For the past few weeks I’ve been making a concerted effort to map solar panels across rural areas of North & Central Wales (Powys, Gwynedd and Ynys Mon - Anglesey), so far with good results. I’m using a thorough search technique which looks at individual clusters of buildings from Ordnance Survey Open Data (which is complete for Great Britain). This means I see lots of other things which need mapping, but from experience I know it’s important to focus on the specific task. However, I have followed up some of the more striking things, which I plan to report in a series of posts.

First up was a striking structure in the middle of farmland on the Llyn Peninsula. It was pretty obviously a high-tech milking machine: milking parlour seems a bit quaint for a pretty sophisticated bit of kit.

Bing Imagery (close-up view).

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Parcel lockers are a newly approved feature in OpenStreetMap. They are now included in the “Communication” category with a box symbol. I also included the deprecated tags vending=parcel_pickup;parcel_mail_in, vending=parcel_pickup and vending=parcel_mail_in. These will render with a bright red symbol to indicate deprecation, also there’s a warning in the popup.

• Do you know of more tags which should be indicated as deprecated? I was thinking about adding some QA features for some time, so this is a good opportunity.
• There’s a new string to translate for this deprecation warning. Find the translation system here.

I’m running for reelection to the OpenStreetMap U.S. board of directors. In my 14 years of grassroots mapping, organizing local communities, and evangelizing OSM, I’ve witnessed the community and ecosystem grow tremendously while remaining true to its humble roots.

The past year has proved that big things start small. Who could’ve predicted that a complaint from a park manager would turn into a thoughtful Trails Working Group, or that an offhand comment in a long Slack thread would inspire our community’s cartographers to come out of the woodwork and collaborate on a new OSM Americana renderer? We tend to think of OpenHistoricalMap as a daunting blank slate compared to OSM, but you should’ve seen people’s eyes light up at WikiConference North America when they learned about the project. You make all of this possible through your creativity, hard work, and financial support; the board is right here alongside you to connect the dots and grease the wheels.

OSMUS has matured to the point that the board no longer needs to run the day-to-day affairs of the organization, which frees us up to do what we’re better at. It’s up to us to have a big-picture, long-term vision for the organization. We funnel the U.S. community’s many needs into a coherent strategy. As representatives of the community, we engage with other communities and organizations, seeking to turn their interest in OSM into a source of energy and diversity for the project. Collectively, we support our staff by providing ideas, scrutiny, and encouragement in healthy doses.

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Hello and thank you for reading why I’d like to continue serving on the OpenStreetMap U.S. Board for 2022!

Serving on the board this past year has been a great honor and learning experience, but it has been too short a time, especially during a pandemic, for me to help the OpenStreetMap U.S. community and expand the awareness of project in the way I’d like.

There are three particular avenues along which I have been helping support our executive director, Maggie Cawley, and the OSM U.S. organization increase the reach of OpenStreetMap:

1. Education Connections – expanding the awareness of OSM among students as something to which they can contribute as well as use as a data source
2. Community Connections – encouraging local groups to engage in OSM to help address their community needs
3. Professional Connections – opening communication with government entities to create symbiotic relationships with OSM

I have spent the past year working on creating these types of connections. For example, I am facilitating the Trails Working Group along with Maggie, to help federal and other land managers work cooperatively with OpenStreetMap. The progression I envision is building more structures within OSMUS to make initiating and maintaining these kind of connections; either with academics groups, diverse communities or government entities; more approachable.

My main goal is growing the OSM community in an open and equitable manner.

Paraphrasing what I wrote last year, because it is still true: I am a scientist and outdoorsperson at heart. I have a degree in earth sciences and turned to geospatial technologies through a research project. I presently work in an academic library as a geospatial data scientist supporting students and faculty. I introduce OpenStreetMap whenever possible through research consultations and the MaptimeMileHigh meetup group I run.

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Who am I?

