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Részletek / details: https://wiki.osm.org/Hungary/20230211

Tortával jutalmazzuk a szabad platformunkon jelentkező első 20 tagot: OSM wiki, OsmCal, GetTogether, Mobilizon, Friendica-Mastodon, levlista.

  • Cake will be awarded to the first 20 members who RSVP on one of our open platforms: OSM wiki, OsmCal, GetTogether, Mobilizon, Friendica-Mastodon, mailing list.

Tétényi-fennsík

Location: Nagytétény, XXII. kerület, Budapest, Közép-Magyarország, Magyarország

Részletek / details: https://wiki.osm.org/Hungary/20230304

Tortával jutalmazzuk a szabad platformunkon jelentkező első 20 tagot: OSM wiki, OsmCal, GetTogether, Mobilizon, Friendica-Mastodon, levlista.

  • Cake will be awarded to the first 20 members who RSVP on one of our open platforms: OSM wiki, OsmCal, GetTogether, Mobilizon, Friendica-Mastodon, mailing list.

Kéktó famadarak

Location: Nagytétény, XXII. kerület, Budapest, Közép-Magyarország, Magyarország

Részletek / details: https://wiki.osm.org/Hungary/20230218

Tortával jutalmazzuk a szabad platformunkon jelentkező első 20 tagot: OSM wiki, OsmCal, GetTogether, Mobilizon, Friendica-Mastodon, levlista.

  • Cake will be awarded to the first 20 members who RSVP on one of our open platforms: OSM wiki, OsmCal, GetTogether, Mobilizon, Friendica-Mastodon, mailing list.

Érd-Ófalu Kálvária->Nagytétény

Location: Nagytétény, XXII. kerület, Budapest, Közép-Magyarország, Magyarország

[Ed note: this is a ‘preprint’ because my usual blog has technical problems]

A few days back I read this article about the longest straight lines on land and sea and I wondered how routers would handle the load, at least for the land one.

So I set up a route between Rua da Fortaleza, Sagres, Portugal, and what looks like the main square in Quanzhou, China. SRTM and GraphHopper handled the request just fine, while for some reason valhalla didn’t. Then I upped the stakes, by requesting foot routes. Foot routes are harder because the foot network is way bigger than the road network. SRTM and GH succeeded, but not without some effort. I tried to benchmark it, but it seem at least OSRM seems to cache the results, which makes sense. Interestingly, the route more or less follows the great circle all the way down to around Tyumen, Russia, where it starts to deviate more and more as the roads become less and less frequent. Also, OSRM proposes a land only route, while GH also includes ferries, but that depends on how OSM uses GH and how GH (and probably OSRM too) are configured.

I also read the foot notes on that article[1]. It mentions that Sagres is also the end of the longest land route, period; the other end is in Russia. First thing to note is that is says that the end is close to the North Korea border, “the eastern terminus of that country’s road network”. I wonder where he got that nibble, because I found there are connected roads almost all the way to the Chukchi Peninsula, crossing the antemeridian. I found that all routers choke there. So the calculation for the longest foot route will have to wait until this is fixed; I’m not going to settle for partial results :)

Lastly, That Other Map does not even has those routes, so technically they don’t have that problem :)


[1] you do that, right? :)

Neural machine translation (NMT) is a method of machine translation that uses deep learning techniques to improve the accuracy of the translation. The success of ChatGPT already shows the great potential of generative AI and transformer-based language models. This diary will investigate the feasibility and performance of applying neural machine translation for OpenStreetMap, by fine tuning a pretrained translation model on OpenStreetMap data.

How to fine tune a pre-trained translation model on OSM data

I first found a pre-trained translation model in Hugging Face that translates from Chinese to English: https://huggingface.co/Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-ro. This model is a MarianMT model, with 77 million parameters and ~300MB in disk size. So, it’s a small model. In comparison, GPT3 has 175 billion parameters.

