Embark on a thrilling Chitwan jungle safari and immerse yourself in the vibrant ecosystem of Nepal’s Terai region. Here’s a guide to help you plan your adventure:
Safari Options:
Jeep Safari: A popular choice, offering a comfortable and efficient way to explore the park’s diverse landscapes. Traverse through grasslands, forests, and riverbanks while searching for wildlife with an
Embark on a thrilling Chitwan jungle safari and immerse yourself in the vibrant ecosystem of Nepal’s Terai region. Here’s a guide to help you plan your adventure:
Safari Options:
Jeep Safari: A popular choice, offering a comfortable and efficient way to explore the park’s diverse landscapes. Traverse through grasslands, forests, and riverbanks while searching for wildlife with an experienced naturalist guide.
Canoe Safari: Glide along the Rapti River and enjoy a unique perspective of the park’s aquatic life. Spot crocodiles, gharials, and a variety of bird species while soaking in the tranquil surroundings.
Walking Safari: For the adventurous, a walking safari provides an intimate encounter with the jungle. Accompanied by a skilled guide, navigate the trails on foot, heightening your senses and increasing your chances of spotting wildlife. Note: This option carries a higher risk and requires careful adherence to safety guidelines.
Elephant Back Safari (Consider Ethical Implications): While traditionally a common method, ethical concerns regarding elephant welfare are growing. Think carefully about the impact on these animals and consider alternatives like jeep safaris. These safaris offer a unique vantage point and access to areas inaccessible by jeep, but their ethical implications should be carefully considered.
What to Expect:
Wildlife Encounters: Chitwan boasts a rich variety of wildlife, including the endangered one-horned rhinoceros, Bengal tigers (though sightings are rare), elephants, leopards, sloth bears, deer, monkeys, and a plethora of bird species.
Expert Guides: Knowledgeable guides accompany all safaris, providing insights into the park’s flora, fauna, and ecosystem.
Duration: Safaris can range from a couple of hours to a full day, depending on the chosen activity and itinerary.
Tips for an Unforgettable Safari:
Book in Advance: Secure your safari in advance, especially during peak season, to avoid disappointment.
Choose Your Adventure: Select a safari type that aligns with your fitness level, interests, and budget.
Optimal Timing: Early mornings and late afternoons are generally the best times for wildlife sightings as animals are most active during these cooler periods.
Dress the Part: Opt for light, neutral-colored clothing that blends with the surroundings. Long sleeves and pants offer protection from insects and the sun.
Essential Gear: Don’t forget binoculars for closer views of wildlife and a camera to capture the memorable moments.
Respect Wildlife: Maintain a safe distance from animals and adhere to your guide’s instructions to avoid disturbing them.
By following these tips and choosing the safari that best suits your preferences, you’re sure to have an incredible experience exploring the wilderness of Chitwan National Park.
A few days ago, I started my mapping project for Jāņupe. The main objectives of this project are to add all the missing houses in the area, re-tag the existing ways and some nodes, and retrace the residential and allotment zones.
Current goals:
Add houses:
I will add all missing (unadded) houses in Jāņupe and neighboring settlements to make the map look more beautiful and updated. The c
A few days ago, I started my mapping project for Jāņupe. The main objectives of this project are to add all the missing houses in the area, re-tag the existing ways and some nodes, and retrace the residential and allotment zones.
Current goals:
Add houses:
I will add all missing (unadded) houses in Jāņupe and neighboring settlements to make the map look more beautiful and updated. The current state of the map in that area is really not good, in some places, the map hasn’t been updated for 5+ years.
Re-tagging:
I will re-tag most places and roads in this area, as well, I’m going to be adding highway = turning_circle in places where they haven’t been added, and changing residential road tags to living street tags.
Retracing areas:
I will trace and re-trace most allotment and residential areas in the area, since most are wrongly drawn.
Upcoming challenges:
While I’m looking forward to work ahead, I will face some challenges like outdated data (for example some cadaster buildings are wrongly drawn or are outdated), or not much available resources to use.
I aim to finish this project in the next 2-3 weeks, breaking the project down into manageable parts. :)
I’m still late : I was supposed to do a municipality with the letter H today. I probably won’t do the letter I tomorrow either, nor Wednesday, however I’m pretty sure I will be able to on thursday.
Today, I worked on Gaillefontaine. For a rural city it is actually pretty diverse in terms of construction : the center has historic buildings, but it is mainly surrounded by single-family hom
I’m still late : I was supposed to do a municipality with the letter H today. I probably won’t do the letter I tomorrow either, nor Wednesday, however I’m pretty sure I will be able to on thursday.
Today, I worked on Gaillefontaine. For a rural city it is actually pretty diverse in terms of construction : the center has historic buildings, but it is mainly surrounded by single-family homes. The northwest has an industrial area though, and it looks like there are monuments on the southeast.
Volunteerism, commitment, and dedication are our hallmarks as YouthMappers!
Now, repeat after me: YouthMappers Ghana… Right!
We volunteered to contribute to developing a sustainable, eco-friendly urban environment in Koforidua collaboratively, and collectively (SDG 11).
Using OpenStreetMap to put streets and landmarks in the right places—because let’s be honest, we’ve all been “LOST” th
Volunteerism, commitment, and dedication are our hallmarks as YouthMappers!
Now, repeat after me: YouthMappers Ghana… Right!
We volunteered to contribute to developing a sustainable, eco-friendly urban environment in Koforidua collaboratively, and collectively (SDG 11).
Using OpenStreetMap to put streets and landmarks in the right places—because let’s be honest, we’ve all been “LOST” thanks to outdated maps nau…! 😅 This is what we do while building technical skills.
🖐🏾High five to all contributors, validators, Bullet OSM and OSM Ghana.
Un certain nombre de contributeurs à OpenStreetMap de la région toulousaine se rencontre de manière très informelle un samedi par mois dans les locaux d’Artilect.
J’aime beaucoup le projet et je pense être un contributeur assez actif, mais je ne me rends presque jamais à “nos réunions”, pour les raisons suivantes :
Ma Femme travaille dans son salon de thé le week-end, je
J’aime beaucoup le projet et je pense être un contributeur assez actif, mais je ne me rends presque jamais à “nos réunions”, pour les raisons suivantes :
Ma Femme travaille dans son salon de thé le week-end, je garde donc les enfants.
les enfants, surtout le dernier a souvent un plateau ou un tournoi de rugby
je dois faire les courses, le ménage et tutti quanti
Toulouse, ce n’est pas vraiment loin, mais ça le devient parce que les transports en communs le week-end c’est quand même moins fréquent qu’en semaine.
Bref, ce week-end, je n’avais pas les enfants et du temps. Je m’y suis donc rendu.
Au programme, roptat nous a présenté l’outil ptna, qui permet de cartographier et vérifier les lignes des différentes formes de transport en commun (train, bus, car). C’est un super outil et dans la région où je vie, il ne prend en compte que Tisséo : les lignes toulousaines (https://ptna.openstreetmap.de/results/FR/index.php). Si l’on regarde sur le portail opendata du gouvernement Il manque au moins Narbonne, Montpellier, Alès etc. Il y a donc beaucoup de chose à intégrer, à vérifier, Bref une présentation bien utile.