Hello, my name is Daniela Waltersdorfer, although to some I’m known as Dani. I am from Lima, Peru and after some moves, my family and I ended in the U.S. Fast-forward to now, after a few moves on my own, and now I find myself as a resident of the wonderful District of Columbia. I’ve had the pleasure and joy of serving in the OSMUS Board for the past two years, two very special and difficult years. As a professional I work in the Transportation Industry, where I help many transportation agencies with their transit, logistics, supply-chain, and asset management needs. I love cities and advocate for proper accessibility and mobility for people and goods. In the past, I’ve led Maptime Boston and Maptime Miami, where I (along with my awesome co-leads) provided GIS and mapping education to the local communities, led mapathons, and hosted a space for everything map-related in our urban areas. In 2019 I joined in on the OSM US Code of Conduct Committee, developed to lead efforts to foster a diverse and inclusive OSM US community, and in 2021 the first ever and this first ever OSMU US Code of Conduct was published (osm.wiki/Foundation/Local_Chapters/United_States/Code_of_Conduct_Committee/OSM_US_Code_of_Conduct#OpenStreetMap_US_Code_of_Conduct). Last year I committed to make this, our community, more welcoming. Albeit it being a difficult year, I believe what we learned from the obstacles in 2020 pertaining to the COVID-19 Pandemic, led us to be optimistic and proactive. Listed below, you can find some of the initiatives and pushes that I was involved in this past year, with the help of our super Executive Director, as an OSMUS Board Member:

• Continue hosting Mappy Hours - A great way to engage our community from all over the U.S. in a virtual setting

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Currently learning the ropes at Unique Mappers Network Nigeria. Glad to have been introduced to this project and looking forward to future events.

Este artículo hace parte de una serie de artículos relacionados con notas:

• Las notas de OpenStreetMap.
• Manipulación de notas.
• Análisis de notas.
• Tipos de notas.
• Finalización proyecto de cerrado de notas en Colombia.

Recomendaciones de resolución de notas

Idioma

Normalmente, las notas que se resuelven son del área o país donde uno vive. Por ejemplo, en mi caso es en Colombia donde hablamos español. Pero no todos los que crean notas aquí hablan español, ya que puede haber turistas de otros países que aportan al mapa. Si bien yo domino el francés y el inglés, y por lo tanto puedo entender las notas escritas en esos idiomas. Aunque también me he encontrado con notas creadas en Colombia escritas en alemán, checo, árabe e inclusive turco. Como son otros idiomas que no manejo, aprovecho de la utilidad de Google Translate con la opción de identificar idioma, y me ha ayudado a resolver muchas notas.

En estos casos de notas en otros idiomas, preferiblemente las respondo en inglés si no domino el idioma en que se crearon. Si no dominara el inglés, respondería en español, pero haría el esfuerzo de traducir la nota de resolución para comunicarme con quien la creó, indicando cómo fue que la resolví, y en ese caso volvería a usar Google Translate.

En el caso de las notas anónimas, puede tomar un poco menos importancia de responder en el mismo idioma de creación; sin embargo, hay varias utilidades que las crean en otro idioma, como las de Maps.me cuya plantilla es en inglés. Aunque, puede que las personas que las crearon estén pendientes de la resolución.

Plantillas de respuestas

Dependiendo de las respuestas que quiera dar, se puede crear una plantilla para copiar/pegar como parte de la respuesta. Sin embargo, se recomienda usar una plantilla para el cuerpo de nota, pero incluyendo algo puntual sin plantilla que explique la resolución.

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Place to Work.

Place for Check in.

Recently someone asked how to find OSM users who’ve left a changeset comment, but have not edited themselves. (Technically the initial challenge was for a one line bash script 😉).

Here’s how to do it.

In OpenStreetMap, people can change their username, but OSM data provides an unchanging numeric user id (uid) for users, which we use here.

First download the dump file, from the OpenStreetMap data download serivce (planet.osm.org) ⁽¹⁾.

aria2c --seed-time=0 https://planet.openstreetmap.org/planet/discussions-latest.osm.bz2.torrent

This will download discussions-YYMMDD.osm.bz2⁽²⁾, which is currently about 5 GiB.

I had to write a new tool, anglosaxon to easily parse large XML files like this into a TSV file format⁽³⁾. This programme works on all XML files, maybe it’s useful for other problems you might have. Install that first.

bzcat discussions-220110.osm.bz2 \
  | anglosaxon \
   -S -o changeset_id --tab -o changeset_uid --tab -o comment_uid --nl \
   -s comment -v ../../id --tab -V ../../uid NO_CHANGESET_UID --tab -V uid NO_COMMENT_UID  --nl \
   | gzip > changeset-comments.tsv.gz

This took about 45 minutes to run on my machine, and the output is about 4 MiB (19 MiB uncompressed), and has about 805,000 lines. This step takes the longest.

