OpenStreetMap Blogs

Our second baby arrived last week. Here she is. Our new baby girl!

It was a planned C-section, and all went to plan, in contrast to the unexpected twists and turns of our boy’s birth which I blogged about four years ago. She seems partial to sleeping, sometimes for six/seven hours straight, and the breastfeeding is proving to be less stressful this time. Some of the same problems as last time, but this time we know what to look out for, and what we wanted to avoid!

A second child is an important milestone in my life. My chosen mate and I have now successfully spawned offspring in sufficient numbers to replace ourselves and project forth our genetics to a new generation. I do feel like a successful organism now.

But we humans have long lifespans, and we rear our young for several years before they are ready to face the world on their own. I can confirm that even my older offspring, now facing his fourth winter, still requires food and shelter supplied by me, although he has a heightened sense of foraging where chocolate is concerned. By convention (for we are socially advanced creatures with widespread social groupings and strong social conventions) I understand we normally rear our young for over a decade. Eugh! So I definitely can’t declare myself a completely successful organism yet.

But worse, we humans are an advanced intelligent species, capable of not just of globe-spanning social interaction, but of contemplating the overall health and ongoing survival of our species within its environment. We can project population growth and demands on resources, and when we do, we see that humans are on course to overpopulate, exhausting our resources, and polluting our environment. As an intelligent organism, perhaps by reproducing I have failed after all.

But we are a highly intelligent inventive and increasingly technological species. We might find ways to collectively solve the environmental threats we face, and/or we might build a sustainable community on another planet as an insurance policy for the survival of our species. We might, but no guarantees we’ll achieve this in time. We should try.

And by “we” I mean my offspring. Astronaut training begins today! Here she is trying on the jetpack in our mini neutral buoyancy pool:

• GraphHopper
• OSRM
• openrouteservice
• Mapbox

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_OSM-based_services#Routing

This note has some strong anger, seems a tad excessive https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/1995084

• HOA areas.

My native language is a dialect of the lingua franca of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. And I live in a culture that is notorious for being adamantly monolingual. But I thought I had some understanding of the issues of mapping names in a way friendly for internationalization.

It seems pretty clear cut when you read the wiki. Put the local name, in the local language, as the value for the “name” tag. You may also put it in the “name:<lg>” tag value too.

To be clear, I am not worrying about the legal name, short name, international name, alternate name, or other various names for a place. Just “the common default name” to put in the “name” tag.

I make paper maps for myself and if traveling like to have both the local name as I will find on signs and the name in English, if available, both rendered. For example:

काठमाडौ
Kathmandu

I may not be able to read the local language but I can compare the glyphs on my map with the glyphs on a sign to see I am entering a specific village. And if an English name exists, even if only (automatic) transliteration, I will have something to verbalize.

But my attempt to produce a map of a trekking destination in Nepal showed that it is not that simple.

First, the local mappers in Kathmandu and apparently throughout Nepal decided to put “Romanized” versions of their names in the name tag. I am not sure what “Romanized” means in this context as they did not specify what phonetics might be used when “Romanizing”. The current tagging of Kathmandu breaks Internationalization:

name=Kathmandu
name:ne=काठमाडौ

Please, please, don’t do this. It is specifically discouraged in the wiki. If a transliteration is needed, it can be done automatically by the data consumer. The tagging should be:

name=काठमाडौ
name:ne=काठमाडौ

Second, even if the “name:<lg>” value is set for the local language but the “name” value does not match how can a renderer determine what the local language is to use for the area? So far the solutions are ad hoc. I have seen suggestions that this has been solved by the OSM DE people. But when I look at the tool kit I see the problem it solves is transliterating a local language if the tag for the desired language does not exist. That is a good and useful thing to do but it is not the problem I am worried about.

Another suggestion is to follow the lead of SomeoneElse who has produced maps with Welsh and Scots Gaelic names in areas where those languages are dominant. This is closer to what I am looking for.

But both the German automatic transliteration and SomeoneElse’s implementations reveal that they use internally coded polylines to define areas where a language is used. In effect they are implementing an additional geographic database to help interpret the OSM geographic database. This seems terribly wrong.

Adding language boundaries to OSM has been discussed and there are issues. So it is unlikely that it will be agreed upon.

One of the issues is that there are places that share a boundary with many localities with many languages. For example, the coast line of the Mediterranean Sea is shared with many countries where many languages are used. What name should be used for that feature? The English one I used? Probably not.