J’ai lancé l’idée d’aller dans le Gers pour la prochaine cartofête et de le faire dans le premier semestre de l’année prochaine, car un certain nombre de personnes présent sont déjà complétement occupés d’ici à la fin de l’année. Je ferrais prochainement une annonce sur les forums.
В недавней дискуссии на тему внешнего хранилища 3d моделей уважаемый pfg21 написал:
в полноценных модельках есть/нужны текстурные наложения, а формат осм - текстовый.
Вне всякого сомнения, текстурированные модели лучше, чем нетекстурированные.
♦
Но каким образом текстовый формат противоречит наличию/необходимости текстурных наложений,
В недавней дискуссии на тему внешнего хранилища 3d моделей уважаемый pfg21 написал:
в полноценных модельках есть/нужны текстурные наложения, а формат осм - текстовый.
Вне всякого сомнения, текстурированные модели лучше, чем нетекстурированные.
Но каким образом текстовый формат противоречит наличию/необходимости текстурных наложений, я как ни стараюсь, понять не могу.
Cделать внешнюю информационную помойку базу абы как сделанных 3D моделей, причем с растровыми текстурами, за 20 лет ни у кого не получилось, даже у гугла с его 3D Warehouse. Его осмовский аналог, 3dmr за шесть лет своего существования собрал 40 (прописью: сорок ) моделек, причем даже не все из них здания.
Гугл от своей информационной помойки тоже отказался, кажется, в пользу фотограмметрии.
Тут бы задать себе вопрос, ПОЧЕМУ так. И другой вопрос, ЧТО бы могло взлететь вместо этого.
Вот например osm2world умеет и в текстурные наложения, и даже в полигональные окна.
Для создания окон osm2world ориентируется на теги window:* , а прикол в том, что для них не то что пропозала, ни слова в вики нету. Я их обнаружил совершенно случайно.
HOW IT STARTED -
Joining the open-source community was one of the most significant decisions I made during my undergraduate studies. I have always been captivated by maps and the way they visually represent the natural world. My passion for geography, combined with my interest in subjects like mathematics and physics, naturally led me to
Whoof!
It’s my first Diary entry.
HOW IT STARTED -
Joining the open-source community was one of the most significant decisions I made during my undergraduate studies. I have always been captivated by maps and the way they visually represent the natural world. My passion for geography, combined with my interest in subjects like mathematics and physics, naturally led me to explore the open-source community and its diverse range of tools. Moreover, the humanitarian aspect of the open-source movement resonated deeply with me, as I have always been inclined towards volunteering and contributing to community development.
I became a member of the YouthMappersFUTA chapter in 2021, shortly after enrolling in college. From that point forward, I actively participated in various community initiatives, including mapathons and other collaborative projects. Over the years, I have held several leadership positions within the chapter, serving as General Secretary, Project Manager, and currently, as the Immediate President.
SOTM NIGERIA 2024 -
SOTM Nigeria 2024 marked my inaugural participation in an open-source conference. The event, held at the African Regional Institute for Geospatial Information Science and Technology (AFRIGIST), in OAU Nigeria, focused on the theme of “AI-Assisted Mapping, Drone, and Open Geospatial for SDGs.”
Prior to the conference, we diligently planned how to mobilize 25 registered participants from our chapter, following the notification of invitation received from the host, Unique Mappers Network, Nigeria. The journey from Akure, Ondo State, to Ife, Osun State, was a memorable one, filled with anticipation. Upon arrival at the venue, we were warmly welcomed and escorted to our assigned accommodations.
The conference commenced with a vibrant mapathon party on the day of our arrival, during which we contributed to a project on the OpenStreetMap US tasking manager. This engaging session was expertly facilitated by Calvin Mentor, who joined us from OSM Ghana.
DAY 1 -
The following day, the conference program kicked off with an insightful presentation by Prof. Lazarus Ojigi. In his thought-provoking address, Professor Ojigi emphasized the limitations of traditional data acquisition, analysis, and visualization methods. He highlighted how AI has revolutionized the field, saving time and increasing productivity. Furthermore, he provided a clear explanation of the hierarchical structure of AI technology, starting with data science as its foundation, branching into machine learning, and culminating in deep learning. Deep learning, a subset of AI, empowers machines to perform remarkable tasks such as object identification and predictive modeling.
Following Professor Ojigi’s presentation, we were treated to six academic presentations delivered by various conference participants.
I was also honored to lead a semi-workshop session, where I shared my expertise on leveraging open geospatial data and tools to extract valuable insights. The title of my presentation was “UNLOCKING GEOSPATIAL INSIGHTS: A QGIS AND OSM TUTORIAL.” During the session, I demonstrated how to install the QuickOSM extension in the QGIS environment, write effective query commands to retrieve data from the OSM database, and visualize the data for easy understanding and interpretation. This interactive experience was truly refreshing.
DAY 2 -
On the second day of the conference, the focus shifted to the essential elements of high-quality maps, both manually and using AI-assisted created maps. These includes: title, grids, north arrow, legends, scale, dating and reference map. Next up, Miss Adeola, the Chief Executive of SheFlies, delivered an inspiring address, encouraging women to confidently showcase their capabilities in the GIS and drone industries. She also urged men to actively support gender equality by providing opportunities for women to contribute to the field.
NETWORKING -
The conference brought together members from other open-source communities, including YouthMappersOAU, Unique Mappers Network from Port Harcourt, and Calvin Mentor from OSM Ghana.
CONCLUSION -
The conference was a memorable experience filled with moments of unlearning, relearning, and acquiring new knowledge and skills related to geospatial technology. The emphasis on AI-assisted concepts, which streamline tasks and enhance productivity, was particularly valuable. I look forward to applying the knowledge acquired and future editions of SOTM Nigeria.
I want to seize this opportunity to express my appreciation to my co-executives who were able to avail themselves in the planning and mobilization of participants for this conference: Adesewa and Kadiri Blessing. The management of funds and dialogue with the bus driver was successful and itch free. Also, my sincere appreciation to Olufemi Damilola, Akintola Mercy, Ademoyero Victor, Babalola Bukola and Adeyemo Oluwafemi for their sponsorship support.
Guillaume Rischard shared the OpenStreetMap Foundation 2024 chairperson’s report.
Craig Allan, Laura Mugeha, Maurizio Napolitano, and Héctor Ochoa Ortiz have been elected as new OpenStreetMap Foundation board members. A total of 740 ballots were cast out of 1,971 eligible voters in this election.
Mapping
There are several useful tutorials on iD editor and JOSM in Japanese. For example, Kisaragi’s tutorial ► on how to split an area on OpenStreetMap using the iD editor and Kohei Otsuka’s guide ► to splitting and joining OSM objects in JOSM.
