Last week, we launched a new OpenStreetMap-based website: “Pin je Punt”.

This application -based on mapComplete- was commissioned by the flemish touristical agency Visit Flanders. The application is a map viewer and map editor, which requests information about charging stations for ebikes, bicycle rental, benches, playgrounds and a few more POIs.

Why?

This project was started for two reasons:

• No one in Belgium does know where all the charging stations for bikes are
• There are five different, provincial touristical offices. They all keep their own database of POI as benches and bicycle rental. ‘Visit Flanders’ (which is responsible for the five smaller ones) wants to unify and integrate these databases. And where better to store all the data then on the biggest geodata repository?

This project builds upon MapComplete, which aims to be an easy-to-use map viewer and editor.

The launch

The project is live since the 7th of march, the (dutch only) project page can be found here

A former radio presentator made an advertisment video as well, which can be seen on youtube (dutch only). As far as I know, this is the first professionaly made commercial which asks to contribute to OpenStreetMap!

There has been quite a few edits done by now too:

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In my little OpenStreetMap-editor translations are provided by contributors on hosted weblate, where thousands of text snippets have been translated already in the past year - which is awesome. Thank you translators!

However, the language picker was a bit dry: it used to have codes for every langauge, e.g. nl, en, ja, ‘pt_BR’, ‘zh_Hant’… Quite boring and not really user-friendly - but easy to implement.

Today, I decided to give these an overhaul. I wanted to show proper language names in them. But: in which language should we show the language overview?

Should we show the language option in the language itself? Or should the languages be shown in the current language? Showing in the current language also means that the name of every language should be translated too - a huge task… Also, translating every language has the drawback that, if a user accidentally selects a language in a foreign writing system, they’ll won’t be able to find their language in all the “gibberish”.

Best of both worlds

I decided to offer the best of both worlds: in the menu, first language name is shown as the native speaker speaks it, followed by the language name in the current language (except if both are the same)

This means that, in all circumstances, everyone can find their language.

But, where to fetch every language name in every language?

Wikidata to the rescue

Of course, the internet must have a list of languages translated in every language. But where to find it or compile it?

I decided to have a look at one of the biggest repositories of knowledge: Wikidata. They do have an entry for every language (e.g. Dutch). To fetch every modern language, we turn to the SPARQL-endpoint with the following query:

sparql SELECT ?lang ?label ?code WHERE { ?lang wdt:P31 wd:Q1288568. ?lang rdfs:label ?label. ?lang wdt:P424 ?code }

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Hi all,

Just a quick heads up that MapComplete 0.14 is deployed!

Apart from lots of fixed bugs and performance improvements, a new theme showing OpenStreetMap notes has landed! Especially the filter functionality should come in handy

And of course, there are plenty of (new) themes, such as the street lighting theme (thanks Robin!) or the postboxes and -offices map (by nicolelaine).

And -by now- over 1000 individual contributors have used MapComplete.

Hi everyone,

A new version of MapComplete has been deployed. It has a lot of exciting new themes and features, which I’d like to highlight in this diary entry.

New themes

The Flemish touristical agency (Toerisme Vlaanderen) has asked me to create a tool to help them to map charging stations, restaurants, café’s, …

This has resulted in quite some fun new themes:

• The theme with charging stations has improved tremendously and now asks which plug types are available, how much power these plugs output, …
• One with pubs and cafés
• One with restaurants and fast food
• One with publicly accessible towers with a panoramic view
• One with binoculars

At last, the theme I’ve quickly made as demo with hackerspaces and makerspaces is online as well.

Other improvements

At the same time, I’ve been doing lots of work on improving performance. A lot has changed under the hood, resulting in a way more robust and fast experience. On high zoom levels, the OSM-API is used directly, bypassing overpass all together. If overpass-api.de is down, failover to other instances is now builtin. At last, caching is a bit more aggressive and if the data on your machine is recent, no new data is loaded at all.

Earlier releases had some important features to, which I’d like to highlight as they can be important for theme builders:

• A layer can configure filters
• A layer can demand to have ‘precise input’, showing an extra draggable map (with e.g. aerial photography) when a new point is added to the map.
• A new point can be snapped to an already existing road, e.g. when adding a bollard
• A layer can define that a point can be (soft) deleted
• The new Mapillary-API has been integrated
• Some themes have a download-button enabled to download as GeoJson or as CSV

I need your help!