Then, from OpenStreetMap, I collected all the existing Chinese-English translation pairs for any map objects located in Taiwan (as of 2023/01/31), and split them into training data and test data. I fined tuned the pre-trained translation model on this training data for five iterations. Finally, I evaluated the performance of the fine tuned model on the test data.

The code to fine tune the translation model is here: https://github.com/liyinxiao/neural-machine-translation-on-OpenStreetMap

Evaluations

After manual inspection on the first 200 rows of test data, the performance seems pretty good, and it performs especially well on ways. The details of the evaluation can be found in https://github.com/liyinxiao/neural-machine-translation-on-OpenStreetMap.

Conclusion

See full entry

Hi OSM! I’m MoiraPrime, a mapper from Mississippi, and I wanted to reflect on the current state of the map in my region. Since joining the community fully in January 2021, I’ve seen all kinds of things across my state, and I wanted to use this opportunity to talk about them.

TIGER Fixup

Fifteen years have passed since the initial TIGER import in Mississippi. Despite all the work various sparse mappers have done in the state, there are still 84,400 ways that remain untouched since they were imported. Overpass turbo screenshot showing the entire state of Mississippi covered in red dots.

In an effort to move this along in a way that’s compatible with my ADHD brain, and to maybe encourage a few random OSM users to venture into Mississippi, I’ve created a few different MapRoulette challenges!

TIGER Fixup Projects on MapRoulette

I created a project called “MoiraPrime’s Mississippi TIGER Fixup Projects” and put 2 related projects under it as an initial tryout of the approach.

See full entry

Location: Leake County, Mississippi, United States

Hi, my name is James Crawford, and I’m running for the OpenStreetMap US board.

About me

I’m a regular editor from Auburn, Alabama. I mainly contribute by editing TIGER road data, importing from external sources, POI surveying, street level imagery coverage, and backcountry trail details. I’ve been active on OSM for over 2 years, and I love keeping in touch with the US community about mapping efforts across the country, and I like seeing community leaders that are active in public forums, and are willing to mingle with their mapping peers.

My current priorities for OSM are as follows:

1: Encouraging the coordination of importing high quality data from external datasets. There are numerous datasets from government agencies in the United States with permissible licensing for use with OpenStreetMap. These datasets provide useful information about a variety of objects mapped in OpenStreetMap, and save huge amounts of time over having mappers collect the data redundantly. It is important to be in touch with the community when coordinating data imports, and it is important to be in touch with government agencies so that we can be more aware of available data that is free to use.

2: Prioritizing focus towards what OSM is useful for. OpenStreetMap defeats commercial competitors in the predictable niche- where there is a demand for geospatial data but no lucrative monetary return. Trails and public land data make a good example. Outdoor enthusiasts have a demand for accurate and low cost map data, but large scale commercial map providers have no commercial incentive to allocate resources towards maintaining this kind of data.

I’m a big fan of outreach, and I’m not a fan of the idea of serving on the board without having meaningful communication with the community. I manage a local community myself, and I love keeping in touch about mapping activities!

Thanks for the consideration,

-James

Posted by Pieter Vander Vennet on 6 February 2023 in English. Last updated on 19 November 2025.

Edit (november 2025): Bing Maps Builder was abandoned in july 2024 - one year and a half after publishing the post below. In the meantime, I’d like to do a shoutout to an article about Visual Studio Code which expresses the same fear of community fracture that I feared for OSM.

Edit: A small update happened after publishing this article - you can read it here: @Pieter%20Vander%20Vennet/diary/400992

OpenStreetMap is in trouble

It is a long-standing tradition that every now and then, a member of the OpenStreetMap-community posts that OSM is in trouble. Often times, these essays complain about some trivial things which are, in the end, not that important. For example, they complain that we didn’t implement Bézier curves yet (we don’t need them), or that the data model is stale (it isn’t, new tagging appears every day), that the main OSM.org website doesn’t have some feature and isn’t on par with Google Maps (that’s by intent) or that AI will make the entire manual mapping space obsolete, in “just another ten years time”.