Looking at it from the point of a simple data consumer it seems the following rules would go a long ways to improving how OSM derived maps can be presented:

• If the feature has a name in only one language, then put that value in for the “name” tag.
• Strongly encourage mappers to also put that value in the “name:<lg>” tag where “<lg>” is the code for the local language. This will allow data consumers to identify the language used in the “name” tag.
• If more than one “name:<lg>” tag is present, one of them must match the value of the “name” tag. This allows identification of the language of the “name” tag.
• If the feature is on a boundary with more than one language, then there may be no local “common default name”. In that case, remove the name tag. If there is a QA tool that complains, then put a “noname=yes” tag on the feature. Yes, the feature has a name, it has multiple names. But we don’t know which is the “common default name” used by the multiple sets of locals speaking different languages.
• Don’t try to be helpful and put multiple versions of the name in the name tag. That is almost a guarantee that the name tag should be omitted instead. I’d fix that for Mount Everest except that the values in the “name” tag don’t match any of the values in the many “name:<lg>” tags and I haven’t a clue where to move them since I read neither Nepali nor Chinese.

The above suggestions will not fix all the issues with internationalization of names. But given the OSM schema as it stands today, it will make some types of processing possible. For example, if you want to render a map in language “xx” then you can:

• Use the “name:xx” value if it exists.
• Otherwise determine the language of the “name” tag, possibly by looking at all the “name:<lg>” values for a match. Once the language has been determined, automatically transliterate the “name” tag to language “xx”.

Rendering a map, like the reference one at www.openstreetmap.org or as created by SomeoneElse where local names are used is a harder issue. If a feature has names in multiple languages (e.g. Mediterranean Sea) then which name should be used? That does not seem to have a general answer. If the communities that border the feature have mutually agreed to a common default name then that could be put in the “name” tag. But I suspect a mutually agreed upon default name is unlikely to be agreed to by the parties closest to the feature if they are using different languages.

Allan Mustard, the new OSMF board chairperson, is asking the OSM community members to share their perspectives on OSM’s Strengths, Weaknesses and Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) that OSM faces. Strengths and Weaknesses refer to internal facets of OSM over which we, the community, have control. Opportunities and Threats are external influences with which we may and in some cases must deal.

Please share your thoughts on this page:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_SWOT
(you need an OSM wiki account – register here)

Allan writes:
“One usual practice in SWOT analysis is “brainstorming”. There are two rules of brainstorming. First, no idea is bad. All ideas are good and may be added to the list. We are in that phase, so no matter how crazy or unusual your idea may be, if you believe it is a genuine SWOT, put it down. We will sort out the good from the less good later. Second, no ad hominem (i.e., personal) attacks. If somebody puts something on this page that you don’t like, express your opinion politely later on.“

You are welcome to also translate the initial page in other languages and add them to the OSM wiki. If you don’t know how, please send us an email to communication@osmfoundation.org

Reference materials about this type of analysis are on the wiki page.
Discussion about the analysis can take place at the OSM wiki and the OSM diaries.

Thanks for participating

OSM Communication Working Group

Do you want to translate this and other blogposts in your language..? Please send us an email to communication@osmfoundation.org with subject: Helping with translations in [your language]

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation, formed in the UK to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project, is financially supported by membership fees and donations, and organises the annual, international State of the Map conference. It has no full-time employees and it is supporting the OpenStreetMap project through the work of our volunteer Working Groups. Please consider becoming a member of the OSM Foundation.

OpenStreetMap was founded in 2004 and is a international project to create a free map of the world. To do so, we, thousands of volunteers, collect data about roads, railways, rivers, forests, buildings and a lot more worldwide. Our map data can be downloaded for free by everyone and used for any purpose – including commercial usage. It is possible to produce your own maps which highlight certain features, to calculate routes etc. OpenStreetMap is increasingly used when one needs maps which can be very quickly, or easily, updated.

Should they be separated?

https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/PNQ => ~1500 in Europe

WDYT?

Crochet, Jürgen

Mapillary has long been integrated into OpenStreetMap editors, and we are evaluating how to increase the value of both the imagery contributed by our community as well as the data extracted from that imagery. As it stands, Mapillary’s world-renowned computer vision capabilities provide an excellent tool for fixing maps in an unusual way. Outside of Mapillary imagery, we are seeing machine learning applied toward satellite imagery and telemetry data to help map roads and buildings. The coupling of computer vision and street-level imagery, however, offers a better view of the detailed reality maps have often lacked.