Requests for comments have been made on these proposals:
brt=* for indicating if a route=bus is a bus rapid transit service.
access_key=* to describe places that are accessible using a (centralised) key system.
public_transport=access_space for mapping areas within a stop place such as a concourse or booking hall, immigration hall, or security area that is accessible by passengers, but without direct access for vehicles.
Voting is underway on the proposal sac_scale=strolling, indicating a wide and smooth trail, until Tuesday 29 October.
Community
In ‘It Started with a Road – Global South Version’ the Trufi Association imagines OSM and transportation justice transforming cities in the global South BEFORE car culture becomes endemic.
Justine shared her experience of participating in State of the Map 2024, held in Nairobi, Kenya.
Raquel Dezidério presented ► a proposal for harmonisation between the variables in Brazil’s National Register of Addresses for Statistical Purposes and OpenStreetMap tagging, specifically for educational establishments. Raquel asked for comments on the OSM Community forum. On the forum there is also another request for comments on the standardisation of addresses in Brazil.
Valerie Norton has expressed frustration about people mapping remote areas by guesswork, perhaps prompted by the iD editor’s listing of ‘issues’ in yellow.
Local chapter news
OpenStreetMap US launched the Community Project programme to support volunteer-run projects and technologies that benefit the OpenStreetMap community. OpenStreetMap Americana, a project inspired by the cartographic aesthetics of American paper maps, has been chosen as the first OSM US Community Project.
Events
With November approaching it’s time again for the #30DayMapChallenge, a chance to create maps based around different themes each day of November, posting using the hashtag #30DayMapChallenge. Stamen blogged some of their highlights from 2023 and 2022, if you would like to see samples of the work from previous years.
Oliver Rudzick and Katja Haferkorn shared ► a report from the 22nd FOSSGIS-OSM Community Meeting, held on 3 to 6 October in Essen, Germany.
Maps
Maeool tooted that Cartes, an OpenStreetMap-based online map, now supports a globe view feature when zoomed out, powered by the MapLibre GL v5 pre-release.
Software
HOT has added MVT and PMTiles as formats to their Export Tool, along with the option to include metadata elements such as timestamp and user information.
Programming
Tykayn has improved their Mapillary export script to be able to retrieve Mapillary sequences from multiple users and import them into Panoramax in bulk. They offered to do this for anyone who wanted it, and were able to rescue over 14 million photos. Tykayn gave a presentation > explaining the implications and methods used at the State of the Map France.
Edward Betts delivered a talk at GeoPython 2024 on using Python-based tools to help link Wikidata and OpenStreetMap.
Releases
Christoph Hormann announced that v5.9.0 of the OpenStreetMap Carto stylesheet (the default stylesheet on the OSM website) has been released. He says: ‘Once changes are deployed on openstreetmap.org it will take couple of days before all tiles show the new rendering.’ So stay tuned.He outlined the new changes in his email:
Adding rendering of shop=hearing_aids with a dedicated symbol
Restoring rendering of name labels for natural=reef
Adding rendering of lines with barrier=jersey_barrier
Removing rendering of railway=preserved in favor of interpreting railway:preserved=yes on other railway=*
Removing rendering of shop=jewellery as synonym for shop=jewelry
Adding rendering of leisure=dance with a point symbol and label
Interpretation of transport mode specific access tags on roads/paths.
Christoph Hormann blogged about the new release of OSM Carto, where he explained that we have solutions for some very old problems now.
Did you know …
… mediawiki2latex? After the WikCon in Wiesbaden, Germany, the author Dirk Hünniger adapted this software, originally written for Wikipedia, to our OSM wiki so it can be used to create very good .pdf files.
… that Thunderforest offers ten different map tile set styles based on OpenStreetMap data?
Other “geo” things
France’s IGN offered ► us some excerpts from Maxime Blondeau’s soon to be published book Géoconscience, a work richly illustrated with surprising maps and immersive photographs, which reveal the vital and fascinating nature of our common habitat, the Earth.
Harel Dan tooted that there is an Easter egg in QGIS that allows you to play a 15 panel slider game, with your map, if you type ‘bored’ into the coordinate box.
In response to Hurricane Helene’s devastating effects across multiple states, the US Geological Survey (USGS) has activated its landslide event team and collected images and data in the southern Appalachian Mountains. This information was shared across multiple state and federal agencies to inform, prioritise resources, and better predict future events. The data can be accessed by the public on a newly launched USGS Landslide Observations Dashboard Map.
TeleGeography maintains an interactive and regularly updated Submarine Cable Map. These submarine cables keep us connected, but they can also occasionally become sources of friction.
Jacquelyne Germain, from Smithsonian Magazine, reviewed Native-Land.ca, an interactive map that shows the location of Indigenous territories around the world.
Upcoming Events
Where
What
Online
When
Country
Karlsruhe
Karlsruhe Hack Weekend October 2024
2024-10-19 – 2024-10-20
Cabecera Municipal Duitama
Estado del Mapa – Duitama 2024
2024-10-19
Yelahanka taluku
OSM Bengaluru Mapping Party
2024-10-19
Nonnweiler
Craftmapping Höckerlinie Otzenhausen
2024-10-19
Spatial Girls Network Webinar Launch
2024-10-19
Kalyani Nagar
OSM Mapping Party at TomTom
2024-10-19
Toulouse
Rencontre du groupe local de Toulouse
2024-10-19
[Online] 18th Annual General Meeting of the OpenStreetMap Foundation
2024-10-19
Amsterdam
A Synesthete’s Atlas: Cartographic Improvisations Between Eric Theise and Edward Schocker
2024-10-19
Mumbai
Mumbai Online Remote Mapping Pre-Party
2024-10-20
Berlin
DRK & HeiGIT Online Beginner Mapathon
2024-10-22
Berlin
OSM-Verkehrswende #63
✓
2024-10-22
City of Edinburgh
OSM Edinburgh pub meetup
2024-10-22
Flensburg
OK Lab Flensburg Community OSM Treffen
2024-10-23
Lübeck
147. OSM-Stammtisch Lübeck und Umgebung
2024-10-24
OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting
2024-10-25
Bologna
OpenStreetMap al Linux Day di Bologna
2024-10-26
中正區
台北城內商家mapping party暨慶賀MozTW 3.0喬遷之喜
2024-10-26
Mumbai
Mumbai Mapping Party
2024-10-26
City of South Perth
Social Mapping Sunday: Perth Zoo FREE TICKETS
2024-10-27
Bremer Mappertreffen
2024-10-28
Saint-Étienne
Rencontre Saint-Étienne et sud Loire
2024-10-28
San Jose
South Bay Map Night
✓
2024-10-30
Tentative: OSMF Affiliation Models brainstorming
2024-10-30
Amsterdam
Maptime Amsterdam: Autumn mapping party
2024-10-30
Wien
73. Wiener OSM-Stammtisch
2024-10-30
Düsseldorf
Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)
2024-10-30
Moers
Community-Hackday am 1. – 3. November 2024 im JuNo, Moers Repelen
2024-11-01 – 2024-11-03
Berlin
OSM Hackweekend Berlin 11/2024
2024-11-02 – 2024-11-03
Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.
