When I developed the map style that you can see here from OSM-carto one thing that I didn’t carry forward was the representation of borders. Partly this was because it’s not easy to separate maritime ones from non-maritime ones, the the purple maritime country borders frankly don’t look very nice:

Partly it was also due to “clutter” - I didn’t want an arbitary boundary to get in the way of a river or stream or other feature.

Sometimes however, it would be useful to see what borders are where, so why not do it as an overlay? This turned out to be rather easier than anticipated.

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I should stress that this is currently my personal opinion and my personal view and not the opinion of OSM-UA.

In the recent days we’ve seen a number of interesting notions. First of all, the one by Frederik Ramm. Yes, that Frederik Ramm.

I think I don’t quite understand some ideas of Herr Ramm.

Herr Ramm seems to be misunderstanding the nature of OSM. OSM is not a business like Geofabrik. It is not enough to make a resolution to see it working. You have no army, no corporate security, no riot police. No way to one-way enforce a decision. You need (surprise!) to convince people.

First of all, “there was really not any doubt” is not an argument. It is a way to avoid presenting documents. Simply put, it is sophistic.

Next, the argument of “not silently” is simply false. You (and I mean DWG here) never posted the transcript of your discussion, neither did you make a statistic check on community to realistically evaluate if your decision is implementable. You were not elected by the community. We have no reason to trust your decision except your reputation, and reputation is a fragile thing.

Next, I do agree that “political map” is not the intention of OSM. But OSMF needs to take some political decisions into account, or risk being subjected to national and international laws. Putting disclaimers in your resolution doesn’t make it any better. We are not “misinterpreting”. We are extrapolating the effects of this decision, and evaluate your actions, not your words, just as one old dusty book teaches us. Russian propaganda (namely, rg.ru, the official state press of Russian Federation) already uses your decision and both you and I have absolutely no way to stop them.

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Dear all,

Today, v4.17.0 of the OpenStreetMap Carto stylesheet (the default stylesheet on the OSM website) has been released. Once changes are deployed on the openstreetmap.org it will take couple of days before all tiles show the new rendering.

Changes include

• Showing natural areas from z5
• Cleaning up medium zoom rendering, including:
  • Making societal amenities look like residential on z10-z12
  • Rendering motorway junction names from z13 instead of z12
  • Dropping buildings up to z13 instead of z12
  • Correctly dropping minor waterways from z13
  • Rendering intermittent streams/ditches/drains from z15
  • Reducing lightening of tramways
• Rendering religious landuse and place of worship lighter
• Adding text-repeat-distance for highway names
• Rendering dots for gastronomy objects on z17
• Changing icon for tourism=artwork
• Adding icons for memorial subtags
• Rendering man_made=telescope
• Rendering amenity=internet_cafe
• Adding icon for amenity=public_bookcase
• Adding icons for barrier=cattle_grid and barrier=stile
• Adding icon for leisure=fishing
• Rendering entrance for underground parking
• Rendering basin=detention/infiltration as intermittent water
• Tweaking outline of swimming pools and rendering it from z17
• Moving danger_area into landuse-overlay
• Buildings code rewrite

Thanks to all the contributors for this release including jeisenbe, a new contributor.

For a full list of commits, see https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/compare/v4.16.0…v4.17.0

As always, we welcome any bug reports at https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues

.

Some of you might be interested in a small prototype that I coded during the past days. It’s an audio interface to select JOSM presets and here it is in action:

Well the idea of speech2josm is, that armchair-mapping is pretty intuitive. You trace outlines from aerial imagery and apply tags. But finding the right preset, fill in details to get the right OSM tags is very annoying. And beside all the tricks in JOSM (F3 search, autocomplete textboxes, toolbar-shortcuts, clone existing objects …) it seems to be the most interrupting and (in the mind of UX) expensive action while mapping. Add way, switch edit mode, add tags, switch select mode, …

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We all know the OSMF has a small membership compared to the mapping community. Worse, it is skewed towards certain countries. You might hear people say Germans and US Americans dominate the membership.

In a perfect world, all countries have a similar participation rate to OpenStreetMap, and mappers from all countries participate in OSMF by the same degree. The first is not something that is easily changed, but the second should clearly be our ambition. In France, a discussion about this led to a recruitment campaign with the explicit goal of rebalancing. This piqued my curiosity. Oh, and it increased membership with 90 people (from a mere 42).

