Objectives

Guests who show up during mapping activities don’t always have the same level of motivation, equipment, or goals for participating. Some may like to just learn and collect imagery, but are not keen to edit. Some may prefer to just edit, and not go out in the field.

Nobody is even sure if you’d see the same faces again in the next event, so investing too much time on specific (or “better”) tools are deferred, to focus on simpler tools that gets the job done.

A collage of sample photos taken with OpenCamera

The Toolset

… See full entry

1. Copier = CTRL + C
2. Coller = CTRL + ALT + V

Mise à jour du cadastre de Quimperlé OK_______12 313 habitants

In addition to the previous diary post, I want to quickly show why I think that https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:historic=pinfold should be deprecated.

When I started mapping historic pounds with https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:historic=pound, it was pointed out to me that the value I should use was in fact “pinfold”. I had only ever seen “Pound” on old maps, so I presumed that that was the standard word used by cartographers, but I did my due diligence to find out.

Collins Dictionary differentiates by animal kept in the enclosure: “pound” for dogs and cats and “pinfold” for cattle and sheep. No room for pigs, geese, goats and donkeys. I had my suspicion that that was not a very precise definition.

I sent an email to Historic England, because they use both terms in their database; I’m still waiting for the verdict. (Edit 2024-01-29: Their reply email said that they were two words used for the same concept. I don’t find that very helpful. They sent a list of all their pounds and pinfolds, but I didn’t want to look into the copyright license issue, so I ignored that. If anyone is interested, I can forward the list.)

… See full entry

꧂◤نطيح من عثرات الايام ونقوم وتزيدنا الطيحة شموخ وكرامة نواجه الدنيا بصملات وعـزوم ولا هزنا هرج الردي

Granice administracyjne Kościoła Rzymsko-Katolickiego

State of OpenStreetMap in Africa 2023

This article presents a comprehensive overview of the OpenStreetMap (OSM) landscape in Africa as outlined by Geoffrey Kateregga during the State of the Map Africa 2023 conference, held both in Yaoundé, Cameroon, and online. Serving as an update to the previous assessment conducted in 2020, the overview stems from a survey organized by OpenStreetMap Africa, a collaborative network of OSM Communities across the continent. The conference provided insights into the current state, challenges, and successes of OSM communities in Africa, encompassing responses from 50 out of the 54 countries, offering a nuanced understanding of the evolving OSM landscape on the continent.

Survey Methodology and Participants:

The survey, conducted by OSM Africa, engaged members from diverse communities, organizations, and individual contributors across the continent. With responses from 50 countries, the survey covered a substantial portion of Africa, there were no responses to the survey from Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritius, São Tomé and Príncipe, Seychelles.

OpenStreetMap Africa Data Coverage 2023

… See full entry

Bonjour à tous,

Le conseil municipal d’Orelle en Savoie (France) a créé des noms et numéros de rues fin 2023, visibles dans un compte rendu municipal.

Après transmission au centre des finances, c’est officiel et d’ailleurs repris par Googles maps etc.

Est-ce que quelqu’un pourrait se charger de reporter les données officielles ? (Nom et No)

Merci

G p

The Progress So Far, and What Next?!

Dear Diary,
It’s me again, Eden!

It’s the midpoint of everything! My journey at HOT, and all the challenges/growth opportunities that come with it. It’s even the midpoint of the month of January!😀

I’m proud of myself for the progress I have made so far, and the initiatives I have taken in an attempt to maximize my time with HOT.

The 4th of December 2023, began a journey in my tech career which I will forever be grateful for. I was successfully selected as an Outreachy intern candidate at HOTOSM, for a duration of 3 months. As an ambitious learner, I made a list of goals I intend to achieve, and topics I intend to learn more about, but only as much time will permit me.

I mean it’s only 3 months, it will be over before you squint.

That also ushered the thoughts that kept bugging my mind even before I started; How do I achieve this much in just 3 months? What projects would be valuable to HOT and to people? What does my mentor expect of me?

… See full entry

Carte interactif des poubelles dans la commune de Libreville

Dear Diary,

Today marked a significant milestone in my exploration of the world—my first mapping activity. Armed with my trusty GPS device, a sense of curiosity, and a desire for adventure, I set out to document the landscape around me.

The morning air was crisp, and the sun cast a warm glow as I embarked on this new journey. Armed with the tools of modern exploration, I navigated through familiar streets and ventured into areas I had yet to discover.