Today, I worked on Fallencourt. This village is smaller than the previous ones I worked on for my challenge, however something big is nearby, the A28 highway (I’d guess it creates quite a lot of noise). There is a bus stop in the center, however it isn’t used as far as I know, apart maybe by school buses.
Link to today’s changeset
Today, I worked on Fallencourt. This village is smaller than the previous ones I worked on for my challenge, however something big is nearby, the A28 highway (I’d guess it creates quite a lot of noise). There is a bus stop in the center, however it isn’t used as far as I know, apart maybe by school buses.
a small project of mine over the last few years (in my spare time, when I’m not doing the job I get paid to do) is to map every building in the Kingston and new Malden area of SW London.
This is slow progress although I have now nearly finished all but a small part of Old Malden and an area of North Kingston. Although slow, the map does now look aesthetically significantly better than it
a small project of mine over the last few years (in my spare time, when I’m not doing the job I get paid to do) is to map every building in the Kingston and new Malden area of SW London.
This is slow progress although I have now nearly finished all but a small part of Old Malden and an area of North Kingston. Although slow, the map does now look aesthetically significantly better than it did two years ago. although I am aware it could be improved further by putting house numbers on each building, I do have to keep my mental health in check here.
The Previously patchy; Berrylands, Norbiton, and Surbiton have now all been finished with finishing Old Malden being my next project and then Coombe and Ham Kingston Vale, being my next major projects
I have always found it frustrating that people will often do one or two houses on the road and then get either bored (or do their own house).
These diary entries are more to help me keep track of what iv done to date as well as give a minor update to the larger community on the slow updates.
Yes I know, I already missed a day for my challenge. Apologies, I will do 2 cities tomorrow.
Today, I worked on Écalles-Alix. For once, it’s not only sngle-family detached houses, as there are a few semi-detached houses (yeah not much better but still)
Link to today’s changeset
Yes I know, I already missed a day for my challenge. Apologies, I will do 2 cities tomorrow.
Today, I worked on Écalles-Alix. For once, it’s not only sngle-family detached houses, as there are a few semi-detached houses (yeah not much better but still)
After writing to you in 2022 and 2023, you could think that these chairman reports would become pretty routine: compare a few numbers over time, tout the accomplishments of the OSMF board this year, and give a few paths for the coming year. I will be doing this, but in contrast to previous years, we do not have many positive changes to re
Dear OpenStreetMap Community and fellow mappers,
After writing to you in 2022 and 2023, you could think that these chairman reports would become pretty routine: compare a few numbers over time, tout the accomplishments of the OSMF board this year, and give a few paths for the coming year. I will be doing this, but in contrast to previous years, we do not have many positive changes to report on, because of the way the board has been (not) working. I will expand on why later, and talk about how I think the board should refocus in 2025. What might sound like board internal politics is actually, I think, at the core of how we organise as a project. This hasn’t been an easy report to write, which is why it comes so late.
We have 2088 members today, down from 2161 in December 2023, compared with about 2000 in December 2022. 1125 members today are associated members, and the 2024 membership campaign led by Arnalie at least helped diversify our membership’s geographic diversity. The next board should budget for changes to the website to recognise membership, and encourage qualifying mappers to join for an associate membership. It should also rethink the current complex membership structure, and look at technical improvements to the membership system.
We were happy to welcome Regrid, QGIS and Calimoto as silver corporate members in 2024.
Our number of registered users went down to 9851706 from 10.5 million as OWG cleaned up thousands of spam accounts. The number of nodes, ways and relations in the database keeps increasing at a normal rate, showing our growth and demonstrating how contributing to OpenStreetMap is important to many.
We celebrated our 20th birthday this year! What started off as Steve Coast’s hopeless crazy idea is now at the core of so many maps around the globe. I lose track of all the places where I see OpenStreetMap. At first they laughed at us, then they fought us, and maybe now we are winning? There is an infinity of things left to map, and almost as many improvements to be done to the project itself, but it has become impossible to imagine a world without OpenStreetMap.
On the finance technical side, we have much improved our budgeting system, with expenses rapidly getting reconciled with the budget, and the board getting regular finance reports that take little effort to generate. This is work that took a long time: I started it back when I was treasurer. What sounds like a dry internal accounting system is actually useful for fundraising, to be able to accurately show where we’re spending donations. I would like to thank Harrison Devine in particular for his precious help in setting this up and with our 2024 budget.
Map attribution is not (just) an ego thing: giving credit where credit is due is important to recruit new mappers, which helps improve the map. Mateusz and I built a reporting system for maps using our own tiles without attribution, to make it easy to track, contact and, if all else fails, block them. In the coming year, I hope OWG can send back attribution warning images instead of 404 errors. Enforcement against OSM-based maps using tiles from other providers remains an issue that the board should help tackle.
Paul Norman’s vector tile project, which I announced at the AGM a year ago, is progressing nicely. We should have basic deployment to the website soon, and the next board should immediately fund the next part of the project, the development of a style and schema that showcases OpenStreetMap’s richness and diversity, and the many possibilities of vector tiles.
That’s pretty much it when it comes to big actions from the board this year that will have a significant impact on you. Compared to what previous boards were capable of doing, or what the stated intentions of board members hav been, it’s slim. If you look at our recent board agendas, they are pretty bare. Why is that?
The board is bigger than one person, it is the sum of seven humans working together. This year, the board hasn’t been working well at all, with the behaviour of some people leading to aggression, factionalism and frustration, leaving the uninvolved board members who had to act as Solomons burnt out too.
When we have done work this year, it has been on internal policies and guidelines. The additional red tape suffocates other work, and has lost track of what is necessary and good for the project; we had nine circular resolutions for travel costs for the face to face this year.
In May, I called for the board to get training on non-violent communication training. It is very unfortunate that this hasn’t happened, and that some board members refused to have one on one chats.
I hope that with a batch of new board members, the atmosphere on the board will change, and that we can work more collaboratively again.
People join the OSMF board because they have the project’s best interests at heart. How that translates into action is different for everyone; I have, in my five years on the board now, seen what works and doesn’t. You can’t work by yourself, or against board members, or order people to perform work for you, or even be critical of someone if you want to be able to work with them in the future. Some people come on the board thinking they’ll finally be able to implement their ideas, and tell people what to do. This never works. You have to gently convince six others that the direction you want to go in is a good use of the board’s time. The most powerful thing you can do as a board member is listen to problems and answer “how can I help?”
I would like to conclude by thanking everyone who contributes to OpenStreetMap, especially the working group volunteers.
I was round that way this morning and confirm that there is no number 38 Crammond Place. One row finishes at 37 and the adjacent row starts at 39!
I have lived in North Muirton since 1973 and never realised this obscure fact until mapping the area.
I think, but don’t know for definite, that it is because there used to be (in the early years of NM) a council rent office in the row
I was round that way this morning and confirm that there is no number 38 Crammond Place. One row finishes at 37 and the adjacent row starts at 39!
I have lived in North Muirton since 1973 and never realised this obscure fact until mapping the area.
