changes in the coming months, however, the following has been done.

New road added: Bristol Avenue

Changes to following roads: Lanacre Avenue; Hazel Close, Five Acre; Hundred Acre; Cherry Close; Lower Strand; Percival Avenue; Valentina Avenue

Removal of following roads: Belvedere Strand; Further Acre, which no longer exist. Removal of associated footpaths and meadows which have changed too.

Addition of new Points: Barnet Southgate College, Colindale Library and adjustment of former Grahame Park library to a Hindu temple.

New residential buildings added and a small number of buildings removed.

Movement of bus stops from previous locations and alignment of bus routes to the new layout.

Other small-scale editing took place in the Golders Green, Edgware, Hendon and Borehamwood areas, mainly changes to building names

First a note, it seems as if I never blogged about the 10.1 update, information on those changes can be found in the release notes on the Vespucci website.

The beta release of 10.2 that is now available in the beta channel on the google play store, or from the releases on github does not change an awful lot that is end user visible outside of a new upload UI, however there are two core changes that I want to touch on quickly.

Support for “network” location providers

Historically Vespucci has only supported using the on-device GPS location provider, or nothing at all. That meant that you were unable to get a rough location approximation on devices that didn’t have onboard GPS, or that had GPS disabled for example to reduce power requirements. The main reason for this is that on the one hand we wanted to avoid location information potentially tainted by your devices Android provider and avoid our users position being tracked by them.

We now support using so-called “network” location providers, that is location sources that derive your position from the mobile network, WLAN and other signals your device is receiving. If you’ve enabled such providers on your phone, more on that later, Vespucci will use all available providers for centering the map display on your position and for auto-downloads, tracks will still exclusively be generated from GPS data.

The change in opinion is mainly due to less and less people caring about such matters and at least google tracking in any case (see for example https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/21/16684818/google-location-tracking-cell-tower-data-android-os-firebase-privacy), further allowing such providers enables better indoor positioning which is a clear advantage.

… See full entry

I finally got around to adding statues in Ylham Park between Gorogly and Azady streets. The Mapillary imagery is available for those interested in seeing what the statues look like.

(https://www.mapillary.com/app/?lat=37.943060305004906&lng=58.37661221628855&z=17&pKey=a8voMY8xqYsMxd2L1uyB7Q&focus=photo)

Ann and I spent a chunk of this weekend collecting street names and GPS traces of unmapped streets in Bagyr and Yanbash, former villages (and before that, Soviet collective farm villages) that are now formally neighborhoods of the city of Ashgabat since being annexed. It had rained, and some of the streets were muddy enough we had to use four-wheel-drive! Over the two days we shot over 3,000 Mapillary images while searching for street signs and marking mosques, schools, and other POIs on the GPS. The GPS traces are public so anybody has access to them.

With these two neighborhoods largely done, we have completed base mapping of all neighborhoods of the greater Ashgabat metropolitan area, i.e., everything inside the new city limits. Much remains to be done–more POIs, new buildings soon to be under construction in central Ashgabat, and a number of streets with no names (and we missed a few in Bagyr this weekend), but we are in a better place now than before.

2018.03.18

Chinese proverb says “The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step”. Well, I did not know it was my first step towards a long journey when I walked into the “Map your community” workshop arranged by Save the Children International in Bangladesh. The workshop was arranged for the “Kolorob” project, aiming to completely map two slum areas where the Kolorob app will be launched. The purpose of the app was to provide slum dwellers with necessary information so they can make informed decision. The chosen map was OpenStreetMap. In the two days workshop, I was first introduced to mapping and I got hooked.

I had no idea how maps were made, no idea about GPS, no idea about anything related to mapping. As a completely new area, it was able to grab my attention pretty tight and I started learning more about it. I was hired by “Save the Children” as a volunteer mapper in Kolorob project and I started doing field mapping using different tools. I also assisted in OSM traning and lead field mapping team for the “Data4Action” project by American Red Cross in association with Bangladesh Red Crescent and Red Cross Society.