Putting on my hat as chairman of the board of the OSM Foundation, I have created a wiki page at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_SWOT to collect the OSM community’s thoughts on OSM’s strengths and weaknesses, and opportunities and threats OSM faces. I respectfully ask that OSM community members share their perspectives on that wiki page.

ประเทศไทย

Taking points of the map that are not open or not there anymore.

連絡先:行動の呼びかけを通して⇗ Initial: Through a call for action

Mapping Human前進して最初のプロジェクトに参加します。

検証チェックの別のラウンドとHOT

いくつか無効にしましたインポートオブジェクトはチェックされません。

• そのようなインスタンスのコメントとして {{bbox}} URLを貼り付けてください！

• おそらくfixmeタグを含めることができますか？ 変更することをお勧めします

データおよびイメージレイヤースイッチャーの詳細

その他のヒントTipps：使用zoom view to selected object【3】+Zoom view to previous 【7】

永遠にマッピングを学ぶ JOSM josm-tested.jar (version 15628)

MappingHuman 目的がない 建物を追加する。オブジェクトを追加するための詳細 natural=* 検証ラウンドを通して。

テーブルとしてタイル領域に植えることを検討する種子。 Seeds to consider planting

ナチュラル、防ぐ Natural protects

イコール投稿します：数時間チェックした後、その瞬間が来ました

Neverending,
Editスクリプト

Hi, I recently suggested to another mapper that we delete all place=localities without a name. https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/79577457

WDYT?

• Alaska Railbelt Power Plants with Capacity
• South Addition Alley paved/unpaved metadata

This is my first time on open street maps. I think I just spent 5 hours or so randomly placing things down. Oooffffttttttaaaaa…. This is addicting to do. Now on a serious side I realized I marked the size of houses when their is probably a database someone will import that will do that for me.

I know Reddit is Full of Bots you can summon from summerizing to automod. Imagine the following. Highlight area, bot sees square like objects and creates random markings. You select any non house object and delete it. I hope that made sense. If it did not it is because I stayed up way to late.

During the last months, DevSeed data team, as active members of the OSM community in Peru, along the support of other members of the community, imported around 7,933 health centers throughout Peru between health centers of different categories and from different operator institutions both public and private.

Once the importation was completed, about 6,200 new health centers were added to the map, and to those already existing on the map we added more details, such as; operator, telephone, address, category, among others. This was possible by the data found in the Peru’s National Open Data Portal, so, thanks to the open data, we were able to add new health centers to OSM and improve the map in Peru, especially in the rural areas where this type of information was poor and in many other areas they simply did not exist. But currently, after this importation, there are more than 8,600 health centers across Peru, in comparison to the 2,400 that were on the map.

The before and after of the importation - The yellow dots are the existing health centers before the importation, the turqouse dots are the new health centers added at the end of the import.

Recently, the Peru’s president declared the official name of the year 2020, as; “Year of the universalization of health”, that shows to the health as one of the government’s priorities, since it is a basic service in which each government must set its eyes to improve the population’s opportunities access to health services.

With this, we can have a detailed map of existing health centers in the country, to see where the institutions are located and have information that is available to the population and to the decision-making government institutions on health issues, in order to expand health services to the entire population, through the implementation of new health centers where there is not or the improvement of the existing ones.

The process of the data cleaning for the importation is documented in the health-centers-import repo and the wiki.

Miejsca się zgadzają ale kolejność nie była taka sama jak w oficjalnym programie wycieczki na stronie Itaki

2 DZIEŃ NOSY BE http://openpoimap.org/?map=various&zoom=15&lat=-13.39918&lon=48.27346&layers=B00FFFFFFFFFFFFFTFFFFFF

3 DZIEŃ

ANKIFY http://openpoimap.org/?map=various&zoom=18&lat=-13.55758&lon=48.36832&layers=B00FFFFFFFFFFFFFTFFFFFF

PLANTACJA KAKAO http://openpoimap.org/?map=various&zoom=19&lat=-13.62963&lon=48.45568&layers=B00FFFFFFFFFFFFFTFFFFFF

PARK NARODOWY ANKARANA http://openpoimap.org/?map=various&zoom=15&lat=-12.94762&lon=49.1106&layers=B00FFFFFFFFFFFFFTFFFFFF

Zakwaterowanie w lodży w okolicy parku http://openpoimap.org/?map=various&zoom=19&lat=-12.96191&lon=49.14929&layers=B00FFFFFFFFFFFFFTFFFFFF

