tl;dr the release notes 🙂

The biggest new feature in version 3.3 is the introduction of reviewing other mappers’ tasks. If you would like to have someone else review the tasks you complete, you can let MapRoulette know. If you’re an experienced mapper, you can volunteer to review other people’s work. In this post we explain how this works, and review some of the other goodies that made it into this version.

Reviewing Tasks

As you fix things via MapRoulette, you can indicate that you would like someone else to review your work. Here’s how you do that. When you mark a task as fixed, you will see a new confirmation dialog:

If you check the box ‘Need an extra set of eyes?’, the task will be added to the review queue. You can also set a global preference in your User Settings to have all your work reviewed by default (you can override it for individual tasks if desired).

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If a Missing Maps mapathon was hosted this year in Dorchester, would any local OSM contributors be interested in mapping dedicated to humanitarian action and community development, to revolutionise disaster management, reduce risks, and contribute to achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals?

Checking interest before organising something :-)

Adela

Here is regular-expression based OverPass query for finding some of the broken opening_hours values:
opening_hours~/(mon|tue|wed|thu|fri|sat|sun |sund)/i
http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/I3I
Does anyone know how to propose adding this to existing error checkers?

Hint if you are trying to fix in semi-batch mode: copy/paste the bad value to opening_hours evaluation tool and it will do a partial correction for you.

I’ve been meaning to add this path to the map for months, but I’m glad I went and checked it out in person because my memory of it is from the 1990s — and it’s changed a bit:

The City of Regina added 7.5 cm ortho air photos of the city from early May 2018 to their open data website. I contacted them about enabling WMS so I could use the imagery in JOSM and they were happy to oblige.

Their server is slow serving up imagery so you may want to turn it on and off while panning to a new location. I checked the alignment with the surveyed road centerline dataset and it is dead center for the most part. Some areas such as around the university are a bit off, so don’t go moving all the roads to match the imagery.

The Bing imagery for the area is newer, but this imagery is much more detailed with flat lighting and no shadows.

Adding Image Server to JOSM

https://opengis.regina.ca/arcgis/rest/services/CGISViewer/Airphoto_Regina_2018_7_5cm/ImageServer

The get capabilites URL needed for setting up the imagery in JOSM is the WMS link in the upper left.

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On the other side of Longden Street to Allan Joyce Architects, the subject of my previous Diary, is H3 Performance, a Fitness Centre ensconced within a large former warehouse:–

… See full entry

Allan Joyce Architects occupies the former Midland Bank on Bath Street and, in recent times, has purchased property adjacent to that building and then both developed & built an impressive set of apartment blocks at 22-26 Bath Street.

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[repost from the OpenStreetMapUS blog]

The OpenStreetMap US board elections for 2019 have completed! As an election observer, I was tasked with making sure the elections were impartial and not unduly influenced, and that the vote counting was done properly.

This was an unusual election in that we had two separate questions:

The first question was to fill the open seat vacated by Maggie Cawley, who resigned to take on the role of Executive Director. The second question was a simple confirmatory vote of approval for the remaining four board members. Given that there was no election held for the board back in March (because only five candidates were nominated for five open seats), the board decided it was appropriate to hold a confirmatory vote since we were already holding an election anyway for the open seat.

The results of the election are as follows:

The existing board members were confirmed overwhelmingly, with 98 voting “yes” and 6 voting “no”. In the final round of ranked choice voting Minh Nguyễn was elected to the open seat. Congratulations Minh!

Analysis

If you don’t care about the nerdy mechanics of this Ranked Choice Voting election, you can stop reading now. But if you’re interested in a deeper analysis of the results, read on:

For OpenStreetMap US elections, we use Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), which means that each voter has the opportunity to rank all the candidates in order of preference. When RCV is used to elect multiple seats at the same time, it’s also known as Single Transferable Vote (STV), and when it’s used to elect a single seat (as was the case in this election), it’s sometimes called Instant Runoff Voting (IRV).

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On Saturday 6th April 2019, following the IWD event, we had a practical session where new members of UniqueMappersTeam were introduced to openstreetmap platform and registered. Every member/participant was opportuned to map buildings and roads. The following day being Sunday 7th April,2019. Members of Unique Mappers Team visited mercy and praise orphanage. As a voluntary act

On the friday, 5th of April 2019. I, Miss Ifeoma Ononiwu, the current Director LetGirlsMap, of UniqueMappersTeam Nigeria, alongside the female leadership of UniqueMappersTeam in persons of Miss Mercy Banu, the Secretary General, Miss Godslove Ishola the Director Media and Blessing Oshoma, the Director welfare planned and organized the IWD event with the theme: Geospatial technologies, the solution for women transformation. We had guest speakers in persons of Mrs Chioma Nwankwo (E. D, Mercy & praise orphanage homes) who spoke to us on “Being focused in a world full of distraction, Miss Timipre George ( graduate mentor and MSC holder in GIS) she elaborated on the topic “ geospatial technologies: the solution for women transformation “. Also, the Team coordinator analyzed the “ Mapathon & Catchaton’ .We had word puzzles & fastest finger in between the talks. We also had cake cutting and refreshment. Finally I anchored a panel discussion featuring the guest speakers where we analyzed the team ‘Achieving balance for better’ with discussions on Health and Safety, Women Empowerment, The woman in Humanitarian Response. Attached to the panel discussion was ‘Question and answer sessions’ Group photos were taken afterward.

