Ilya wrote about the 10th anniversary of OSM adopting the ODbL license yesterday. He has a cool 2012-2022 map compare web site to go with it. It’s incredible to see what we, the OSM community, have accomplished building our map in 10 years.

Ilya is a pretty technical guy and it’s not a huge thing for him to set up an OSM tile server from scratch. But what if you want to create something similar and you’re perhaps not quite that technical? If that’s you, I have something you might be interested in! It’s a little open source project on Github called openstreetmap-vintage-tile-server. With it, you can create a side-by-side map in a few pretty simple steps. The README on Github explains it pretty well, so I won’t repeat it here, but the steps are basically:

1. Make sure you have docker and osmium installed
2. Download a full history planet for the area you’re interested in (Geofrabrik has these, but you have to log in with your OSM account)
3. Run the script

When it finishes, the tiles should be available on your local machine. The script will give you the URL to go to. There’s also an HTML example that you can use to create an interactive side by side map like this:

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分享一个基于OSM制作的中国文化自然遗产地图，很有意思。

网址：http://stele.geogv.org/

可查看世界遗产、全国重点文物保护单位、部分省级、市级文物保护单位及其基本信息。

地图使用OSM数据制作，使用了新的渲染方式。叠加了其它渠道来源的省市边界，边界上符合中国相关规定。

Hi from Syria

I’m very impressed by the achievements of all the OSM contributors and as an IT student it was very nice to see how all this tooling is open-source.

I found OSM while searching for alternatives to Google Maps, that’s mainly because our country is sadly under restriction from the high majority of services provided by US companies.

And even if it was not for the restrictions, it would be for the price.

So I’ve found OSM and started diving step by step in it’s wiki. Until I was able to understand how the map can be mirrored, rendered and customized.

Then with some checks of my local area I wanted to do some edits as an experiment and oh god the tooling is amazing.

Huge thanks for everyone who worked on OSM whether on it’s software, organization or even contributed to it’s database!!

As a start I marked some appartement buildings, lets so how this goes.

Ten years ago on this day we changed the license for our data to ODbL, Open Database License 1.0. That was the final action of the lengthy relicensing process, which followed an exciting show of redacting and remapping the planet.

In July 2012 we started every day with watching the redaction progress map, discussing how the redaction bot devoured our precious map data, and making memes on the way.

After the bot finished its work, we started remapping everything we had lost. Poland and Australia were particularly broken, but most other countries had their losses. Alas we could not make everybody agree to the new contributor’s terms, so some mapping had to be done twice. But the work went better than expected, and it was then when we felt that the community is more important than the map, and that OSM can survive the loss of the latter.

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Namaste from Nepal,

Even though it has been two weeks since I returned from the conferences, the memories still seem fresh. When I reflect back, I am filled with so many new experiences and learnings that will be hard to cover in this diary but I will try to summarize in highlights so that it’s not boring for you :).

First day at Florence

Landing in a new country for the first time far away from home, was an overwhelming journey. I want to express my gratitude to Poorni Badrinath and Hector for helping to make my first day in Florence easier. Before I could check in, they showed me about the city, and after waiting in line for at least five minutes, I got to enjoy the best sandwich in popular place called All’Antico Vinaio. Oh, the first day went much better than I had anticipated. And, the next day, SOTM started. The idea of badges for talking accessibility really amazed me. Kudos to the creativity!

SOTM 2022

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Hi everyone, this is the update on the final phase of my progress in enhancing Nominatim’s search results ranking.

Previous Diary Entries

To have a background understanding of the project, you can check the overview of the project followed by the project’s first phase down below.

1. Project Overview
2. Phase 1

Project’s Pull Request

To see the code of the project, you can check the pull request here.

Detailed Report of the Project

The detailed version of the report can be read here.