I think, but don’t know for definite, that it is because there used to be (in the early years of NM) a council rent office in the row 39-47 which maybe didn’t have a house number and this has caused a “missing” house when the rent office ceased to be.
In the unlikely event anyone who knows reads this stuff then please let me know.
Setiap tahunnya Ikatan Bujang Gadis Unsri mengadakan pemilihan Bujang Gadis Universitas Sriwijaya. Kegiatan ini diikuti oleh 60 peserta pra semi finalis Bujang Gadis Universitas Sriwijaya 2024. Tahun ini diselenggarakan di Aula D3 Fakultas Ekonomi Universitas Sriwijaya dan berlangsung selama bulan oktober. Peserta yang hadir berasal dari berbagai macam jurusan seperti ekonomi, keguruan, teknik,
Setiap tahunnya Ikatan Bujang Gadis Unsri mengadakan pemilihan Bujang Gadis Universitas Sriwijaya. Kegiatan ini diikuti oleh 60 peserta pra semi finalis Bujang Gadis Universitas Sriwijaya 2024. Tahun ini diselenggarakan di Aula D3 Fakultas Ekonomi Universitas Sriwijaya dan berlangsung selama bulan oktober. Peserta yang hadir berasal dari berbagai macam jurusan seperti ekonomi, keguruan, teknik, hubungan internasional dan lain sebagainya.
Pada kegiatan kali ini saya berkesempatan mengisi salah satu materi yaitu memperkenalkan definisi pemetaan, aplikasi pemetaan dan kegunaan dari peta. Tidak hanya untuk mahasiswa yang berasal dari disiplin ilmu geografi/pemetaan, namun sebagai pengetahuan dasar bagi setiap orang. Peta sangat bermanfaat dalam kehidupan sehari-hari, peta dapat membantu kita menuju lokasi yang diinginkan. Peta memuat informasi seperti titik koordinat, menentukan arah, jarak, luas, bentuk permukaan bumi, fenomena alam, serta pola sebaran bahkan informasi untuk penelitian.
Aplikasi pemetaan yang paling familiar digunakan dalam kegiatan sehari-hari adalah Google Map. Google Map biasa kita gunakan untuk mengetahui lokasi dan arah dari suatu tempat. Selain itu, kita bisa menggunakan ArcGIS, QGIS atau Openstreetmap (OSM) untuk memproses informasi dalam peta. Aplikasi pemetaan dapat diakses secara gratis dan berbayar. Bagi mahasiswa, OSM memiliki berbagai keuntungan karena gratis, tidak rumit bagi pemula, dan open source.
Open source memiliki arti terbuka bagi siapapun yang butuh untuk mengedit informasi dalam peta. Sebagai contoh, jika kita ingin memesan transportasi online namun terjadi kendala saat penjemputan atau pengantaran maka kita dapat mengedit jalan/bangunan/titik sesuai kebutuhan dan sesuai fakta di lapangan (local knowledge). Kita sebagai masyarakat setempat dapat membantu memperbarui peta karena setiap lokasi yang terdapat di dalam tempat bersifat dinamis. Bisa saja jalan tertutup, terbuka, banjir, jembatan terputus, tempat sudah tidak beroperasi kembali, dan lain sebagainya.
Setelah materi disampaikan banyak mahasiswa yang aktif bertanya dalam sesi tanya jawab terkait kegunaan OSM serta peluang kolaborasi di masa yang akan datang. Kemudian dilanjutkan sesi quiz dengan 5 macam hadiah yang bermanfaat bagi mahasiswa. Mahasiswa dengan antusias mengangkat tangan dan menjawab pertanyaan dengan benar. Dengan berlangsungnya acara ini, harapannya saya dapat menemukan mahasiswa yang tertarik pada kegiatan pemetaan. Semakin banyak yang berkontribusi, semakin banyak kolaborasi yang dapat dilakukan.
On the 10th June 2024 I gave a presentation to LRUG, the London Ruby Users Group, about being a software maintainer for the OpenStreetMap website codebase. The description of the talk was:
Maintaining one of the world’s largest non-commercial websites, OpenStreetMap, is a unique challenge. We’re a small, volunteer-based development team, not professional software developers. I will illustrate some of these challenges with a mixture of technical and organisational tips, tricks and recommendations, that you might find useful for your own teams and projects too.
Here’s a video that the team at LRUG kindly made (32 mins) which has the audio and the slides, and below that you’ll find the transcript.
Transcript
Hi everyone, my name is Andy. Every Wednesday is my volunteering day, it’s when I step away from normal work and I do some volunteer development work. So in the mornings I head to my desk, I open up the OpenStreetMap website github repo page and I have a quick check to see if there’s any pull requests that need my review.
Yeah there’s a few, there’s a few more, in fact there’s loads. At the moment we have 137 open pull requests, more than 500 open issues and you might be thinking the same as me which is where on earth do I even start!
So I’m Andy Allan, I’m one of the two volunteer maintainers for the OpenStreetMap website project.
Actually the other maintainer, Tom Hughes, has come along this evening so I need to be very careful about what I say as he’s an expert on things. When I’m not doing volunteer development work I’m the founder of a company called Thunderforest which builds commercial services based on OpenStreetMap data. This evening my talk is split into three parts, I’m going to give you background about OpenStreetMap, and also some background about the OpenStreetMap website project. I’m going to look at some of the challenges that we face, the organisational approaches that we use to deal with that, and then finally some of the technical implementation details which is great to be in front of a technical audience for a change so I actually get to put some code on the screen today.
So let’s start with some background.
OpenStreetMap, if you haven’t heard about it already, is a global volunteer open data mapping project, where we go out and we map all the details about the whole world from scratch.
The data gets used by hundreds of different websites and applications, businesses small like mine or large like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, they all incorporate OpenStreetMap data into their various mapping products.
Lots of people think of it as either a technical project or a data project but in my mind it’s actually a community project. It’s building the thousands of volunteer mappers who are willing to spend their time going out and mapping the world, and on a typical month we have more than 45,000 volunteer mappers who will be walking the streets adding information about their local areas into the system.
The part of this project that I’m talking about tonight is the Ruby on Rails app that powers the core website. So this is the initial commit by Steve Coast, the founder of OpenStreetMap back in 2006 so those of you with very long memories will realise that this is a Rails 1.0 era project that’s been continually maintained for almost two decades. Like most Rails projects, the split covers a few bases.
The first obviously is the website. We also have an XML and JSON API which allows third-party editors to edit OpenStreetMap and the project also contains the definitions for the core database of the project. It’s kind of hard for me to give an overview of such a large project in a small amount of time so here’s just a list of the models in the Rails app with some of the more interesting ones highlighted.
So as well as the OpenStreetMap data we have lots of community features, like we have user diaries, we can comment on changesets, we can block users, report, spam, all these kinds of things. If you’re familiar with the front page of OpenStreetMap, it’s worth me at this point mentioning that a lot of the stuff you see on the front page is not maintained by me and Tom, they are separate projects. So the rendered map images, the search, the routing engines, even the built-in editor and some of the other built-in tools are all separate projects, but the OpenStreetMap website is the one that pulls everything together.