There was a lot of constraints in the beginning and I had to make some last-minute decisions. But it was a huge success

This town has a lack of houses mapped

These last month I’ve been working on St Lucia map adding information from different sources. It’s still a work in progress but there is now enough data to start creating topographic maps from osm data of Saint Lucia.

Forest landcover

Most of the island weren’t covered, I’ve added forest landcover on the totality of the Island. However this landcover is not very precise. The project https://osm.earth/project/43 help me to organize the refinement of the landcover.

Forest Reserve

I’ve added the Forest Reserve boundaries. The data comes from Saint Lucia Open Data. Some of the boundaries seem to be defined by physical element like river or road. In these case I removed the imported boundaries to replace them by the physical element on the map.

District Administrative Boundaries

I’ve imported the administrative boundaries of the St Lucian District. See OSM Wiki St Lucia District Import for more informations.

Rivers and Streams

Using elevation data and the Caribbean Handbook on Risk Management I’ve started adding the localisation of more streams and rivers.

Communities

I’ve added all the communities name from St Lucia Open Data. The localisation of the settlement center come from personnal knowledge and satellite view so it’s not very accurate but the name of general area should be correct.

Paths and tracks

I’ve added new path and tracks, from satellite view and GPS tracks.

… See full entry

How well mapped is a town in OSM? There are many ways to answer that question depending on how you define “well mapped-ness” (or just mappedness). One simple approach is to look at the number of points of interest (POI) mapped. My assumption is that POI are a higher order feature: mappers establish a base layer of roads first, then move on to enriching the map with POI. So having more POI in an area could be a proxy for mappedness. A benefit is that it’s easy to measure. All you need is the POI data from OSM, and town / city boundaries. I took a stab at it. Here’s a preview:

Prepare the data

Getting POI

We need POI from OSM as the quality indicator. As a proxy for POI, I use nodes that have a name tag. This lets me sidestep the curious OSM attribute hierarchy that would require selecting subsets of tourism, shop, amenity and a few other attribute keys from the data. There’s two ways to go about this. For smaller areas you could use Overpass, using a query like this one:

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Last week, MAFF (Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Japan) has published farmland data for entire Japan.

It is under MAFF original license, but it allows pretty similar to JP Gov’s Open License. (based on JP Gov’s default one, but seems more open) I guess it need to ask them if we could use/import them to OSM, but I hope we have a chance :)

Sample

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After a 6+ year hiatus, I have resumed working on OSM entries, for my local area of travel. Mostly this covers Gilchrist, Levy and Dixie counties in Florida, with occasional visits to Gainesville (Alachua county) and Ocala (Marion county).

The “largest Rolls-Royce funeral fleet in the world”

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Ann and I found a steam locomotive on static display in Ashgabat yesterday! I’ve explored that neighborhood previously but not seen this!

I found the piste:grooming description from the ‘Piste maps’ (osm.wiki/Piste_Maps#Grooming) or the Key:piste:grooming (osm.wiki/Key:piste:grooming) pages that was derived from the earlier not very clear. I’ve made an attempt to re-write it to document actual usage here:

osm.wiki/Talk:Key:piste:grooming#Page_rewrite_proposal

I’d like to have some comments if you think I missed something. This is about actual usage and better comprehension. If the values re-used from one type of piste to another does not suits you, it’s another story that can be dealt with later.

Yves

I have imported some 4500 place names for North Eastern Greenland - most if it an uninhabited national Park - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Greenland_National_Park

The names are all points, so you are all invited to assist in finishing the job of assigning the names to the correct landscape features.

The source database, the change sets, How and why, written permission etc. can all be seen at http://xoz.dk/public/nordost

I have myself fixed the majority of islands. Most just need the name assigned to the existing outline and the temporary point deleted.

For most of the rest the outline first have to be closed (so far beyond my skills) or established.

All assistance is welcome.

I’ve noticed a spate of small edits of people adding single driveways in the areas I’ve been mapping so it has brought me back to a question I’ve never quite come up with a satisfactory answer for:

At what point is a driveway so long that it should be added to the map?

Most driveways in this area are only a few car lengths long and it feels a little bit ridiculous to add all of those, on the other end of the scale you’ve got driveways to houses off Mandarin Road that are 300+ yards long that probably should be

What’s the cut off point between those two?

I haven’t come up with an answer that I find satisfying yet, so have been leaving it alone, but it’d be nice to make this whole thing a bit more systematic, instead of a hodgepodge of single driveways being added