What Has Been Done

• Enabled PostGIS to work with raster files
• Nominatim CLI tool can now import OSM views data from the GeoTIFF file
• Nominatim CLI tool has the ability to refresh the OSM views data and recompute the importance scores
• Integrated OSM views data into the algorithm that computes the places’ importance scores which are used in ranking Nominatim’s search results
• Added some unit tests
• Updated the documentation and added a detailed report of the experiments conducted

Possible Next Steps

There is a weak correlation between the OSM views data and the wiki importance data. A number of possible reasons have been outlined in the detailed version of this report in which further investigation is needed to have a better understanding of this outcome. Apart from that, the OSM views import feature can be enhanced so that the user can specify the zoom level when importing the data, or even have multiple zoom levels data imported one after the other so that the OSM views data have a higher degree of accuracy.

What I have learned

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https://wiki.osm.org/Hungary/20220911

Recently I started an attempt to make the campsites shown on https://opencampingmap.org googleable.

One part of this attempt will be an indexable list of campsites by country.

However, the main trouble with this seems to be broken mapping which will make the generation of such a list really cumbersome.

As an Example I came across this place: way/335229905

There are multiple problems with this site in its current form. I will fix them later but use it as an illustration for a broken site first.

The main problem here are nodes tagged tourism=caravan_site and tents=yes which reside inside two polygons tagged tourism=camp-site.

As an example we have a node tagged:

• name =C11
• power_supply=yes
• tents=yes
• tourism =caravan_site

The way this node should be tagged instead is:

• tourism=camp_pitch
• caravans=yes
• tents=yes
• ref=C11
• power_supply=yes

Please do never map individual pitches as tourism=caravan_site or tourism=camp_site. Use tourism=camp_pitch instead.

This said, in this case even the two polygons are not individual camp-sites themselves.

What should be done instead is merging the two polygons tagged tourism=camp_site (way/335229905 and way/335229904) into one multipolygon with two outer rings as we are obviosly talking about one single campground rather than two. I also consider “Campground Loop A” a feature of one of these rings rather than its name. So best would be using the description tag on the to be created rings then.

The name tag of the to be created Multipolygons should then be Fort Pickens Campground which is surprisingly tagged on none of the objects currently.

I do not have local knowledge of this campground but there may well be camp-site features outside these polygons.

The way to map the site in this case would be a site relation. I wrote about this in my blog some time ago: https://blog.geggus.net/2021/09/announcing-support-for-site-relations-in-opencampingmap/

Hace unos meses comencé a revisar la página del wiki acerca de Objetos del mapa buscando arreglar las entradas que aún estaban en inglés. Para mí, esta es una de las páginas más importantes del proyecto OSM, ya que es la carta de presentación de lo que se puede hacer o encontrar en el mapa. Inclusive, muchos lugares externos referencian esta página (la de inglés principalmente), para promocionar el proyecto y mostrar sus capacidades. Sin embargo, cuando uno entra al proyecto, y descubre todos los posibles caminos, esta página uno la termina olvidando. Cuando uno ha mapeado mucho, ya conoce qué se puede hacer, cómo buscar lo que desconoce, etc., pero esta página de características del mapa no se vuelve a consultar. Es verdad que es una página muy grande (y demorada en cargar) pero permite entender el potencial del proyecto. Por eso, quise arreglar su versión en español para que estuviera más sincronizada con su versión en inglés.

Primero comencé a entenderla, ya que al editarla, no se ve tan compleja. El problema es que hace referencias a muchas otras páginas que se incrustan, y estas otras páginas tienen unas tablas. Entonces toca activar el espíritu investigativo y comenzar a abrir páginas y comenzar a imaginar cómo funciona todo esto. Es verdad que la edición del wiki en esto tan básico como agregar una nueva etiqueta a este listado, no está descrito en ningún lado. Pero esta aventura me ha enseñado muchas cosas, y me ha permitido hablar con muchos editores del todo el mundo.

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Project Abstract

The primary aim of this Google Summer of Code project is to re-introduce transit support in Valhalla, the OpenStreetMap based Routing Engine. Initially, Valhalla supported a mode to route transit, but due to a bottleneck from a third-party library, it became unviable to continue support transit routing. Therefore, the aim of the project is to directly parse raw General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data and remove the dependency.