As I walked, I marked waypoints at interesting locations, capturing the essence of each spot. The quaint coffee shop on the corner, the hidden park with its serene ambiance, and the bustling market—all found their place in my digital map.

Creating routes added a sense of purpose to my exploration. I followed winding paths, capturing the intricate network of streets and alleys. It felt like I was leaving a digital trail of breadcrumbs, each waypoint telling a story of the places I visited.

The highlight of my mapping adventure was recording a track of my entire journey. It was fascinating to see the intricate pattern that emerged—a visual representation of my exploration. The twists and turns, the pauses at various landmarks, all etched into the digital canvas of my mapping application.

This activity not only satisfied my curiosity but also ignited a newfound appreciation for the art of mapping. Each point on the map now holds memories, and the routes tell tales of the paths I’ve taken.

As I conclude this diary entry, I can’t help but feel a sense of accomplishment. My first mapping activity opened a door to a world of discovery, and I’m eager to continue exploring and mapping the beauty that surrounds me.

Until the next adventure, makilagi ed

在上次吐槽有人删除道路名之后，今天发现一个编辑中山市道理分析。看起来又是一个数据分析作业/工作，把不需要的信息删除了。

• 将关系由行政边界(type=boundary)改成线路(type=route)
• 删除存在的民众街道点
• 删除道路名

I’ve been looking at how many tiles are changed when updating OSM data in order to better guide resource estimations, and have completed some benchmarks. This is the technical post with details, I’ll be doing a high-level post later.

Software like Tilemaker and Planetiler is great for generating a complete set of tiles, updated about once a day, but they can’t handle minutely updates. Most users are fine with daily or slower updates, but OSM.org users are different, and minutely updates are critical for them. All the current minutely ways to generate map tiles involve loading the changes and regenerating tiles when data in them may have changed. I used osm2pgsql, the standard way to load OSM data for rendering, but the results should be applicable to other ways including different schemas.

Using the Shortbread schemea from osm2pgsql-themepark I loaded the data with osm2pgsql and ran updates. osm2pgsql can output a list of changed tiles (“expired tiles”) and I did this for zoom 1 to 14 for each update. Because I was running this on real data sometimes an update took longer than 60 seconds to process if it was particularly large, and in this case the next run would combine multiple updates from OSM. Combining multiple updates reduces how much work the server has to do at the cost of less frequent updates, and this has been well documented since 2012, but no one has looked at the impact from combining tiles.

To do this testing I was using a Hezner server with 2x1TB NVMe drives in RAID0, 64GB of RAM, and an Intel i7-8700 @ 3.2 GHz. Osm2pgsql 1.10 was used, the latest version at the time. The version of themepark was equivalent to the latest version

The updates were run for a week from 2023-12-30T08:24:00Z to 2024-01-06T20:31:45Z. There were some interruptions in the updates, but I did an update without expiring tiles after the interruptions so they wouldn’t impact the results.

To run the updates I used a simple shell script

… See full entry

2023 in review

Now that 2023 has come to an end, it is an appropriate time to take a look back and see what has happened within the MapComplete-sphere.

2023 also marked the year that I (pietervdvn) received a grant by NlNet, meaning that I could spend a ton of time on improving MapComplete - and with success.

Looking back, a humongous amount of work happened. I’m giving a quick recap here.

User survey and other statistics

I’ve started the year with orienting myself. I ran a user survey (part 1, 2 and 3) and analyzed how mapcomplete was used. For example, there are some interesting statistics about the number of pictures created and about the reviews that were made

Lots of improvements

Most of the work of course went to programming MapComplete, which underwent a few big changes (notably the UI-framework and Mapping-library) and received numerous small improvements.

A quick recap:

Svelte (Q1)

The first big change of the year was switching to an actual frontend framework. MapComplete was written in a hand-rolled framework, which wasn’t very performant. And while I really loved it, using Svelte made the frontend more approachable for other programmers, more maintainable and faster.

Svelte was chosen partly because it works and has a large ecosystem, but also because it turns out to be conceptually similar to the previous, handrolled framework. Even better: the old framework is so similar, that they can be used together! With a few tweaks and adaptions, they were made compatible.

The big advantage of this compatibility is that it becomes possible to gently migrate. Instead of porting everything at once, component per component can be switched when the time is right. As such, there are still a few components around written in the old framework, but they are slowly getting replaced.