So we have these user-facing separate projects that have some of the functionality of the site. We also have some behind-the-scenes external projects which are to do with speeding up the API, or distributing the data including publishing the data every minute. But like I say the OpenStreetMap website project ties everything together.
To give you an idea of the activity we’ve had 14,000 commits from over 200 individual people in the last 18 years. We’ve got a few thousand tests. Because it’s a global volunteer project it’s important that it’s translated so we have over 100 languages that the website is translated into.
I was shocked when I made that stat but it’s almost 2,000 different people have been involved in translating the website into these languages and we have just under 3,000 source strings in our en.yml file which leads to almost 200,000 translations and these are done by a separate project and automatically copied over into our repo for publication.
So the main challenge that I want to talk about tonight is that this is not developed in the same way as your typical commercial project. We don’t have a big team of people. We have two volunteer maintainers and a few volunteer developers. And for projects this size, this important, this heavily used, that’s quite different from your typical setup with teams of professional software developers, product managers, designers and so on in the background.
And our volunteer developers come along and make one of these pull requests.
It’s worth bearing in mind that there’s no candidate screening, there’s no technical interviews, no onboarding, no pair programming, no senior developers to point them in the right direction. It’s quite different. And because also they’re volunteers, regardless of technical ability, they also have their own priorities.
They have limited availability of how many hours a week they’re likely to dedicate and this has implications for the kind of features that we can develop, and how we want to maintain the project. So I want to dig into this a little bit and see some of the techniques that we use in order to handle the fact that all of our development is done both by volunteers and by people of varying skill levels.
One of the key things I like to focus on is making the developer experience as robust as possible and that involves a lot of linters.
So most of you are familiar with RuboCop and its sibling gems. We also use strong migrations which can catch a migration that might block one of these super huge tables if it needs an exclusive block. We use ERBLint for linting the view files. We use Brakeman to do security testing. We use something that you can barely see on the screen called Annotate which is a nice little gem. It puts comments describing your database tables into the model files and it makes it super easy for people to get started to know what the model does, much more so than digging into the database.
And we put all these into CI. And for those of you who think of RuboCop or any of these linters as a kind of like strict teacher making sure your double quotes are not single quotes or that the spaces in your hashes are consistent, that’s not really how I like to think of it. I like to think of it more as a form of automated code review.
Those kind of syntax layout things are not as interesting as the cops which will teach you something. And the great thing about putting these in CI is that our developers will get instant context specific feedback on the code that they’ve just written. And to me that’s much more important than expecting somebody to have read a Rails book or been on a tutorial or read something general because this is about specifically what they’re focused on.
So for example a Capybara RuboCop thing that might tell you how to make it work with asynchronous methods or going back to the example about database migrations, it turns out loads of the database migrations are safe if you’re doing specific things on specific versions of Postgres. And not only do I not expect the developers to know this, I don’t know it either. So this is super useful for me when I’m doing code reviews to know that I’ve got the backup of all of the collective wisdom of all of these different tools.
The second thing that I like to do is to really concentrate on refactoring. And that’s because our developers tend not to be Ruby experts who are starting work on OpenStreetMap. They’re OpenStreetMap experts who are learning how to do Ruby and Rails by reading what’s here already and copying what we’ve done in the past.
And for an 18-year-old project there’s a lot of things in various corners of the code base which is not how we would do it anymore. So it’s important to refactor this first, otherwise we just get pull requests with - aargh, wouldn’t merge that if I was you.
And the third thing is that we work hard to make sure we follow Rails standards and conventions because we don’t have much internal documentation.
We don’t have much time to explain to people how things work and what they do. So we rely heavily on the fact that if we follow the Rails conventions then there are tutorials, there are the guides, there are YouTube videos which will also explain things. So we shy away from doing our own curious things and try and stick to the main ones.
So for example we got rid of our own file handling to use Active Storage. We got rid of an external job queue in order to use Active Job and things like that. Whenever these new things appear in Rails framework we try and take advantage of them straight away.
When it comes to the technical matters we also need to approach them with the view that again our developers are not Rails experts. And the first topic I want to talk about is output safety. Whenever I’m testing stuff I like to put some HTML into my username because it makes it really obvious where we’ve forgotten to do it.
And when I first did this these horizontal rules started appearing all over the place which let me know we weren’t doing the output safety correctly. If you’re not sure why a horizontal rule isn’t important just imagine I’ve written a script tag instead. That opens you up to all kinds of cross-site scripting attacks.
A bit of history in Rails 3. By default nothing was escaped. So if you just put something into your view template it would show it straight away. You needed to figure out every time you were using anything that was user controlled like their own display name you had to escape it with the h function.
And obviously that leads to loads of places where that gets missed. And so in Rails 4 they switched it around and they created a thing called safe buffers, which means everything is escaped by default. If you have a helper that outputs HTML then it ends up double escaped.
And to help with this migration they created two little get out of jail free cards. One of which was calling html_safe on a string and then that would be escaped again, or the other one is calling raw. Now like I said before because our developers are often inexperienced and these are quite powerful tools, it leads to situations where they can easily make mistakes - especially if they’re copying what they see in one place and using it in another.
So I took a lot of time to go through all of our legacy code and refactor it to get rid of these html_safe safe and raws. And for the most part this was straightforward. The Rails translation system lets you mark translations as “we expect to see HTML in here” and therefore you don’t need to escape them you can get rid of that raw tag.
You can get rid of html_safe from your helpers by using certain things like there’s a safe_join which is aware of how SafeBuffers work and all the Rails ActionView tag helpers do that too.
The final challenge and the hardest one to deal with was flash messages because ActionDispatch is not, the flash system is not aware of SafeBuffers. It only takes Strings, Arrays or Hashes, and so if you have a flash message which has some HTML in it you need to come up with something - you can’t just commit it to flash because it will only take a string and it will think that it’s an unescaped string.
So if you go on to Stack Overflow or anywhere and say how do I put HTML in a flash message they all give something along these lines which is just put it as a string and then when it comes to the view call html_safe on it. Jobs a good’un.
But the problem with this is that html_safe does not escape anything. It’s a declaration by the developer that what you’re handling is definitely HTML safe. There is no possible code injection in this and in this case that’s fine because it’s a hard-coded string. There’s no user information there.
But we had a problem where one of our flashes said that we were blocking users so whenever a moderator blocked a user… Well one day one of the users had some script tags in their name, and the scripts ran. So despite this being what everybody says to do, no don’t do that.
We need another way of doing it which means we are using SafeBuffers and because we can’t do them from the current action to the future action, we can’t pass the safe buffers across, we need to think about using the SafeBuffer approach after the event.
So this is a method I found somewhere else I want to share with you guys which is to make a partial with whatever HTML you want in it. So we have a couple paragraph tags here. We take advantage of the fact that Flash can take hashes and say which partial we want, any locals that we want to pass it to, we can store that hash in the Flash and then a small helper at the end which detects if we are using a hash, calls that ActionView render on that hash and it will do exactly what you want. If you’re just passing strings that’s fine, just use the Flash message as is.