The high level overview of the project is visible here:

GitHub Project

Specific details of each pull request will be described below.

What has been done

The first stage of the project was importing GTFS and ensuring that we can parse the data. GTFS is a set of text files, and rather than iterating through them manually, I decided to use a third party library to automize the read-write process. Just_gtfs allows us to read and store transit data in variables rather than manually trying to parse text. Moreover, I can create sample test data without being concerned about creating invalid data.

After parsing GTFS data, the next step was to pre-process them so that they could fit into Valhalla’s existing data format. Firstly, since the map is divided into tiles – square regions of equal area – I sorted the data according to which tile it belongs to. Tiles are beneficial to save computing power because only the information that belong inside the tile need to be processed when routing through small regions.

Parsing GTFS Pull Request

The sorted data then needed to be built into protobufs, which are used as intermediary data storage before they are converted to tiles. Protobufs are much more condense and versatile than raw GTFS data, so we extract the relevant information from GTFS into protobufs and gather the data. This is further useful because instead of iterating through each stop or trip of a tile, the tile could be read as one whole entity, streamlining the reading process.

Creating Protobufs Pull Request

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Original post in Portuguese here

After some time from the return of State of the Map 2022 in Florence, and after a brief reflection on my experience at the event, I would like to share my views on SotM 2022.

Initially, I would like to thank the State of the Map Working Group for providing grants to participate in the event, which I was awarded (more on this later).

About the event, it was 3 very intense days (and sometimes overwhelming)! During SotM, I thought I could enjoy it more, but looking back, I see that it would be practically impossible. Several very interesting presentations at the same time, amazing people to meet and talk to, very well constructed and presented posters, in short, a lot happening at the same time.

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English version here

Depois de algum tempo do retorno do State of the Map 2022 em Florença, e após uma breve reflexão sobre minha experiência no evento, gostaria de compartilhar minha visão sobre o SotM 2022.

Inicialmente, gostaria de agradecer ao State of the Map Working Group por fornecer bolsas para a participação no evento, na qual fui agraciado (mais sobre isso adiante).

Sobre o evento, foram 3 dias muito intensos! Durante o SotM, pensava que poderia aproveitar mais, mas olhando para trás, vejo que seria praticamente impossível. Várias apresentações interessantíssimas ao mesmo tempo, pessoas incríveis para conhecer e conversar, pôsteres muito bem construídos e apresentados, enfim, muita coisa acontecendo ao mesmo.

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versão em português

In these last 2 years as a full time volunteer, I have developed several mapping projects around Brazil, because I believe it is my duty to contribute because of the deficit the map had in my region. My goal as a mapper is to try to decrease the blank spaces in OpenStreetMap so that more people can use them and thus more mappers emerge.

I understand that not everyone has time or interest in mapping, the most they can do is the basics, and many times they forget about OSM because they can’t use it on a daily basis, even more in a country like Brazil where hardly a worker would have time to be updating maps.

I have dedicated myself daily to OSM, but unfortunately this has a cost and since I am no heir, it has been very difficult to reconcile my volunteer work and my personal life, I have gone through some very complicated phases since I decided to dedicate myself full time, but I also had a lot of help.

Working at OSM is not an easy task, because your work is never finished, there are always new changes that need to be mapped, mistakes to be corrected, it’s a continuous job that requires a certain level of knowledge and experience acquired over time.

One of the first projects I did was using DAMN and then Taskmanger to be able to manage and map entire cities, with this project almost 20 cities were fully mapped from roads to buildings.

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English Version

Nesses últimos 2 anos como voluntário em tempo integral desenvolvi vários projetos de mapeamento pelo Brasil, por acreditar ser meu dever contribuir por conta do deficit que o mapa tinha na minha região. Minha meta como mapeador é tentar diminuir os espaços em branco no OpenStreetMap para que mais pessoas possam usá-los e assim mais mapeadores surgirem.