However, most of these things miss the crucial point of what OSM is: a community; a group of people that are working together on mapping the world in an Open Data way and building related tools with Open Source. Our strength is the unison in this goal, even though everyone pursues this differently, through different technological means and for different motivations. Motivations range from the most mundane reasons up till political activism. And that’s fine. All this activity and diversity strengthens us as a global community.

However, recently, a new participant has entered the ecosystem with parasitic intents. It tries to capture away precisely what makes OSM strong: the contributors.

The means to this end is called ‘Bing Map Builder’.

A bit of history

See full entry

Hello, there!

Hello, everyone! Welcome to my first OSM diary entry! I’m Charmyne Mamador, project lead at Ausome Maps, a She Leads and She Inspires grant-funded project and co-founder of GeoLadies PH.

She leads and She inspires

Together with a number of awesome women all over Asia and the Pacific I went through the 6-month She Leads and She Inspires program. The program covered topics from how to build teams, leadership, solution formulation, and project management .

This program culminated with a project proposal and a chance for 10 projects to be funded. Ausome Maps was one of the proposals selected to be funded. For me, it was a dream come true. I first presented the idea for the Ausome Maps initiative almost 4 years ago at a Geoladies PH meetup. I even created some preliminary screens on how I envisioned the data viewer will look like. Since then, I was waiting for an opportunity to make it happen.

Now, through the She Leads and She Inspires program I finally was able to take this initiative closer to reality.

Pista ng Mapa for me

I was always an admirer of the open data and mapping community. Everyone is genuine and passionate towards the cause that they are working on. These passion-driven (as well as purpose-driven) individuals makes Pista ng Mapa a go-to annual conference for students, professionals, and enthusiasts to learn about new mapping technology, techniques, and relevant projects.

Pista ng Mapa is a conference that is truly close to my heart. It was where the first GeoLadies PH workshop was held! Here was where I also tried to bring my human-centered design expertise into mapping by doing a Human-centered Design (HCD) mapping workshop.

And now, Pista ng Mapa 2022 is where Ausome Maps was officially launched to the public.

Journey to Bicol

The journey from my hometown in Oriental Mindoro to Manila was already long. However, I’m already used to that.

See full entry

Location: Em's Barrio East, Legazpi, Albay, Bicol Region, 4500, Philippines
Posted by @Garam on 6 February 2023 in Korean (한국어).

오래간만에 왔더니 사람이 많이 늘어난 것이 눈에 띕니다.

예전에는 한국어 일기는 혼자만 작성했었고 한창 포켓몬고가 유행하던 때에는 동네에 포켓스톱을 만들어 달라는 글이 간혹 올라오던 곳이었는데 활발해진 게 보기 좋고 더불어 과거에 서양 중심적인 툴 내에서 제가 하던 고민들도 여럿 보이네요.

한국 지역의 태그와 관련해서 과거에 정리했던 위키 문서가 묻혀 있는 듯하여 다시 올려 놓습니다. osm.wiki/Korea_tagging

오늘도 즐거운 편집 되시기 바랍니다.

Posted by watmildon on 6 February 2023 in English. Last updated on 8 February 2023.

About me

A photograph of the mountains near Gold Bar Washington. A range of rocky peaks are in the distance with nearer hills covered in green trees. A river winds it's way through the middle of the photo

I started mapping in June 2020 as a way to find parks and trails near my home in Redmond, Washington. My daughter loves adventures and provides huge motivation. I am a software engineer by trade and from that bring my passion for great tools. I love being able to work with others on a project that is expansive, vivid, and important.

My mapping

See full entry

Hello and thank you for reading why I’m interested in continuing my service on the OpenStreetMap U.S. board for one more term!

This organization, under the excellent leadership of Maggie Cawley, has been making great strides in supporting our community and open geospatial data. I have been involved in a number of these efforts and would love to have one more appointment to follow through on these projects and help steer OSM U.S. on its path.