I think this is a really nice technique and I have yet to see it documented anywhere. I found it by digging through some MySociety code base, when they’d had the same problem and I thought - yeah, that works.
Internationalization, as I said before, is quite important for our project and one of the interesting quirks we came across recently actually shows some of the limitations of the Rails internationalization framework which I wasn’t previously aware of so I thought I could share that with you tonight as well.
Many of you have seen this before which is you can use, you can leverage Rails in order to choose what translation you want depending on how many things you have.
So if you have one cat, it will use this translation name that’s a singular. If you have multiple in English, then you can… it’s all the same… ‘cats’.
This is different in different languages. I lived in Poland a couple of years ago and so I learned in Poland they have three different plural forms. You have one for one, you can see that two, three and four have the same pluralization but five changes to a different pluralization. And this can be handled by the translation system, that’s not a problem. It is worth noticing though that not only two “koty” but also 22, 33, these also count as few in Polish.
So it’s more like the number behaves like few. Most things that end in a two, three or four count as few, most things that don’t count as many. So it’s not strictly one, few, many.
And this is important for all the situations where you want some special text for when you have nothing or something. So we have it for comments like there is no comment yet or I need a cat. When we were doing this, I have there are no comments as a separate translation until one day one of our translators popped up and said I can’t translate this into Latvian and that’s because this is not zero as in nothing, this is zero as in numbers that behave like a zero and in Latvian that’s zero but it’s also 10, 20, 30, 100, 140 and so on.
So they couldn’t have a translation which worked for both the special case of zero and also for 10, 15 and so on. And so we dug into this and in the Ruby internationalization framework, they have the standard six translation keys that work with the system - zero, one, two, few, many and other. And we saw most of these already.
But the more comprehensive approach is to have specifically zero and specifically one as translation keys and Ruby internationalization just treats these as aliases of zero and one and that blows up the whole approach to translating in Latvian. So if you want your translations to work, if you want a special message for the zero case, then you have to have a separate translation and then you can do the rest for counts.
Sounds pretty obscure, right? But we don’t want to make the same problem again and we don’t expect any of our developers to know this or understand it. So we made a test and this runs during commits and it checks the en.yml file for any translation keys that start with zero and then it can warn the developer, no, don’t do this because it doesn’t work and then we don’t have to think about it every time we’re emerging pull requests.
Our developers will only be told about this when they come across it. It’s not like something they have to read in the documentation and so again that kind of targeted feedback is super interesting.
The final thing is going to combine those two topics of output safety and internationalization.
When I was looking at this one day and I thought that looks fair enough. We’re using the safe buffer-based approach. We’ve got a translation that we’re expecting html because we want that name to be the link but this is safe buffer aware so it’s doing the escaping.
Everything looks good. It’s hard to understand is there an output safety problem here and then I was looking at a translation. It wasn’t Polish but I was looking at that and I thought wait a minute if we’re permitting html what happens if it’s the translator who puts the dodgy html in there.
Because we have almost 2,000 translators and 200,000 translations. We’re not inspecting these manually. They’re just being automatically brought over.
So I had a quick check and it turned out- it was fine. Nobody else had figured this out before me.
But it did mean that I wanted to make sure that there was no dodgy html in any of the translations and that there never would be. And the easiest way to do that is to make sure there’s no html in any of them at all.
And that was an opportunity to do a lot of refactoring and pull out any of these translation strings where we have html in them to break them down into their parts, have the translations with no html and then use the views to build it up.
And to a certain extent this is a better way of doing it anyway. You’ll find these creep into projects but it’s a separation of concerns issue. You don’t want to have to go hunting in your translations to change paragraph tags or things like that. Of course we added a test.
So this test does two things. One it warns our developers if they ever think “oh I don’t know how to do this properly I’m just going to put a bold tag or a link directly into the translation”. It will fail and it’ll do that.
It’ll also give us a warning if any of our translators are trying something they shouldn’t do, because the build will fail when all the translations are imported.
So that’s about it for me. There was a view on things that we do in our project to deal with our main challenges.
But this is where you guys come in.
I would like your help. Read our contributing, help review our PRs, make new PRs, think about other ways that you guys know about how we can improve the developer experience, other techniques that we could be using.
If you don’t fancy coding on your time off I totally understand that. We could still do with help with issue triage or join our enormous team of translators.
Here’s some LRUG special things because this is the most technical audience I’ve ever talked about this stuff.
We’re part way through replacing the JavaScript with Hotwire. If you’re a Hotwire expert please come and tell me how to do it more easily. Restful controller renaming, super important to make the code clean and to meet developer expectations but I really struggle to come up with good names for certain controllers and certain actions on controllers.
We currently use a C++ utility to speed up our XML and JSON APIs because we can’t get the performance we need out of the Ruby view system. If you include the same partial 10,000 times it takes dozens of seconds to run. If you know how to do XML, big XML, big JSON APIs at scale come and talk to me, or any of your more typical Railsy type things like we want to build a whole notification system, models, database things, it’s a lot. Your help would be very much welcome.
So that’s it for me. Thanks very much. Any questions?
Q [This person is asking about using fake streets (known as trap streets) to understand if people are stealing your map data]
Yeah we do.
So for the benefit of the recording this is about trap streets and map data to see if people are violating the copyright. We deliberately don’t do anything wrong but you can still spot OpenStreetMap data quite easily because it’s never complete. So if you look at a map and it has some of the buildings mapped or some of the buildings mapped accurately and some of the buildings mapped not so accurately, you can easily compare that with OpenStreetMap data and then you know they’re using OpenStreetMap data.
And we can also go back through the history because we record the history of everything and publish the history of everything. We have services which will show you if they took the data six months ago or nine months ago you can do comparisons there as well.
Q [This person is asking which Rails version the OpenStreetMap app runs on]
It’s 7.1.
Yeah the latest version and we test on Ruby 3.0 and newer and that’s so that we have quite a wide range of supported Ruby versions so that a typical developer who might just have whatever the latest Ubuntu LTS is on their laptop can get started straight away. So we try and be as accommodating as possible with Ruby versions, Postgres versions, all that kind of stuff because these are the technical barriers that we don’t want to get in the way of people who might not be that technical to start with.
Q If I wanted to contribute is there a list of like we really want seasoned Ruby developer help on these issues? Like I know a lot of open source projects have this would be good for a first-time contributor type issues so that you want this would be good for a first-time experienced contributor. Is it easy for me who’s never looked at a good app before to identify those?
Yeah it’s really hard to get started with finding the right issues. We’ve tried the good first issue approach which is often not for super experienced people but it tends to attract people who are not actually that interested in OpenStreetMap or the development and more kind of just clicking somewhere and GitHub that points you to the repos. We get an awful lot of people saying could you assign the to me please and then we never hear from them.
