Which popular editors do we have now? According to statistics, three of these: iD, JOSM and Potlatch 2. The next four editors are mobile: Go Map, OsmAnd, Vespucci and Pushpin each have a thousand of users. Today there is another one, which now has less than a hundred users, but aims to go for the first place: MAPS.ME.

As you might know, MAPS.ME is a popular app for using OpenStreetMap data on a phone or a tablet. It has geocoding, routing (using OSRM engine), bookmarks and 3d-buildings. It runs both on Android and iOS devices, and it is very fast. Obviously it works offline: you just have to download some countries. Besides speed, MAPS.ME is known for simplicity: even I can understand which buttons to press, without examining every control and menu item first.

Just now we have released the first major update this year. It has better geocoding (and reverse geocoding), smaller regions (no bigger than 70 MB, most are below 50) and, the most important change, now it can edit the map! In most POI cards (click on a POI and get one) there are two new options: «Edit place» and «Report a problem». The first one opens a simple (as in, easy to understand) editor for relevant fields: name, address, opening hours. The second one is for leaving OSM notes. Also there is an «Add a place» option on the menu. So yes, it’s an editor.

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Почему-то информация была только на форуме, но на ближайшие дни, если хочется потренироваться в картировании города, который ещё не так надоел, как ваш собственный, загляните в тему http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=53769

Alas, you cannot embed youtube videos in diary posts:

https://youtu.be/X0CENjG_zMs

Did I mention to vote for me in the upcoming elections? :)

I am Ilya Zverev, a.k.a. Zverik, currently living in Russia. I’ve nominated myself to the OSMF Board, and now I have supposed to write a manifesto, touching on diversity, transparency and other serious topics. But the thing is, I’ve read all manifestos for past three years, and all of them (except Frederik’s) are boring and didn’t affect anything. So what if I show support for transparency — would it help? Nearly all candidates supported it, and look how verbose Board minutes are (they aren’t).

Do you know what the Board is working on? I don’t, and I read the minutes. There are two options: either the Board discusses a lot of things on their private mailing list, or they actually are working only on topics spotted in minutes. Both of these are not good: I am a member of OSMF, and I expect to know what’s in store for OpenStreetMap. I hope it would change, and maybe I could help it — but after Frederik’s revelations, I am not sure. I’ll try.

I support diversity. The Russian community is severely under-represented in OpenStreetMap, despite being the fourth (occasionally the third) biggest in the project. Though I don’t like needless «regionalizing» of some aspects, e.g. tagging. Obviously, we should promote OSM in more countries, though I don’t see how it is the Board’s task. Last year I learned what gender diversity actually means, how inequality is enforced by nearly every aspect of most cultures, and that IT has it worst. But also I was taught that, as a man, I can do nothing about it, other than properly teach my daughters. So I have nothing to offer on the topic of diversity.

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If you are not yet using MAPS.ME, you are missing out :) The most frequent complaint from the mappers was that official maps in that application get updated only once a month, along with new releases. I usually map stuff the day before I’m going out, so this update cycle does not suit me. And since I work for them now, I can fix this.

Since this month, there are daily updated map files for MAPS.ME. To install downloaded files on Android, find MapsWithMe directory on your device (you can check “Settings → Map storage” in the app), and put new files there. You should delete old maps and directories with same names (the latter is to clear caches). And probably restart the app. On iPhone and iPad, just use iTunes: find and open MAPS.ME application, delete old maps, upload new.

Maps are published every day at around 5am UTC. Mwm files are maps, routing files are needed for car routing (pedestrian routing doesn’t need them). In a couple of days a new version would be released, and it will be required for daily maps to function.

These files are not official. The application may behave strangely (there will be notifications about outdated maps), data may be broken (it’s OSM, it is always broken), and your application may crash. If you encounter anything strange, you can clean the MapsWithMe directory and/or move the app from SD to the device memory, which must fix most bugs. Daily maps are my initiative, and MAPS.ME company is in no way responsible for these. Of course, I’m ready to answer any questions.

Update: the original URL is not updated, the new weekly-built maps are here. Subscribe to this issue for updates.

Surely now is the moment for OpenStreetMap to accelerate adoption, usage and uptake? But why hasn’t this already happened? Why hasn’t the geospatial world run lovingly into OSM’s arms?