My interest stretched out to GIS and I started learning the basics by myself. Along with my learning, I continued mapping and became an active member of the OpenStreetMap Bangladesh (OSMBD) team, which is the OSM community in Bangladesh who were actively working with OSM as it’s contributor, advocate and as a learning sharing platform.

… See full entry

In the last few days -

I discovered that with this month’s [1] update of OsmAnd’s PT data, all my work on bus route relations was finally visible in the app. Suddenly, so many bus stops on the map of Delhi (in OsmAnd) now show bus routes - it is a wonderful feeling! :D It also means that I can now begin using OsmAnd to aid my own commuting.

I took my first two bus trips exclusively for the purpose of mapping them. (I recorded a GPS trace, and tried to add as many bus stops on the way using OsmAnd as I could. If I could spot benches or tactile paving, I’d tag that, too; if I saw another bus, I’d add a local OsmAnd note for it.) [2]

This also led to what is perhaps the first bus route relation in Delhi approaching completion - Bus 680 is (as far as I know) the first route relation in Delhi to have both the first and the last stop_position added. It still has some stops to be added, and some sections need to be surveyed, to be on the safe side.

Lastly, my faithful Moto G 5s Plus, which I had hoped to keep for at least ten years, was stolen - ironically as I was boarding a bus, guitar in hand. Most of my data was synced to my laptops via Syncthing and NextCloud…but not the ~500 local OsmAnd notes in it - of which ~300 were bus sightings. Oh well. The last few days I’ve been working off a borrowed Moto G with a cracked screen, waiting for the Moto G6 series to be launched.

[1] See issue #5078

[2] I added 28 stops this way on this trip; the total number of bus stops I’ve added in Delhi is now 388, accounting for 65% of the stops mapped in Delhi 😲

I have been on the internet from its early beginning. The internet as we usally call it, has become our worst enemy. in relation to culture, emvirpment, human tradegies. Misunderstandings, selfhate and trolling. Its all negative, like criminals that only think about their own power and money. The cultural revolution in china 4 many years ago, igs like Spotify. Most musicians never even get tje chance, if you think that it is you that selects what you will hear or see on the internet… then think again.

I won’t always refresh the table with the weekly planet file update, but I did today with a delta to 2 weeks ago. (The previous table is at table_planet_180301

Some observations, in nodes:

• Despite another round of my vigorous cleanup in Ontario, the ‘CanvecImports’ account only dropped by 600k from 39.5 to 38.9 Mnodes. Still so much Canvec to clean up!
• Import accounts that were active include: ‘StefanB_import’ +14, ‘Svein Olav’ +119, ‘osmviborg’ +132, and ‘Rúdisicyon’ (+434!) which is doing a giant import of buildings in Portugal.
• Other accounts that moved up in rank, which are probably due to good active mapping and not imports, included ‘indigomc’ +14, ‘santamariense’ +11, ‘Kohki Hiraga’ +15, ‘Hernan’ +18, ‘yunita sari’ +28, ‘Ben97’ +40, ‘hpduwe’ +13, ‘yuantouniaoren’ +65, ‘jpgon’ +14, ‘ajithkarunaratne’ +25, ‘dubf’ +48, ‘Hendrikklaas’ +23, ‘baradam’ +12, ‘chachafish’ +19, ‘Sander H’ +17, ‘DaCor’ +10.
• HOT/MissingMaps active users ‘asmi84’ +59, ‘ASHIQ MAHAMUD’ +31, ‘Raven Nahid’ +77, ‘anisa berliana’ +13, ‘Nodia’ +567, ‘Abou kachongo jr’ +52, ‘dianawa_22’ +11

In ways, I notice some of the same activity, and also:

• ‘kiaraSh-Q’ who maps mostly Iran, somehow moved down in nodes (-59) but up on ways (+41).
• Mysterious drops ‘Canyonsrcool’ -52 and ‘alester’ -36.
• ‘Matthew Darwin’ (+22/+23) seems to be impressively fixing/aligning every road and address of Ottawa, Canada.
• Some Japan-import-account drops are probably due to the cleanup work that myself and other Japanese users have been doing there, hence ‘chnkshm’ -7/-17, ‘KSJ2_adm_bnd_imprt’ -16/-283, ‘nyampire’ -14/-21, ‘watao’ -5/-105.
• User ‘PierZen’ (+4/+539) seems to be doing a bunch of cleanup in Quebec, including boundaries and removing superfluous tags.
• Other active global users who moved up in ways include ‘vichada’, ‘de vries’, ‘Seandebasti’, ‘JFK73’, ‘edvac’, ‘danbjoseph’, ‘Alan Bragg’ and ‘gscholz’ (+3/+57).

Yesterday’s OSMF board meeting contained a discussion about the idea of translating OSMF wiki pages, in particular the board meeting minutes, into languages other than English.

There was no definite decision on the matter, the topic was essentially bounced back to the Communication Working Group. But there was an interesting discussion on the topic of translations i want to comment on here.

For context: The OSM community is a multilingual community in the sense that there is no majority of native speakers of any language in the community. But OSM community communication has always been centered on the English language - partly because OpenStreetMap originated in the UK, partly because English is the most widespread smallest common denominator language, i.e. it is the language most community members speak and understand at least rudimentarily - though this is also kind of a self fulfilling prophecy since people with no capability of communicating in English at all have it much more difficult to become a member of the OSM community.

The OSMF in particular is practically an organization with English as the only working language. The OSMF in terms of members also almost has a majority of native English speakers, on the OSMF board 4 of 7 members are native English speakers. None of this is codified in OSMF policy though and i would wish we had more variety of language in OSMF communication - like for example people posting on osmf-talk in other languages (which is rare - but it does happen).

… See full entry

   Today I joined Unique Mappers Team and I am grateful that I was given this opportunity.I am a 100 level student of the department of Geography and Environmental Management University of Port Harcourt.I participated in the Let Girls Map held on International Womens Day 2018 and today is a make up practical mapathon training. I  am also grateful to our team coordinator /mentor and our team leaders.I do hope to participate actively in #Let GirlsMap#UniqueMappersTeam#YouthMappers   activities. 

Ever since reCAPTCHA become mainstream we knew that Google was using us as mechanical turks. At the beginning it seemed OK because we were reading books and newspapers, but then the system started asking questions like which of these squares had cars or traffic signs or store fronts in it, and you had to be kinda dumb not to realize you were training an Street View AI[1]. Since then, I’ve been trying to avoid sites that ask me to work for free for Google.

On the other hand, I’m kinda sick and tired of the SPAM that comes through the RSS feeds of https://blogs.osm.org/ . I think this is mostly due to the fact that opening an account does not involve proving you’re not a robot.

So, what about creating a captcha system that at the same time helps building the OSM database? What is not clear to me is what exactly the system would be helping to do. I think the simplest and more impacting would be to recognize simple features that would help mappers to find things to maps, more than trying trying to train an AI to map automatically.

I wonder what would the suppliers, like Bing, Mapbox, etc, think of such use of the imagery they license to OSM for mapping, specially if the system starts to be used by third party sites to block bots/spammers.

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[1] If you want to know a little more, please read https://www.techradar.com/news/captcha-if-you-can-how-youve-been-training-ai-for-years-without-realising-it.

A small number of edits have been made to shops, buildings and road layouts in response to map notes and what was seen on a site visit there on Tuesday 13 March.

I am considering correcting the name of the railroad going from Bowie to Globe, AZ. It is named Arizona Eastern Railway, but on OpenStreetMap it is identified as Union Pacific. The railroad has had a number of names since it was built, so I’m trying to figure out what to put under the old_name tag. Looking at Wikipedia entries for Gila Valley, Globe and Northern Railway, Arizona Eastern Railway and Southern Pacific Railroad, I’ve come up with these values:

old_name:1885-1898=Gila Valley, Globe and Northern Railway

old_name:1899-1923=Arizona Eastern Railroad

old_name:1924-1987=Southern Pacific Railroad

I do remember seeing some Union Pacific locomotives, but the Wikipedia entry for Arizona Eastern Railway says that the line was sold to Kyle in 1988, and Southern Pacific was sold to Union Pacific in 1998. I think this shows that the railroad was never part of UP.