Entendo que nem todo mundo tem tempo ou interesse em mapear, no máximo fica no básico e muitas vezes acaba esquecendo do OSM por não consegui usar no seu dia a dia, ainda mais em um país como o Brasil onde dificilmente um trabalhador teria tempo para ficar atualizando mapas.

Tenho me dedicado diariamente ao OSM, mas infelizmente isso tem um custo e já que não sou nenhum herdeiro, tem sido bem difícil conciliar meu trabalho como voluntário e minha vida pessoal, já passei por fases muito complicadas desde que eu decidi me dedicar em tempo integral, mas também tive muitas ajudas.

Trabalhar no OSM não é uma tarefa fácil, pois seu trabalho nunca está concluído, sempre há novas mudanças que precisam ser mapeadas, erros a serem corrigidos, é um trabalho contínuo que exige certo nível de conhecimento e experiencia adquirida com o tempo.

Um dos primeiros projetos que eu fiz foi usando o DAMN e depois o Taskmanger para poder gerenciar e mapear cidades inteiras, com esse projeto foram quase 20 cidades que foram totalmente mapeadas desde as estradas aos edifícios.

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It was a joyful moment, having been selected and given a scholarship to attend the hybrid conference, SOTM 2022 in Firenzi Italy, first time to board a plane so it was a whole lot of new experience and excitement, I arrived in Firenzi on the 18th of Thursday evening just in time for the event. The historical city of Firenzi is a beautiful city with a whole lot of sculpture, just like what I see in the movies.

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مصور فوتوغرافي - استوديو تصوير - مكتب الفوتوجرافر محمد صديق

First stop, Cercedilla

The Spanish government has decided to fully subsidise the regional train services around major Spanish cities for the rest of the year, to try and encourage people to use public transport more. Now I don’t use Madrid’s Cercanias services very often, because I work mostly from home, but I decided to get my free ticket and explore the region a bit more. Then it occurred to me that I could also take advantage of the offer to do a bit of OSM mapping in different places.

So yesterday I got on the train and headed to Cercedilla, sitting at the foot of Madrid’s mountains. It’s a station I have been to many times, but always to start a hike - you can walk straight out of the station and onto a trail that takes you up to those mountains. This time I headed for the nearby village, gathering addresses and points of interest as I went.

I was giving a test run to the Every Door application, presented by Ilya Zverev at this year’s State of the Map event in Florence. It worked very well for capturing the points of interest, the address and building interface was a little trickier to understand - but I liked it and will use it again. I need to check whether I can configure it a bit more so that I don’t need to add so much to the data later at home. But I can stop being the mapper with the old Garmin GPS for a while.

More OSM away days around Madrid will come, the free ticket lasts until the end of the year!

Aachener Stammtisch 2.0 - 1. Treffen am 21.09.2022

Zeit und Ort

Am: Mittwoch, den 21.09.2022 um 18:00 Uhr Wo: Chaos Computer Club Aachen - Schützenstraße 11, 52062 Aachen

Für Getränke (gegen Unkostenbeitrag) ist vor Ort gesorgt.

Wenn ihr Lust dazu habt, kommt einfach vorbei!!!

It is always amazing to connect with like-minded people on topics you are interested in and talk about making it better. That’s what State of The Map has always been to me. And this time, thanks to HOT UnSummit, I got a chance to attend one as a student, and understand the use cases of maps from a very fresh perspective.

After more than 5 years of working in the mapping sector, I decided to pursue my Master’s in Cartography and being a student again, both of the conferences of SoTM and FOSS4G proved to be very beneficial to attend and understand the ways the mapping community are branching out in.

I have been a part of the SoTM community for a few years now and have got a chance to even present some of the talks on OSM and validation. However, the whole experience at Florence this time was very different and engaging. The first in person conference after COVID, it was fantastic to meet everyone I knew in person and connect on maps and more.

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I discovered OSM a month ago, and I found it a really interesting project. A sad thing is that sometimes there are really bad mapped areas, with no streets curves, no parkings and even no schools or schools without name! Although it does give me something to work on.