Gary Gale published an interesting article on removing SA clause from our license (actually, the major part was about business-friendly face, but you know the principle: want it? go do it). We’ve heard it before, from Mapbox. As Richard points out, that won’t happen any time soon, because there is clearly less than 2/3 of active contributors supporting the idea.

And these opinions strike me as lacking an understanding of OpenStreetMap project. Are we mapping for PNDs? Yes. Are we mapping for commercial companies? Of course. Would we like a thousand more commercial users promoting OSM by simply using it? Yes, go ahead. What? They cannot do that right now?

Well, we can wait. That what distinguishes us from other map data providers: we can really wait. OpenStreetMap is slow, but unstoppable. Mapbox and other businesses have immediate tasks, and for that they need a fast reaction from OSM. But OSM isn’t fast. The last license change took 3 years. That’s just a bit less than Mapbox has existed. Some think that because we make maps for crisis areas so fast, we are very responsive – but we are not. And it is good.

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Two weeks ago Steve Coast held an AmA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit. I’ve selected and rearranged some of his answers for this post, since he rarely expresses his point of view on lists or anywhere else.

Also, he agreed to participate in next week’s Russian OSM Radio (in English, of course). You can submit your questions during the broadcast (22nd of January, 20:00-21:00 UTC) on #osm-ru IRC channel.

mr_gila: What inspired you to start up OSM?

There’s a few different answers to that question. On one level, it was just kind of obvious. Back then, in 2004, Wikipedia was hot new technology and the wiki idea in general was spreading. Why not apply it to maps?

On another level, I had an old laptop with Debian Linux on it and a USB GPS device. I tried to use some mapping software but there were no maps. So why not make them?

On another level, the maps that were available in the UK and Europe tended to be very proprietary and expensive. So why not open them up?

On another level, I was young and naive.

Let’s not forget though that OSM is now many, many people from all over the world. It wouldn’t have worked if I hadn’t convinced a lot of people to join in and help.

mapsandmapsandmaps: How did you find your time studying at UCL, and how much of an impact do you think this lead into you founding OSM? Does it feel strange that it has become a big topic of academic research with people like Muki Haklay writing papers about it?

UCL. I was working in a couple of PhD research labs and not paying much attention to studies. That mean I had the time and resources (computers with direct access to the internet, no NAT!) to go do OSM and other things.

Muki was in one of those research labs (as was Paul Torrens, Martin Dodge, Sean Gorman and others), so it’s not entirely strange.

ManAboutCouch: Half-jokingly, how has OSM managed to get this far without a properly defined Polygon feature type?

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Hi everyone, I’ll be visiting Porto in two days. Portugal is great, not as cold as Saint-Petersburg. We’ve already been to Lisboa, from where we recorded a holiday OSM podcast: English parts start at 2:00:30 (featuring Manuel Hohmann, Thomas “malenki” and Jerry Clough) and 3:01:15 (with Ian Lopez). The next issue will be recorded on 8th, 20:00-21:00 WET, and I very much hope to talk with a local, portugese mapper. Maybe even face to face, though usually I use Skype or Mumble.

So, if you map Portugal, or live in Portugal, or know someone from Portugal — contact me please. Also, I’m up for a osmers meeting in a cafe near Santo Ildefonso on 7th or 8th. I’m Ilya, my phone (for sms only) is +7 921 583-12-91.

update: radio recording today, 8th of January

We in Russia have a weekly podcast recorded live: OSM Radio (looks like RadioOSM, I know). Every Thursday we go online, discuss OpenStreetMap news and interview guests, either from OSM community or from OSM-related companies (Sputnik, Maps.me, OsmAnd, NextGIS etc).

The next broadcast will be on the 1st of January. Because of the holiday, that won’t be an ordinary podcast, but an “open mic” event. From 17:00 to 21:00 UTC we’ll be receiving calls from OSM members (and making calls ourselves), and will ask three questions:

• What was the most cool or satisfying thing you did in OSM last year?
• What was the biggest event for you in OSM in 2014?
• What do you expect of OpenStreetMap in 2015?

On that evening we expect to bring the community together and to make them hear each other, to really feel like a group united by the common goal. And I think it would be great to have English-speaking OSM members on air as well. Probably in the second half of the program. We are open till the last visitor, so if there are many osmers, we’ll finish later. If you want to participate, call me by skype (zverikk) on the 1st after 19:00 UTC, or mail me ([email protected]) your skype id, so I will call you myself. Mumble server is also available, mail me for its address. Let’s make it an event to remember.