But numbers without context are of little use. Guillaume (user Stereo) supported the French with membership statistics, and hooked me up with a list of membership by country for all countries. Now I’d say OSMF membership would ideally reflect the mapping community - skewed slightly for countries with a bigger data-user community. Unfortunately, no thorough statistics about mappers by country is available. Fortunately, there is something close to it: “the number of daily mappers” in a country. It is not a perfect measure:

• hdyc has a de facto “estimated home location”. This would allow to take some of the random noise out of the equasion

• “active mappers” (people with at least three months with a mapping day) might be a better measure

• in some cases, it’s impossible to find the country of people who only map abroad

But it’s close enough, and it’s available. Pascal Neis, deserving his last name as usual, sent me a list of all countries with the avarage number of daily mappers over the last 12 months.

Numbers with context

The easiest useful measure in this context is the membership rate, which allows to compare countries. For the world, you get 26 OSMF members for every 100 daily mappers. This rate varies from 0 in Tanzania to 94 in the US. On a map, it looks like this:

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I see that many paths are disappeared between Haskovo and Harmanli and specially below road number 8. Can anybody tell me what is happening?

Starting to add roads and other features in Somalia, around Baidoa (Baydhabo بيدوا), I often come across with long ways that have “attribution: Mart Roumen; FAO-SWALIM; Madmappers-SOM-2008-01’”. Most of them are not more visible through many satellite imageries, sometimes cross water or residential areas regardless of any feature on the ground.

I know Somalia and other territories can change very quickly but it looked me strange that so many areas changed dramatically. So, when I have no evidence of them I delete them.

Original post

I believe we are entering dangerous grounds here, setting a very curious precedent, to put it mildly.

*1. The way I see it, the authority of DWG is focused on vandalism

Nowhere in the description of DWG on OSMF wiki we see that it is entitled to make decisions about territorial disputes. The way I see it, it was and is intended for preventing copywrited uploads, vandalism and edit wars.

As we can see from DWG’s resolutions, the only existing decision concerning disputed territories (or at least the only one published) is about Crimea. That raises questions such as “why making a decision about this at all?” and “why revising it 4 years later?”

*2. DWG is not transparent in what it does

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MapRoulette 3.1.1 is now available on maproulette.org. Here’s what’s new!

Mapillary layer

Mapillary images are now available as an overlay on the map. If you’re zoomed in far enough you can select the Mapillary overlay from the Layer dialog.

This is a work in progress. Let us know if you have any suggestions to make it better! And yes, we plan to support OpenStreetCam images soon as well.

Rebuilding Tasks

MapRoulette now supports rebuilding tasks from Overpass based challenges as well as local and remote GeoJSON challenges. You can use the ‘Rebuild’ link at the top of you Challenge maintenance screen to start the process. For Overpass based Challenges, it will simply re-run the Overpass query. For remote GeoJSON files hosted someplace else, it will reload the GeoJSON from there. For local GeoJSON challenges, you will be prompted to select a new GeoJSON file to upload from your computer.

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Planning to map the Bürgerbus line. There are a few stops missing which need a visit to locate them. A rough idea of the line is here.

I wrote an article about OpenStreetMap and its related services and applications

http://jakobmiksch.eu/post/openstreetmap_overview/

Turkmenistan aspires to renewed status as the “hub” or “crossroads” of Central Asia, harkening back to the days of the Great Silk Road that connected Xian in China to Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Antioch, and from there to Rome and beyond. I thus took it upon myself to check out and ensure proper mapping of as much of Turkmenistan’s national highway system as I could, and then to check out its border crossings with neighboring countries. They are now all easily identifiable, both national highways and border crossings, I think properly tagged, and in the case of highways, every gas station I could see has been added to the map (still have a few FIXMEs out there, and there are undoubtedly some gas stations I haven’t found yet, but…) So far other mappers and I have mapped 156 gas stations in Turkmenistan, up from the very few on the map in 2015. Turkmenistan is ready for higher volumes of motor traffic and has a better road atlas on line to help navigate!