… See full entry

A bit more than a year ago I built the first version of Overpass Ultra. It was an experiment in making an Overpass client similar to overpass turbo but powered by MapLibre GL JS in order take advantage of its excellent support for large GeoJSON sources and vector styling capabilities.

Today, I’m excited to announce version 2 of Overpass Ultra which features a number of improvements over the first version, including the following:

• A new URL: overpass-ultra.us
• Configuration of the style & Overpass API server via YAML Frontmatter
• Simplified styling of the results with a partial MapLibre style
• Customization of the detail popups
• lz-string compressed queries in share URLs
• The ability to share the result as an interactive map without the “IDE” UI (not just hidden like in v1)
• A handy menu with MapLibre styles that work with Overpass Ultra

Here’s a screenshot demonstrating a styled query:

YAML frontmatter

… See full entry

پاسداران، بهستان هشتم، ساختمان آبتین

مشهد وکیل آباد بلوار باهنر باهنر 10 ‍‍‍‍‍‍‍بلاک 17

In preparation for an upcoming video, I fell into another rabbit hole, this time about village pounds/ animal pounds, whatever you want to call them. I won’t go into the tagging scheme which I came up with, but which is recorded on the wiki.

It was fairly easy in England and Wales, where plenty of photographs on Wikimedia with coordinates were provided. The coordinates weren’t always 100% correct, but the well preserved structures are easy to spot on aerial imagery. Historic England and Cadw combined also have hundreds in their databases which I only consulted to get the reference numbers, not to import locations! ~~~ The old Pound in Blundeston, Evelyn Simak / The old Pound in Blundeston ~~~

The situation in the Republic of Ireland is very different, very possibly also for historic reasons which I might go into in the video, but not here. I found 4 recorded as pre-1700 monuments and one as a post-1700 monument. I could find not a single photograph on Wikimedia.

… See full entry

Una delle cose che ci ha ricordato recentemente Steve Coast, il fondatore di OpenStreetMap, è che il nostro database è carente di indirizzi rispetto ad altre mappe commerciali.

Pertanto ho pensato di fare una presentazione dove spiego come funziona la numerazione civica in Italia. Illustro poi come si inserisce un indirizzo in OSM con alcuni esempi. Analizzo quali sono gli errori più comuni che si commettono e infine mostro diverse modalità di rilevamento e alcuni strumenti per il controllo della qualità dei numeri civici.

La trovate sul canale YouTube OpenStreetMap Piemonte, dove sono presenti anche altri video sul nostro progetto di mappatura preferito :-)

Dzień dobry.

29 grudnia 2023 roku na stronie Geoportalu pojawiła się informacja o aktualizacji ortofotomapy w Zwoleniu i kilku innych miastach. Jestem tym uaktualnieniem niezwykle uradowany, gdyż pozwala mi to dodać dane, których dokładność byłaby wcześniej wątpliwa, jak na przykład miejsca parkingowe, a będzie to możliwe dzięki zwiększeniu rozdzielczości zdjęć.

Problemem nowej ortofotomapy jest pora wykonania zdjęć — okres letni. Utrudni mi to mapowanie zadrzewionych okolic, gdyż korony drzew zasłaniają podłoże. W związku z tym będę zmuszony korzystać z archiwalnego podkładu (warstwa “Geoportal 2: Ortofotomapa czasowa (zdjęcie lotnicze) WMS” z filtrem ustawionym na 1 października 2022 roku) w tych miejscach.

Z początku myślałem, że uaktualniona ortofotomapa jest niegeoreferencyjna, gdyż ulice, których geometrię korygowałem, były przesunięte względem znaków poziomych — linii, które były punktem odniesienia. Po porównaniu z jeszcze starszymi zdjęciami (“Ortofotomapa czasowa…” z filtrem ustawionym na 1 listopada 2020 roku) okazało się, że to te aktualne w październiku 2022 roku były przesunięte. Współczynnik przesunięcia wyznaczyłem na (0.40; 0.05). Mimo wszystko proszę Was o opinię w tej sprawie.

Wszelkie zmiany, które będą możliwe dzięki nowej ortofotomapie, a w szczególności korekty geometrii, będę oznaczał hasztagiem #NoweOrtoZwoleń.

Z wyrazami szacunku

Kamil Kalata