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A bit over a year ago, I received a phone call: We would like to have some project about nature and forests, where people can like go out and add data about those. Oh, it has to be really simple to use.

Some months and some funding later, the first version of MapComplete was born. While it had a specific focus then, it has grown a lot. Today, MapComplete is a map viewer for a certain theme, where the configuration for that theme decides what features are visible with which icons. When a map feature is clicked, known information is shown and the user is invited to add more information and to add pictures.

By now, there are about 20 themes for multiple topics, such as bicycle shops and pumps, playgrounds, public bookcases and much more. And it is relatively easy to create and load your own theme.

The ease of use and flexibility has lead to a steady increase of contributors that way. Thursday 15th of april was the day the editor saw its 500’th contributor:

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Hello everyone,

As a coach for the Open Summer of Code in Belgium, I thought the community would be interested in reading a little about it and get inspired - along with reading how many of the teams used a map and specifically OSM.

What is the Open Summer of Code

If you have never heard about the Open Summer of Code yet, it is an awesome project. Students create an open source or open data application which a real client needs. The client -often, but not always a governmental organization- sponsors the students. During the four week program, the students get relevant workshops, gain lots of experience, have lots of networking opportunities and are exposed to other Open Source projects and ideas. This all is organized by Open Knowledge Belgium, a small but amazing organisation which furthers the use of open data in Belgium.

This year 73 (!) students participated, along with 17 coaches, making this eight edition bigger then ever. Furthermore, oSoc has been more international then ever, with lots of international students and projects and having a spinoff in Spain. This first Spanish edition had 10 students whom enjoyed it a lot. In other words, don’t hesitate to contact us. Wherever you are, you are welcome as student, coach, client of partner organization or perhaps even as organizer of your own edition.

For me personally, it was the first I participated to oSoc. I had the honor of coaching two teams, quite a challenge for someone just stepping in; but whatever challenge arose, there was always some coach with the right expertise to help out. Furthermore, with Ben Abelshausen (Xivk) and Jonathan Belien (jbelien) being coaches as well, OpenStreetMap was well represented, especially when Joost Schouppe passed by as well.

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Today, I got the question how I quickly added a ton of notes. I use OSMAND for this, with a few tweaks.

Setup

1. Enable the ‘OSM Editing plugin’
2. Under configure screen, enable ‘Quick action’. You find it right on top
3. Go back to the map; you’ll notice a new button on the lower right side, just above the plus-button.
4. Press this ‘quick action button’. A new menu pops up.
5. Press ‘add action’ and choose ‘Add OSM Note
6. In the following menu, make sure to enable ‘Show an interim dialog’ and press ‘apply’

Adding a note

1. Press the quick action button
2. An orange marker appears. Swipe the map to position the marker above the note location.
3. Press ‘Add OSM Note’
4. Enter the note text in the popup and press OK
5. Your note now appears as green circle with an ‘i’ on the map
6. Repeat for all the notes

For now, your note is not send over to OSM.org but remains on your own device!

Uploading all your notes

EDIT: M!dgard figured out a way to make this step obsolete and to import them directly into JOSM. See his diary entry here

After surveying, you’ll have a ton of notes. To upload them all at once:

1. Go to ‘My Places’
2. Go to the third tab: ‘OSM Edits’
3. Press the upload button in the lower left corner (pointing up)
4. Select the notes you want to upload. If you want to upload them all, press the checkbox left of ‘your edits’
5. Press the upload button in the upper right corner
6. Enter your credentials and hit OK.

You can also enter your credentials with the ‘OSM Editing’ plugin settings, so that you don’t have to enter them over and over again.

Adding POI

If you are gonna add a lot of POIs with the same presets (e.g. benches, AED, …), you can also make a quick action for that. Play around!

I’m from Bruges (Belgium). You know, that famous medieval city in Belgium.

As everyone in Belgium knows, the center of Bruges is paved mostly in sett/cobblestones. Personally, I’m pretty fond of those sett pavements. They’re way nicer to see then asphalt (not to mention conrete plates), the absorb a lot of heat in the summer (cooling the city) which is released again in autumn.