Are my old_name entries a reasonably correct improvement to OpenStreetMap?

The line from Lordsburg, NM to Clifton, AZ is also part of Arizona Eastern Railway, now, but it has a different history.

I finally managed to install QGIS 3 on my favourite linux distro. The magic incantation was found here:

sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-key 073D307A618E5811

echo “deb http://qgis.org/ubuntugis xenial main” > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/qgis.list

echo “deb-src http://qgis.org/ubuntugis xenial main” » /etc/apt/sources.list.d/qgis.list

echo “deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable/ubuntu xenial main” > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntugis-unstable.list

echo “deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable/ubuntu xenial main” » /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntugis-unstable.list

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install qgis python-qgis qgis-plugin-grass

for some plugins QtWebKit is needed:

sudo apt-get install libqtwebkit-dev python3-pip python3-setuptools

pip install jupyter==1.0.0 qtconsole

---

To be able to develop Python scripts I did the following:

apt autoremove echo “deb http://qgis.org/ubuntugis xenial main” > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/qgis.list echo “deb-src http://qgis.org/ubuntugis xenial main” » /etc/apt/sources.list.d/qgis.list echo “deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable/ubuntu xenial main” > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntugis-unstable.list echo “deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable/ubuntu xenial main” » /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntugis-unstable.list sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install aptitude aptitude install qgis python-qgis javascript-common liblwgeom-dev python3-tk apt-get install Qt5-Support apt-get install qt5-designer sudo apt-get install qttools5-dev-tools sudo apt-get install python3-pyqt5.qtsql sudo apt-get install postgresql-client libpq-dev pgadmin3 sudo apt install libqt5sql5-psql sudo apt install pyqt5-dev-tools

I don’t think anyone blogged about London OpenStreetMap Q&A events yet, but we should! We’ve been experimenting with this new event format in London. Well I haven’t. I’m still setting up occasional pub meet-ups, but thanks mostly to Firefishy’s organisational efforts, we’ve been escaping the pub, and doing something a bit different.

These are presentations evenings, and also (trying to be) an opportunity for discussions and questions, and getting help with mapping or using OSM. We’ve had a few now. They’ve been pretty successful, with increasing attendance each time. On Wednesday night we had maybe 30 people attending.

I’ve been forgetting about the FOSS4G UK conference, which was taking place Thursday and Friday. We missed an opportunity to advertise our thing as a warm-up event to that. Some people figured it out though. Janet Chapman was going on to give a similar talk at the conference, and there was at least one other person who was visiting the UK for FOSS4G UK, and taking in our event beforehand.

… See full entry

Had a visit to this charming village. Don’t want to tread on any local mappers toes… but did add some landuse and houses - up to usual standards, I hope. A few thoughts: - always a problem with farmland/meadow: I tend to look for ploughing lines on farmland and worn paths + trees on meadows. - there are a lot of ‘little manors’ here: at what point does the ‘residential area’ end and the ‘private park’ begin??? - if a major road has wide verges each side, I would map a ‘grass’ area hedge-to-hedge and this should render OK with the rendered highway on top of the grass. - should take someone a day to review all the buildings as ‘houses’, or not, and possibly add some addresses ;-)

Ann and I celebrated International Women’s Day (an official holiday in Turkmenistan, so I had the day off) by exploring two former villages annexed by the city of Ashgabat, so they are now officially neighborhoods: Yalkym and Herrikgala. We collected street names and some POIs, plus shot lots of Mapillary images. Very interesting to see large mansions in these quasi-rural former villages, cheek by jowl with greenhouse operations, plus households with up to 16 cows, and camels. The Mapillary imagery is being uploaded as I type this so please give it a few (or several) hours before looking for it.

We’ve released a new version 0.10 of our open source routing engine GraphHopper. Read here for more information.