We create the list of all uids who have opened a changeset:

zcat changeset-comments.tsv.gz | cut -f2 |uniq|sort |uniq > changeset-uids.tsv

Then a list of all uids who have left a changeset comment:

zcat changeset-comments.tsv.gz | cut -f3 |uniq|sort|uniq > comment-uids.tsv

Then we compare, what’s in one but not the other.

comm -13 changeset-uids.tsv comment-uids.tsv |sort -n > uids-comment-without-changeset.tsv

Et voilà! Sin é! And there’s your results. 🙂 The file is 29 KiB, and has ~3,500 entries. I’m surprised it’s so high.⁽⁴⁾

You can find all the changesets that a uid has commented on with this command, (replace UID with the uid)

zcat changeset-comments.tsv.gz | grep -P "\tUID$" | cut -f1

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When we create a goal of how to increase the number of mappers in a community we have to take into account who will consume and how this data reached the final public, it is a proportional account, the greater the number of consumers the greater the number of mappers in the region. We need to consider OpenStreetMap as a complex ecosystem that goes beyond the open mapping community and that each group has specific needs. I propose that to better understand the OSM ecosystem we divide it into three groups of users: consumers, distributors and producers, and exercise a little reflection on each group

Consumers: are users who use the map as an end product for navigation, data visualization, planning, search, etc.. without contributing actively.

• How do they access the maps? (whether for navigation, transportation, exploring, trails, etc.)
• How often do you use maps?
• What impediments do you have to use OSM in your daily life?

Producers: all those who actively contribute to the map the known mappers.

• What is the profile of mappers in the region?
• What problems do these mappers face? (socio-economically)
• What tools do they use to map?
• How can we motivate these mappers?
• What are the objectives of the mappers for the region?

Distributors we can classify distributors as those who use the map as a basis for their applications within the communities such as a government that needs to disseminate geographic data or a company that needs its consumers to find its physical stores or any application that needs a map to show its data.

• How can we attract more distributors?
• What is stopping a distributor from using OSM?
• How can we improve our tools to attract more distributors?
• What data do distributors in the region need?

By asking these questions we can get a more complete profile about each group and define ways to target each group according to their interests and needs.

com esse codigo de exemplo você consegue pesquisar em qualquer area escolas que ja estejam mapeadas no OSM. Execute esse codigo no site; https://overpass-turbo.eu/

copie o codigo abaixo para o site;

https://overpass-turbo.eu/

e em seguida execute o mesmo, com o resultado clique em exportar e em seguida faça o Download do arquivo em Geojosn, feito isso você pode mapear no editor Josm ou em outro Editor de sua Preferencia.

/* This has been generated by the overpass-turbo wizard. The original search was: “escola” */ [out:json][timeout:25]; // gather results ( // query part for: “escola” node“amenity”=”school”; way“amenity”=”school”; relation“amenity”=”school”; ); // print results out body; >; out skel qt;

with this example code you can search in any area for schools that are already mapped in OSM. Run this code on the website; https://overpass-turbo.eu/

copy the code below to the site;

https://overpass-turbo.eu/

and then run it, with the result click on export and then download the file in Geojosn, done that you can map it in the Josm editor or in another editor of your choice.

Raphael de Assis Recife/PE.

Zabrałem się ostatnio za poprawę przystanków oznaczonych dawno temu. Z dzisiejszej perspektywy błędne jest tagowanie węzłów highway=bus_stop na drogach - powinny być w miejscu oczekiwania.

W Polsce miejscem z wieloma takimi błędami jest Metropolia GZM. Poniżej opiszę jak ja poprawiam te błędy.

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Problem users, whether it be vandals, trolls, spammers, or undisclosed/”rogue” organized mapping projects, is considered a problem all across OSM, but I would like to bring up some top examples of notorious problem users and major incidents involving organized mapping groups from the Philippines. Such edits are a perennial problem in the Philippines OSM community, and particularly in the time of COVID, I think the extended mass quarantines has make this problem worse as more people will be spending time in front of their computer, laptop, cellphone or tablet. While we have a ticket system to monitor suspicious editing activity, I feel it’s kind of Wild Wild West in OSM in the Philippines; new users are increasing (usually ones who only edit a few features, usually in their home area, before riding off into sunset) and not everyone will be patrolling the map for fishy changesets.

