I created way which has _link tag for the first time.I did not have ever edited road.So, I may have made a mistake.

Change set is here

MAPS.ME is a great app, and Ashgabat users suffering from high internet costs (the highest in the world, we are told) have found it a cost-effective way of uploading POIs. In certain important respects, this is a boon to mapping Ashgabat and other cities in Turkmenistan.

There are, however, two issues. First, the mappers often mis-tag POIs, either because they don’t know English too well (some mappers tag all medical or health facilities “amenity=hospital”, for example, including pharmacies, clinics, and ambulance stations), or because MAPS.ME’s limited universe of point tags doesn’t lend itself to proper tagging. Second, because MAPS.ME’s offline maps are updated relatively infrequently, multiple mappers add a POI multiple times, so you end up with two or three new entries for the same POI. This has created a fair amount of work for me, cleaning up after entry of POIs that either duplicate an existing node, usually consolidating all data from multiple entries, or simply correcting tags. I’m not complaining–there are worse problems (like vandalism), but it does take time.

The good news is that this weekend temperatures in Ashgabat will be well over 100 Fahrenheit, mid-40s Celsius, so I have a great excuse to stay close to the air conditioner and edit the map.

In Argentina we discussed and finally have a new highway hierarchy criterion.

Proposal is kind of loose so we can adapt it in different situations. I used it on my city and I think is an opportunity for other to understand the process. Specially if you live in a city similar to mine.

Context: Resistencia has 300,000 inhabitants, at East there is an important satellite city Barranqueras that has 50,000 inhabitants, at Southeast Puerto Vilelas has only 8000 inhabitants, at West you find Fontana, 20 years ago a town with 10,000 people, now 40,000 people. Resistencia is a wide city with a weak infrastructure, less than 40% of its streets are paved, and there are big areas where main roads are unpaved avenues. Its checkerboard city plan has “avenidas” (avenues) each 1 km, inside that avenues there are very few avenues. It is situated on a flooding plain, there is not any rocky outcrop, average precipitation is 1200 mm a year and it never snowed. Unpaved streets are maintained with gravel, mainly when they are in a public transport route. There are so many unpaved streets that it is very difficult to have them in good conditions all the time, more difficult when it’s rainy season, so public transport streets are heavily used because it’s very common that are the only one in good conditions.

Trunk: in a medium size city we shouldn’t have any trunk street. Exceptions are roads that get here: RN11 and RN16. In big cities it could be possible we find trunk internal roads.

Primary: under our scheme they are “trunk avenues”. In Greater Resistencia they are the main access to the cities, except for Puerto Vilelas.

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You can now preview OSM notes in iD by pressing ‘F’ to open the map data pane, enabling notes, and zooming in. Much like on osm.org, you can toggle on and off the notes layer, close / reopen notes, comment on them, and follow links to a note or its creator on osm.org. Give it a try and let me know what you think! We are compiling feature requests such as filtering, note templating, etc. Also, feel free to search and open issues related to bugs or desirable features. Before the next release of iD, expect an add Note button as well (as seen in the image below).

Additionally, along with Bryan Housel and Marc Farra (my GSoC 2018 mentors), I am researching how OSM users use notes. We hope to make notes more useful, more consistent, and potentially a rejuvenated outlet for stronger socialization and communication across the OSM community. Therefore, if you have feedback on how to improve notes (or what you use notes for), please comment below! In my next blog post, I’ll provide more fuel for ideas by sharing note features that we have already started working on.

Until next time,

-Thomas Hervey

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OSM processes over 3.1 million feature changes per day. With the help of OSMCha and the ever-vigilant OSM community, many low-quality changes are found and corrected. However, sometimes low-quality labels are not detected and slip into the map.

Towards ensuring a high-quality map, I have been applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to detect low-quality labels. Part of applying these NLP techniques requires:

1. Defining low-quality labels and understanding their properties
2. Determining the motivation of a user who submits a low-quality label

First, towards defining a low-quality label, we typically think of labels that include profanity, such as the following (also! 🙂, all of the screenshots you see below are examples of low-quality labels that I have found with my filtering logic):

Profane label says: “The Shit”

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The workshop: Orientation and Consultation on Geographic Information System (GIS) and its Applicability to Social Welfare and Development of the DSWD GIS Unit was conducted on July 18-20, 2018 in Quezon City. It was attended by the Planning Officers and Technical Staff from the Central Office, Field Offices and Attached Agencies of the Department.