4 DZIEŃ Przejazd samochodami terenowymi do KANIONU TSINGY ROUGE http://openpoimap.org/?map=various&zoom=17&lat=-12.63759&lon=49.49183&layers=B00FFFFFFFFFFFFFTFFFFFF

5 DZIEŃ.

Przejazd do niewielkiej miejscowości Joffreville http://openpoimap.org/?map=various&zoom=16&lat=-12.49717&lon=49.19914&layers=B00FFFFFFFFFFFFFTFFFFFF

Zwiedzanie jednego z najpiękniejszych i najsławniejszych parków narodowych Madagaskaru – MONTAGNE D’AMBRE http://openpoimap.org/?map=various&zoom=15&lat=-12.52566&lon=49.16379&layers=B00FFFFFFFFFFFFFTFFFFFF

Powrót do hotelu, kolacja i nocleg. http://openpoimap.org/?map=various&zoom=15&lat=-12.52566&lon=49.16379&layers=B00FFFFFFFFFFFFFTFFFFFF

6 DZIEŃ

MONTAGNE DES FRANÇAIS http://openpoimap.org/?map=various&zoom=17&lat=-12.32418&lon=49.33368&layers=B00FFFFFFFFFFFFFTFFFFFF

Przejazd do niewielkiej, rybackiej wioski RAMENA (Obiad) http://openpoimap.org/?map=various&zoom=18&lat=-12.24213&lon=49.34529&layers=B00FFFFFFFFFFFFFTFFFFFF

Przejazd do ZATOKI ORANGEA z niepowtarzalnym krajobrazem, białą, piaszczystą plażą i krystalicznie czystą wodą http://openpoimap.org/?map=various&zoom=17&lat=-12.23205&lon=49.3526&layers=B00FFFFFFFFFFFFFTFFFFFF

Zakwaterowanie w hotelu, kolacja, nocleg. http://openpoimap.org/?map=various&zoom=19&lat=-12.26885&lon=49.29128&layers=B00FFFFFFFFFFFFFTFFFFFF

7 DZIEŃ

Całodzienny przejazd. (trasa: ok. 250 km) https://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?engine=graphhopper_car&route=-13.5485%2C48.3647%3B-12.2689%2C49.2918#map=9/-13.1303/49.3698

Obiad w Parku Ankarana. http://openpoimap.org/?map=various&zoom=18&lat=-12.96838&lon=49.13685&layers=B00FFFFFFFFFFFFFTFFFFFF

Przejazd do hotelu. Zakwaterowanie, czas wolny, kolacja, nocleg. http://openpoimap.org/?map=various&zoom=18&lat=-13.54885&lon=48.36392&layers=B00FFFFFFFFFFFFFTFFFFFF

8 DZIEŃ (trasa: ok. 24km)

Przeprawa łodziami motorowymi na NOSY BE http://openpoimap.org/?map=various&zoom=14&lat=-13.43607&lon=48.28242&layers=B00FFFFFFFFFFFFFTFFFFFF

Wycieczka na Nosy Iranja.

http://openpoimap.org/?map=various&zoom=17&lat=-13.59713&lon=47.81795&layers=B00FFFFFFFFFFFFFTFFFFFF

非常に土地

土地のマッピングに関する簡単なヒントジェム精神として Einige kurze Tipps zur Kartierung von Landmerkmalen als Mensch.

Map paint style

を切り替えるwire frame 及び JOSM Wechseln Sie zwischen wire frame und JOSM

より細かい詳細

• いくつかのツールを使用する working modes follow【F】、select last modified node【!+Z】、select last modified way【F】

• たくさん線を引く ** Linien viel zeichnen

Fixate default zoom level

私の好みは zoom 14(4:12km) Meine Präferenz wäre Zoom 14

Changesets: ⵎ??ⴻⵛ?ⵉⵢⴰ MappingHuman ماسه های

推奨： ○ Tesla ○Waugh,D (1995) ○ShakespeareFan00

永遠にマッピングを学ぶ JOSM | josm-tested.jar (version 15628) https://josm.openstreetmap.de/

Neverending, Editスクリプト

Since returning to the United States from Turkmenistan last June, I have been plowing through the mass of information collected, but which I did not have time to study thoroughly. Yesterday, while (Turkmen-English dictionary in hand) I was deciphering Parliamentary Resolution No. 111-IV of 10 May 2010, I found reference to one of the six towns (‘‘şäherçeler’’ in Turkmen) not yet on the OSM map. That resolution ‘‘inter alia’’ renamed the village around the Danew rail station to Bahar (which means “spring” in Turkmen) and upgraded it to town status. Fortunately user jaimemd had mapped that rail station and its surrounding village five years earlier, so I was able to retag Bahar.