Specifically, I’ve been leading the Trails Working Group, a collaboration of OSM mappers, data users and land managers, towards building a better system for trail data that protects our environment and keeps people safe and informed. The Trails Stewardship Initiative is a project I’m passionate about. I am excited to see where it leads OSM U.S. in cooperating with entities that use our data. I am also highly interested in academic connections, such as the opportunity we had to work with data science students at the University of Virginia to help build a tool that will identify where the map is underrepresented. I am also part of the TeachOSM Education Working Group, which is focused on building materials that help teachers bring OSM to their students. OpenHistoricalMap is another space where I see immense growth potential for connections to students given all the data that can be created on that platform.

In last year’s election cycle, I mentioned the following priorities for building connections in the OSM U.S. community and they still hold true:

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

See full entry

Начал записывать углублённый курс лекций по JOSM. Для начала выпустил три большие лекции по работе с геометрическими объектами в редакторе JOSM.

1) JOSM. Лекция по работе с геометрией объектов, часть 1 [1ч45мин] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGDZWOhPEAs

  • Типы геометрических объектов OSM
  • Режимы рисования
  • Сходство и отличия разных режимов рисования
  • Способы выделения объектов (массово, поштучно, перечнем, поиском), которые предоставляются базовым JOSM и плагином Utilsplugin2
  • Инструменты рисования, которые предоставляются базовым JOSM, а так же плагинами Fastdraw, Building Tools и Improve Way.

2) JOSM. Лекция по работе с геометрией объектов, часть 2 [1ч11мин] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxWha-FcqZc

  • Разрезание линии сразу в нескольких местах
  • Разрезание замкнутых линий (почему требуется не меньше двух точек, можно ли обойти этот запрет и для чего он нужен)
  • Рисование кругов по двум точкам, по трём, рисование дуг по трём точкам. (И почему сегментов у круга получается именно столько, а не иначе, как сделать если хочется больше/меньше.)
  • Добавление промежуточных точек на существующие фигуры без изменения их формы.
  • Добавление точки перекрестка на пересечение двух линий (и для чего это нужно)
  • Несколько дополнительных возможностей плагина Building Tools
  • “Замена геометрии” и опасность этого инструмента
  • Два инструмента для лоскутного зонирования без мультиполигонов (и для чего такое может понадобиться).

3) JOSM. Инструмент Поиск со сложными запросами [26мин] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E9yea1FuTs

  • Как работать с инструментом Поиск на примере “ищем в городе все подъезды многоэтажек, для которых не указан диапазон квартир”.
  • Как работать с инструментом Фильтр, используя запрос, сконструированный при помощи инструмента Поиск.

See full entry

Posted by hdevine825 on 5 February 2023 in English.

I’m Harrison Devine, and I am running for the OpenStreetMap US board. I edit on OSM and OHM as hdevine825. I have come to OSM through a confluence of my love of maps and open projects.

I got my first start in OSM contributing a few changesets to a HOT project in 2014. I never engaged with the community during this brief stint, and I think that is one reason I did not get more involved. Fast forward to 2021, in the midst of the pandemic, I dove into editing Wikipedia. As I got into Wikipedia, I discovered a passion for cataloging information and contributing to open projects. Then in late 2021 I got back into editing OSM and quickly got involved with the local mapping community.

I’m located in Brooklyn, NY where the map is already densely populated. That has led me to mapping smaller details of sidewalks, tactile paving on curbs, and benches in parks. My largest contributions have been in mapping sidewalks around Brooklyn. I also work on welcoming new mappers and connecting them to the community through the OSM US Slack and giving feedback and resources for their mapping.

Professionally, I work in non-profit accounting. In this role, I work with multiple organizations overseeing their finance function. Often I am the person presenting financial statements to the non-profits’ boards. This has given me considerable experience with compliance and best practices that I hope to contribute to OSM US.

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