The program consisted of several talks from various resource speakers of different sectors (academe, social/community development, environment, Indigenous Peoples, disaster response, and private sector).

Being one of the main sources of free spatial data, OpenStreetMap was briefly presented by OSM mapper advocate, Ms. Jen Ayco (@jenjereren). She encouraged the participants to sign up for an account to increase visibility of each of their communities, and raise diversity (gender, ethnicity, PWD’s) on the map. Surprisingly, few participants were already mapping volunteers of OSM! :)

During the afternoon break, I found myself surrounded with the three women mappers/resource speakers we invited. They’ve shared experiences in the field of GIS and discussed the importance of an integrated and free geographic data source in the country. There is an existing one though, PhilGIS.org, but still needs to be populated and updated.

Ms. Kail’s remark on this topic was something to ponder about: “No one owns spatial data. Nobody can have copyrights on your location.”

Maybe the act of gathering location information (purchasing of tools and investing effort) gives data collectors the right to own it. Giving proper credits to data collectors would facilitate sharing of data. And there are still privacy issues. It’s still a case to case basis. And maybe, spatial data can be also be tagged as “special” data depending on its purpose.

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In 2012, the ‘new’ public_transport scheme was voted. What seemed like a good idea at first, has not led to unification though. I was not smart enough at the time to see how this would develop, but today with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight it it’s apparent that we are on the wrong track.

The way the wiki formulates it at present, even though I have tried over the years to keep it in check, we should supposedly map 2 objects for each and every stop and then add both of these to the route relations.

I’m sorry, but that is unacceptable! For one thing, I need a SINGLE object, preferably a node where all the details of the stop go. That has always been the way we do things in OpenStreetMap. The node that gets the stop_position tag is NOT suitable for that purpose, as it is not immediately apparent on what side of the street the stop is.

So, over the years I have tried to work with public_transport=platform and stop_position tags on the stop nodes I’ve been mapping. The idea was that, in time, highway=bus_stop would be replaced by those tags. Only that is not possible, for one thing, those nodes we’re mapping to represent the stops, were not supposed to have a mode of transport on them. So it is utterly impossible to drop highway=bus_stop from those nodes.

OK, let’s step back for a moment: highway=bus_stop is here to stay, wait for it… it’s coming… the conclusion: public_transport=platform tags are NOT ADDING any information. highway=bus_stop says it all. Sorry that it took me a few years to figure that out!

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இந்தியா என்பது ஹிந்தியா அல்ல. பாரத் என்று இந்தியாவை குறிப்பது தவறு. இந்தி தேசிய மொழி அலல. India என்றிருப்பதே சரி.

India is not Hindia. Please remove the word “Bharat” (1000km) in hindi from osm. Indians speak 100’s of languages. Hindi is not a national language.

There is a lot of prepared and approved SVG icons for OSM-Carto just wainting to be added, but there is unfortunately also lack of people ready to add these new features. We would like to invite you to improving default OSM style.

Here is a task list: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/3298

Coding instruction links:

osm.wiki/Standard_tile_layer

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/blob/master/DOCKER.md

You can also ask for any help in certain tickets and PRs :)

I have been OSM mapper since February 2015 and got enthusiastic about the change I was making in #MapLesotho. Being the spatial planner I realised the importance of OpenstreetMap data and how it would be useful in my job.

Being number one mapper in Lesotho opened doors for me, and in September 2016 I won a scholarship to study in Ireland doing MSc in Spatial Planning at Dublin Institute of Technology. I adapted easily in Ireland & met Ireland OSM community and also continued training school kids to map, and also how to use different Phone Apps such as mapillary, OSM Tracker, street complete and maps.me.

I wanted to be able to map more than what #MapLesotho taught me, so simaltaneous to moving to Ireland for town planning scholarship and internship I started mapping Ireland. I adapted to different ways of mapping and started mapping things in Ireland that aren’t there in Lesotho such as the coast and heritage sites, different tags for different road uses, such as bicycle lanes, bus lanes, footpath etc. It was also fascinating to map high buildings because they are frequent in Ireland using maps.me and the sudden change when editing height of the buildings using the app was entertaining as well. Streetcomplete is another app that always got me curious because the more I used it the more I got different kinds of stuff to edit which I would say widened my experience with Tags also.

Being in a new country of course I wanted to get out and about, so I turned my curiosity into mapillary trips in all 32 counties and I became number 2 mapillary contributor in Ireland. The truth about me is when I do mapping stuff I make sure I do it well and conquer, hahah😊.