Vandals/trolls

bryanpiczon

Long-term vandal, often adding fantasy features usually in the Eastern Visayas region of the Philippines. Has abused multiple accounts. Mostly interested in power lines and roads. Also vandalized areas outside the Philippines,

Joey Samson

Vandalism related to speculative real estate and transportation projects, especially around Manila. Some edits resulted in mass deletions (e.g. a former movie theater south of Manila). Also pesters users to add admin boundaries. 2 accounts traced so far (1 deleted following block)

Niwre Erv Apotseg

Vandal from Mindanao. Mostly duplicated roads, but also have added fictional features. Comments often nonsensical alphabet soup. Had 3 sock puppets.

Mass copying from GMaps

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امام صادق علیه‌السلام فرمود: مصلحت زندگى و معاشرت اجتماعى، به پیمان‌ه‏اى پر می‌ماند که دو سوم آن هوش و زیرکى، و یک‌سومش نادیده گرفتن و تجاهل است‏.

Bonjour ! Je contribue depuis quelques années et ce que j’apprécie le plus, c’est la contribution de terrain. J’ai pu expérimenter plusieurs styles et cette entrée du journal a pour but de vous montrer ces styles, d’en discuter en commentaire et de voir comment je pourrais améliorer tout ça.

À pied

Édition directe

Quand je vais sur le terrain pour une contribution, j’ai le plus souvent sur moi uniquement mon téléphone android. J’utilise plusieurs applications qui me permettent la contribution.

StreetComplete

StreetComplete est l’application que j’utilise le plus souvent maintenant pour la contribution sur le terrain. C’est une application qui propose des « quêtes » sous forme de petites questions simples et rapides positionnées sur les éléments de la carte qui ne sont pas entièrement qualifiés. Par exemple, si la carte montre un bac de recyclage, l’application demandera ce qu’on a le droit d’y jeter et cela contribue une nouvelle donnée dans OSM.

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Never Stop learning Because OpenStreetMap Never Stop upgrading

We’ve got to know that slow by slow makes journey. I encourage Local communities as well as underrepresented ones ,Mothers , Girls To keep mapping as long as it gives fun and no specific time to do so. Map in your lovely moments slow by slow we shall have a Women community of active Mappers.

OSM Rwanda community.

As many of you know, over the last 6 months or so, we have been reimagining what the future of the Tasking Manager could look like for HOT and the wider Humanitairan and OSM communities.

We have taken the time to reflect and consult in an effort to create a new model for Tasking Manager that aspires to get the Tasking Manager back to its community software roots. You can read about the ‘TM Tomorrow’ here to get up to speed and find (or contribute) questions and answers you may also have.

As the next step in the TM Tomorrow journey, we are now looking for an individual who would like to volunteer as a community caretaker for the Tasking Manager and are open to anyone who would like to express their interest in this position. You can read the full position description here >

Position description tldr;
* Expected time commitment is about 5 hours a week.
* Responsibilities include, project direction, roadmaps and issue prioritisation.
* Will be supported by TM Maintainers, hot_tech collective facilitator, and hot_tech in general.

A few questions that have arisen since we first started talking about this idea that may be helpful to those considering expressing their interest (or feedback).

Q: Why are you doing this?
The short answer to this is to reduce our control and reignite the collective. HOT recognises its role in taking primary control for the project in recent years and the effects of this (and recognise those effects haven’t always been positive). While this did allow us to move things forward, we also recognise our control has reduced engagement of our collective of contributors, stakeholders and users. Moving forward, we want to reduce HOT’s control of the project and shift power back into the collective, where HOT serves and supports the collective, rather than substituting it.

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joined OpenMap

“Cartographic generalization, or map generalization, <…> is a core part of cartographic design.”

Yet it is quite often unknown or understood incorrectly/partly. This article has a pretty good description of generalisation, it’s purpose, history and main operators with some examples of where OSM-Carto is missing generalisation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartographic_generalization