The more major projects are not very well highlighted but I would look for the refactor tag on issues because these are generally things where I know there’s some work that needs to be done and it’s a kind of long-term thing it’s not not just you know two-line fix for a bug. But otherwise I would encourage you just to have a start having a look at things and something will pique your interest pretty quickly with 500 different things to work on and I’m sure one of them will be interesting.
Q [This person is asking two questions: 1 - How customised is the OpenStreetMap app vs standard rails? 2 - What is the hardest thing you’ve had to fix
Was the second one the hardest single thing or the hardest thing I had to fix? Well I’ll answer the second one first.
The good thing with the hardest things to fix is that Tom does all the hardest things and I do the easier ones. So when it comes to trying to get OAuth 1.0a to work happily with OAuth 2.0 at the same time it’s beyond me. Tom takes care of that.
The hardest thing that I had to work on was probably either one of those things like the flash messages took a lot of looking around.
Actually trying to import a data set which is published as a node package and pull that in. I eventually found Frozen Record which is a great way of having static models that are not database backed but in a way that still feels quite like Active Record. So again these… The hardest things are usually ones where it seems pretty trivial and then I spend an entire day searching for… “Come on there must be an easier way of doing this”.
And the first one was how much customization stuff. Well a lot less than there used to be, put it that way. I think there’s a few things where like controller naming or the routes - they’re not, it’s not heavily customized it’s just really basic and kind of like ideas that were popular back in Rails 1.0. So we have like a thousand routes which would just get this target and we’ve been slowly trying to make them into resourceful routing instead of just every path being individually handled.
That’s the least like in all the Rails app we’re doing. But apart from that most of the stuff in the app is crud things. Adding users, adding user blocks, this that and the other.
In the wider sense, one of the most interesting things that I haven’t covered, here one of the most custom things is to do with the minutely publishing of the data from the database. To do that consistently every 60 seconds with in-flight transactions and being able to handle the Postgres transactions in mid-flight whilst still publishing all the data.
That’s been something which has been super interesting and lots of different approaches over the last 20 years to keep that working as Postgres versions change.
Q [This person is asking how much upstream contribution OpenStreetMap has made to Rails]
No not big ones usually just small bug requests on things that are upstream that haven’t worked. So the multi-database handling stuff that’s gone into Rails 7 didn’t work for us up until the most recent version of Rails because nobody expects to have 20 years of migrations, and so connecting to multiple databases and old migrations and things that stuff wasn’t working.
I don’t know - Tom have we pushed anything else up?
Yeah we used to be heavily involved in the composite primary keys gem and then Rails now has composite primary keys and so that was great to step away from that. Tom had to do a lot of work upstream with that. I saw another hand a minute ago.
Q: [This person is asking how much data is in the OpenStreetMap database]
How much data is it? Tom, how much data is it?
Yeah, yeah, many terabytes! As far as we’re aware, it’s the largest open source dataset that’s using Postgres, because anything measured in terabytes is generally either just autogenerated data, or commercial. So there has been a few cases where we’ve had Postgres consultants who are interested in what we’re doing. And our lack of horizontal scalability, things like that, it’s still… big machine gets you much further than you might think.
Q [This person is asking about which postgresql extensions the OpenStreetMap database uses]
Yeah, curiously, despite being heavily map based we don’t use PostGIS which is the geospatial extension for Postgres. We don’t use that at all. Partly for historical reasons, because PostGIS was nowhere near as good as it is now, 20 years ago, partly to do with rounding errors, and not storing stuff in floating points which PostGIS likes to do. We have our way of storing coordinates which uses integers. Yeah, just straight Postgres.
[Tom mentions another reason for not using PostGIS - topologically aware data]
Oh yeah, and the other reason for not using PostGIS is that we have a topologically aware data model. And that doesn’t map neatly onto what are called OGC standards for data representation. This is like a whole other talk that I’d need to do.
Alright, I think we’ll leave it there. Thanks very much.
Welcome to the latest OpenStreetMap-NG development update! Since last time, we’ve made significant progress towards reaching feature parity and have also implemented some great, exclusive new features. There’s also an updated roadmap with more detailed public release progress.
🔖 You can read other development diaries here:
www.openstreetmap.org/user/NorthCrab/diary/
⭐ This pr
Welcome to the latest OpenStreetMap-NG development update! Since last time, we’ve made significant progress towards reaching feature parity and have also implemented some great, exclusive new features. There’s also an updated roadmap with more detailed public release progress.
🛈 This initiative is not affiliated with the OpenStreetMap Foundation.
📹 Video Summary
I’ve prepared a video summary, where I recap the recent progress and show it off directly on the development website. It’s an alternative and richer version of this diary post. The recording contains chapter information if you’re interested in just some parts of this diary. There’s also a video-exclusive feature highlight :-)
Completion of the OAuth2 feature marks very significant progress towards reaching feature parity. The interface has been refreshed and streamlined. The OAuth2 implementation has been prepared in such a way that it’s easy to extend and work on in the future. For example, today we announce the introduction of the Personal Access Tokens (PATs) system, which is heavily based on the underlying OAuth2 infrastructure with minimal code additions (highlighted later in this diary).
One of the main goals of the OpenStreetMap-NG project is to make moderation and changes review easier. We’re pleased to announce the new Tags Diff Mode that makes it easy to review tagging changes over time - integrated directly into the element history view. We’ll work on further expanding this functionality in the future.
Personal Access Tokens (PATs) provide a simple way of authenticating with the API for personal projects, not requiring full OAuth authorization flow. This can include small scripts, personal monitoring tools, and others. They provide minimal barriers to OpenStreetMap API programming, with an easy path to upgrade to classic OAuth2 auth flow if needed. It’s a popular solution in the world of public APIs.
We’ve achieved a notable milestone of improving the resolution of feature icons in the project. The rendered icons are now suitable for 4K displays and will no longer appear blurry. This change enabled us to add a feature icon to the header of the element page - making it even easier to quickly distinguish object types.
With the rising interest in the project, we’ve revised our roadmap to focus on reaching feature parity, achieving which will allow us to confidently set up a public testing instance of the project. We estimate completing the roadmap this year.
3D GPX track feature adds a new dimension. It not only displays the route's elevation but also offers additional data visualization, including speed, altitude, slope, and heart rate (sensors data), for example. This comprehensive view helps users analyze their performance and better understand the dynamics of their route in a realistic 3D environment.
When I go on a bike ride, I use OsmAnd to record my track, while my heart rate is monitored through sensor. Throughout the ride, conditions are constantly changing—terrain, road surfaces, and weather all play a role in how the trip unfolds.
After the ride, I can analyze my trip in detail using the 3D track mode. The track is displayed in three dimensions, making it easier to study:
This detailed view helps me understand how my physical performance and the conditions changed throughout the ride, allowing me to improve my training efficiency and better plan future trips.
OsmAnd allows you to record track data from various sensors, like heart rate, temperature, bicycle power or speed sensors, and then provides the ability to perform comprehensive analysis afterward. You can visualize how different aspects—such as heart rate, speed, and slope—interacted during your ride, all in one detailed 3D track view. It’s a powerful tool for those who want a deeper understanding of their performance and the ride conditions.
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