But, as the bicycle is my primary means of transportation, one drawback comes to mind: they’re uncomfortable to cycle on - especially when pulling a cart. Some types of set pavement are to be avoided then - I’d rather drive 200 meters over asphalt than 100 over the big boulder. However, the smaller sett -often laid in arcs- is more comfortable to drive on and has a smaller penalty.

This implies that more information should be added to the ‘surface’-tag. In this document, I propose a few extra tags to deal with this extra information; and what kind of sett these are. These tags are used in Bruges; feel free to use them in other places as well.

All example pictures are taken by me, and may be used freely for OSM-related endeavours (e.g. wiki, tools, …).

Cobblestone vs. Sett

First things first.. What is sett stone? And what are cobblestones?

According to Wikipedia, Cobblestone is a natural building material based on cobble-sized stones, and is used for pavement roads, streets, and buildings. Sett is distinct from a cobblestone by being quarried or shaped to a regular form, whereas cobblestone is generally of a naturally occurring form.

In practice, cobblestone is often used in OSM to describe sett stones - although incorrectly. The wiki itself acknowledges this:

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After some experimenting and help from the Belgian OSM Community, I figured out how to tweak the parameters for the routing engine and steer the navigation process. It seemed as if the technical documentation was missing, so lets write it here.

The parameter file: routing.xml

All parameters for the routing file are stored in a single XML.

You can find this XML on the OSMAnd github. Head over there, and download it. EDIT: By now, all the documentation has been included upstream. Everything you can read here, you an also find in the github routing.xml file. This diary entry can still serve as a gentle introduction.

This document should be placed in a place where OsmAnd will find it. As I chose ‘external storage’ to store my maps (settings -> general settings -> Data Storage Folder (under miscellaneous title), adding this custom routing is easy. Plug your phone in your computer and go to the path /sdcard/Android/data/net.osmand.plus/files. Copy routing.xml over.

Reading the parameter file

routing.xml is actually documented quite good! Read the docs there to get some general idea.

Adding an option to a profile

The parameters are split per profile. I edited the bicycle profile, as that is what I use most (also see my previous diary entry).

Over there, add a toggle, e.g., if you want to avoid sett surfaces:

    <parameter id="avoid_sett" name="Strongly prefer asphalt and paving stones" description="Tries to route around sett and cobblestone, ideal if riding with a cycling cart" type="boolean"/>

The id is the name you’ll use in if-statements, the name is what shows up in OSMAnd. Save the file as described above and restart OsmAnd. Start navigation to somewhere. If you click the settings (the cogwheel on the bottom when starting navigation), your new parameter should show up!

Tweaking weights

Routing considers three major aspects:

• access
• speed
• priority

Each of those aspects has its own section in the xml; you can’t miss them.

Access

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Hello everyone,

The 26th of september was an OSM-meetup in Bruges. The few guys which where there - and especially Joost, must have gotten some weird and extremely contagious disease, called ‘mapperitis’. It has been the start of a growing involvement in the mapping efforts of OSM.

Falling in love

Although I’ve been using OSM as my navigation of choice for years now (prob. 5), it’s only recently I’ve actively begun mapping. Altough my first mapping were the ski routes on holiday, that was a one-off - until now.

Using streetcomplete, I’ve been surveying the surfaces of Bruges, which contains - as you guessed it, a lot of sett (aka ‘neat cobblestone’). In the meantime, I’ve been spreading that contagous mappiritis around as well - until it reached someone of the Fietsersbond. One of them had recently seen the talk by Escada and was wondering if it would be possible to map all cycling routes, their surface area and width, to test if they meet the vademecum. “Yes, this is possible” was my answer of course!

I followed by a short showcase of OSM, overpass-turbo and how easy it was to enter all this info. Although he was impressed, he was a bit scared of how much work it seemed to be - and that it is an older and not so tech-savy person didn’t help either.

That was a week ago*. By now, the north of Bruges (the center) is surface-mapped, and around 50 cycleways are measured.

*(To be honest, it was two weeks. However, I was on holiday one week, so I couldn’t map)

Routing around sett

In the mean time, I was confronted with another problem. Quite often, I’m cycling around with a cycle cart. These things are slowed down tremendously by sett stones. So I wondered, wouldn’t it be possible to tweak the OSMAnd routing to avoid those nasty cobblestones?

After a few inquirements on the community riot channel, it turned out to be possible. And not only possible, it was easy as well!

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