One town down, five more to go. The detective work continues. When done, all current “towns” in Turkmenistan will be on the map, along with all “cities” as defined under Turkmen law.

View of manhattan southern tip, from empire state building

Home: is it where I sleep each night, or where I dream of? Spectre of globalism, shadow of the coastal elite - I may be angemeldet in Berlin, but New York will always feel something like home. Inevitably, I’m in the city about once a year, frequent enough to keep up friendships, but infrequent enough to inspire nostalgia for the last visit. It’s a place perpetually in a simultaneous state of metamorphosis and stasis. Gotham, or Girls? Sex and the city Carrie voiceover: “I couldn’t help but wonder, where were all the NYC mappers?”

New York on one intersection: a Bank of America, a gay bar, a gourmet pizzeria, a 99c slice joint, a rusting frame chained to the fence, a $2,000 bike in the shop window. But on the map: it’s nothing but building=yes and address numbers. A homeless man phones a friend on a LinkNYC terminal, a businessman crosses the street without looking up from his iPhone. They hail a taxis, they wait for the M22. In a city where some people have everything, and some people have nothing, there are more ironic things than the lack of POIs in OSM.

I couldn’t find evidence of an official shop=postal, or amenity=shipping, though there are a lot of these kinds of stores!

We chose a sunny day. We printed the screenshots at a FedEx, leaving plenty of blank space in the margins. For the next few hours, we mapped East 9th and 10th streets between 1st and 2nd Ave in the East Village. The system went: for each business not found in the map, write down house number and side of the street. Take a picture of the storefront in case we forget what it is, or to get opening hours.

For a neighborhood that has such an extensive Wikipedia page, a lot of it just looks like empty buildings in the map.

What else about New York…sometimes it’s just a blur of faces in the subway, or a looming facade of buildings as you’re coming out of the Holland tunnel. But sometimes you can take your time and look in to every store, browse a few things, observe people and guess if they’re locals or tourists, like you, just visiting, trying to find what makes this place different from everywhere else.

I got myself a cheap “action cam” straight from China, for little more than 20 EUR. GoPros run easily ten times more than that. So, what can you expect from a budget cam? Turns out, it’s surprisingly useful for photo mapping, with a few gotchas.

Can do / can’t do

• Photo quality, of course, is mediocre at best. You get what you pay for, no more, no less. Videos look useless (I’ll have to try on a bright, sunny day), sound clearly is useless. There’s a lot of good stuff you can do with daylight pics, however.

• The cam can be mounted on the bike’s handlebar or carried on a neck strap. Both work. Pictures can be taken with gloves on. That’s surprisingly important in January :)

• Motion blur is an issue. Shooting sideways on the bike, as good as it sounds for shop mapping and such, won’t work. Shooting forward is OK. Night-time shots are for better cameras; this one won’t cut it.

• Text won’t be readable unless you’re really close-by. Gotta get a feeling for that.

• Road geometry, lane number, presence/absence of sidewalks, traffic_calming are very easy to recognize. Extremely useful.

• Cycleway signs (NL:G11, G12a, G13): easy

(this list to be continued)

Geo-tagging

Of course, the camera itself isn’t GPS aware like its more expensive brethren. It does have a clock, though. Not the most accurate one, but still. JOSM can correlate time to GPX tracks. This works.

EXIF

JOSM relies on time information from the EXIF header. Unfortunately, my particular camera model doesn’t create EXIF headers. Time information is recorded in file time stamps, only.

• It’s crucial to preserve file time stamps when copying pictures from the cam to the computer (“cp -a” if you speak POSIX).

• jhead (try “sudo apt-get install jhead” or “brew install jhead” if it isn’t present, already) generates an EXIF header from ctime: “jhead -mkexif -dsft *.jpg”

• Now pix can be read into JOSM and correlated with the .gpx. For time cross-correlation between cam and GPS, it’s useful to take a pic (or many!) of GPS time. Can be adjusted manually, too. Base this, e.g., on a picture of a landmark taken while riding fast.

Time offset list

This section really won’t matter for anyone but me :) * 2020/01/13: best offset -14 s

Small town Michigan that’s located east of Lansing, Michigan.

I see no activity in the IRC