We started a new meet-up about OpenStreetMap and other geo-related topics. Check our blog post: http://maptime.io/salzburg/event/2018/11/13/Stammtisch/

Yesterday was the last OSMF board meeting before this year’s Annual General Meeting. And like it is already kind of tradition this last meeting had more visitors listening in than any on the previous meetings and IIRC even more than last years pre-election meeting making it probably the largest board meeting in OSMF history.

And this despite the guests having to wait for half an hour because the board started the meeting with a closed session.

And here is where the surreal part started. The closed part was - as you can read on the meeting agenda - meant to determine if two of the board members (Frederik and Heather) had a conflict of interest regarding the subject of the OSMF organized editing policy or guideline as it is now called. This is because apparently two other board members (Mikel and Martijn) were already considered to have a conflict of interest (and after me asking at the end of the meeting confirmed that they recused themselves). Now we don’t know the details yet - no word was uttered by the board in the public part of the meeting about the outcome of the closed part of the meeting (did i already mention it was surreal?). We know that apparently Frederik and Heather were not determined to have a conflict of interest because they participated in the vote later. But we don’t know who decided this and we don’t know who decided that those who had a conflict of interest were allowed to participate in the discussion none the less.

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Added details to Phila. NE Airport KPNE from FAA airport chart 00528AD

There are problems with level=* tag stemming from the fact that not all mappers agree on what it means. This problem comes up more often in some geographic areas than in others where different floor numbering traditions exist. In this sense it is like name=* tag where certain parts of a name stop looking like parts of a name after being translated into a different language.

So what are exactly the problems with level=*? Some people think that the value of this tag should be whatever floor number that is used in place. You can usually but not always read it off some plaque, floor plan or elevator button. Other people think that the value should be a number such that the first floor at or above the ground level gets number 0, the floor above it gets 1 and so on. Those two different ways of assigning a value could be exactly the same, especially for English-speaking areas where they have a “ground floor” as level=0 and a “first floor” as level=1. If you are from those places, you may not even understand that there’s a problem. If you are from a place like Russia or the US, it’s evident for you that those ways are different. I’ll be using Russia as an example because it’s where I map.

But there should be no debate about the exact definition of level=* tag because we have a wiki where it’s perfectly documented, right? Not quite. First of all, we don’t have one wiki, we have multiple wikis in different languages. Those languages may correspond to areas with different floor numbering traditions, which in turn affects the wiki contents. Again, this is like name=*, where local wiki editors put their preferred spin on what should and what should not be part of a name.

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The OpenStreetMap project is organized on an international level by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, under British law.

Some companies are paying employees to join, and there are rumors that they give voting instructions.

In recent years, the Board has gradually lost its balance. Over-representation of some areas and groups makes it difficult to maintain a balanced and diversity of government action and raises some conflict of interest issues. Therefore, it is important that all kinds of mappers join in to balance things out.

On December 15 there are board elections, and everyone who was a member before November 15 can vote.

489 ballots were cast during the last election. By way of comparison, in the last few days, 17 employees from a single US company have joined. This might not be anything sinister, but it’s worrying especially shortly before the board election, and getting the largest amount of OSMF members is the best safeguard of balance.

https://join.osmfoundation.org/normal-membership is the form. It costs £15 (about €17 or $20), it takes 4 minutes, it’s important and it’s too late in 24 hours. I am a candidate for the board election, but of course you distribute your votes however you want.

Last week there was a small change to the API which means some GPS traces are now returned unordered whereas previously they may have been ordered. This obviously has implications for editors’ GPS display. Potlatch 2 now copes with this by doing some basic proximity testing in an attempt to ‘reorder’ the unordered points, which restores the GPS layer to some degree of sanity.

At the same time, I took the opportunity to fix something that’s been bugging me for months. Historically, Potlatch 2 draws all the features crossing the current viewport, and then removes the sprites when they’re no longer visible. This is fine except when you pan across a 2000km power line, which takes ages to draw as a dotted line at z19, and bogs down Flash’s display performance for evermore. For such large objects, P2 now only draws the on-screen part, which makes it a whole bunch snappier.

I spent some time clarifying the Fox Chase-Newtown branch of the old Reading Company, currently the Fox Chase SEPTA commuter rail branch. It starts at Shady Lane and continues to Country Line Rd. as two separate agreements between SEPTA and Montgomery County. Anticipating a 2019 agreement between SEPTA and the City of Phila. for the section between Rhawn St. and Shady Lane.