In June I became mapper of the month and that took me by surprise when I was contacted by a person I have never talked to before Marc Gemis because I never thought there are people out there who notice the effort and the changes I was making.

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Thanks for the ongoing discussions about gender in OSM. At SOTM, we will build on our shared efforts to make improvements. Your support and participation is most welcome. At SOTM we will host the Open Gender Monologues. Our allies, GeoChicas, are also running a session on diversity.

Three ways you can become involved in the Open Gender Monologues:

1. Submit your experiences (optional to be anonymous) for us to read at SOTM on July 28th. We want to be sure that your voice is heard, even if you can’t join us in person. add your experiences here

2. Join us in person on July 28th to share your experiences. Just let Heather and Kate know so that we can add you to the agenda of speakers. SOTM - Open Gender Monologues session

3. Be an ally - share this diary entry on your local/topical mailing lists and social media. We want to reach as many people as possible.

Thank you and see you soon

I took a tip from Dexter from the City of Detroit Office of Innovation, and started on the Detroit Mapping Challenge by browsing City of Detroit Open Data. What open data could help make OpenStreetMap Detroit the best map in the world? BikeShare locations looked like a useful and straightforward starting point. And now OSM Detroit has very accurate MoGo bike share docking stations. There turned out to be a few surprises getting there, and lessons to absorb for mapping all of Detroit.

The data looked decent on quick inspection, and is licensed public domain. Maybe a very small human supervised import is in order. I browsed OSM to see what was already there, and turned out this already all 43 docking stations were already added by mapper175, with the changeset comment Added nodes for MoGo Bike Share system stations (resurvey needed for most of them). Are they in the right place? Is there something a remote mapper could do here?

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Mural by Ukuu Tafari of feeding crows art

If any of you all live in/around Richmond/Greater Richmond Region/Central Virginia (or any other localities in the commonwealth) and are interested in collaborating on open data/open mapping/civic tech/etc., email me: albert@bowdenweb.com.

Yesterday I had too many other obligations to travel far, so I took about three hours of Saturday afternoon to cruise parts of Ashgabat I’d not visited for a while and to collect Mapillary imagery where there were gaps (uploads currently underway). The dacha community north of the Karakum Canal on the far east end of the city is gone. It was apparently demolished in the past months and has been bulldozed. I had no idea, but will have to revise the map. The road into the community has been blocked with a dirt pile. This is why ground truth is so important.

I have completed corrections to the A-381, P-1, P-15, P-16, and P-18 national highway routes in Turkmenistan. I have consulted with local sources to nail down exactly which roads are part of each route and think these five are now pretty accurate.

Cet article est également disponible en français : osm.org/user/jbelien/diary/44358

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Article written for open Summer of code 2018

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First of all, there is absolutely not doubt about the fact Google Maps is a good product and the Google Maps tools (API, JavaScript library, …) work quite well and are easy to setup but …

Google is in charge

When Google Maps started more than 10 years ago, everything was completely free to use. These last few months that has changed drastically.
The first decision made by Google was to limit the free number of requests per day. It didn’t really impact the small users that were still under the limit but some big players decided to switch to other solution like OpenStreetMap (for instance Foursquare and Pinterest).
The latest change (June 2018) has much more impact : Google decided to reduce the limit of free requests (25000 map display per day to 28000 per month - that’s around 1000 map display per day, so 25 times less) but also made it mandatory to give your credit card number even if you do not go over the free limit !

Impact on Belgian Prime Minister website :

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I have found an authoritative but slightly out-of-date list of provinces, districts, and municipalities in Turkmenistan, have corrected and updated it based on recent press releases, and posted it to the OSM wiki:

osm.wiki/Districts_in_Turkmenistan

I am also working with my embassy’s motor pool to identify the national highways, which are either not tagged or are in some cases mistagged. This will be a bit of a project over the summer as we research the Turkmen national highway system and bring the OSM map up to date. My ambition is to have a complete map of Turkmenistan’s national highway network, all properly tagged.

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I have an application which I am developing. I am not sure it is of general interest, yet. I track some relations in it. I am interested in cities and counties in California and I am recording their ids and other information about them.

I just implemented code (in java) which reads the relations, and then recursively reads the ways and nodes of it and verifies that the lines therefrom are connected. The obvious implementation is taking a rather long time to do the job. I am hoping there is a better way.

Any suggestions?

I will post more about the application when I have it running on my colo.

thanx - ray