Hi. I often drop hints about what our project misses, and now want to talk some bit more about a part I’m interested in. Since I joined OpenStreetMap, I have been interested in geodata collecting methods. I quickly grasped walking papers, put my GPS and camera to use, and struggled with georeferencing audio recordings. OSM allows for many types of sources, and in past years a lot were invented. But alas, not much in last years.

Walking papers (or field papers) are still produced from tiles. Fieldpapers.org, the “modern” service for generating atlases, is more than two years old and is a slight update to older walking-papers.org, built in 2009. It stiches tiles and produces a PDF file. You have no control over map style, you can’t even use your own tiles. “Toner” style, which is the best option, are updated infrequently: you might have to wait a week before traced buildings appear on it. And some of them still won’t, since it’s hard to grasp how it works and why it hides some features unpredictably. Finally, pages of an atlas will be oriented by cardinal directions, in a grid with 90° angles. Of course, not many towns have such proper road network, so you will have to choose smaller scale, with less effective area for mapping.

I think I can fix this. It is easy, really: most of building blocks for a proper solution are already invented. First, an interactive map, on which you place rectangles for pages. Arbitrarily, not neccessary in a grid. Maybe draw some lines, which would be “pie segments”: instead of using MS Paint for making a pie, use some advanced technology. Maybe integrate it with MapCraft. So, a bunch of rectangles on a map. Not 90°-aligned: rotate them as you like. Align with road network, with streams etc, so areas for filling in take as much space as possible, and scale is biggest you can get. When done, just save your work and close the website. Go trace some buildings and tracks.

… See full entry

Richard is now counting some stats on anonymous ballots from the Board voting, and he persuaded me to publish some other, more complex stats I did on that Saturday. So, here comes.

Basic counting

Out of 219 ballots…

• 79 (36%) have all 8 candidates ranked
• 56 (26%) have 3 candidates
• 23 (11%) have 4 candidates

Richard makes a smart assumption that some people didn’t quite understand that one can submit any number of candidates, not one, not 3 (for number of seats) and not all 8. I submitted 4 candidates, because I had strong preference for Board members, and I believe that’s the case for most of 3/4 votes. And people who filled all 8 positions maybe are not happy with a tiny chance their vote will be burned otherwise.

Every candidate has been listed at each of 8 positions in ballots (that is, there is no candidate that haven’t been assigned e.g. #6 in at least one ballot).

For ballots with less than 8 positions, some of the candidates were not mentioned. Let’s count number of ballots for a candidate, where he/she is not included:

• 102 (46.6%) — Steve Coast
• 93 (42.5%) — Ethan Nelson
• 80 (36.5%) — Randy Meech
• 75 (34.2%) — Marek Strassenburg-Kleciak
• 73 (33.3%) — Paul Norman
• 64 (29.2%) — Peter Barth
• 54 (24.7%) — Kathleen Danielson
• 39 (17.8%) — Frederik Ramm

So, nearly half of voters skipped Steve (I wonder why) and Ethan (probably because he is less known than others). Frederik and Kathleen wrote a lot of good, thought-provoking posts in osmf-talk, so I hope that’s why everybody were voting for them.

Second places

We know Frederik Ramm got 78 first-rank votes, and 23 of them were distributed among other candidates. Whom?

• 27 (35%) have chosen Peter Barth as the second candidate, so he got 8 of these extra votes
• 19 (24%) have chosen Paul Norman, so he got 5.6 votes

(The rest was skipped because numbers are too small). Some of those who gave the first preference to other candidates had very strong preferences for the second place:

… See full entry

Have you ever printed a map? Clicked a hundred times on “Export” button on osm.org? Installed mapnik or maperitive and spent days configuring a database and customizing a style? Did you wish for a simple web service that lets you select a bounding box and produces a hi-dpi raster or vector image? Well, there is one now. It is called Get Veloroad, for a style it was created for.

On the side panel you choose paper format and margins, add a GPX trace if needed, select style (“veloroad” and “https://www.openstreetmap.org” are available), image format, and press “Submit”. If the server is not overloaded, you’ll get your image in a minute, in glorious 300 dpi. SVG files are postprocessed, so you can easily move labels as a whole, instead of separate letters (the most annoying trait of mapnik-generated maps).

Alas, my server cannot fit all the planet, so there are only Baltic countries and parts of Russia and Finland. Everything is open-sourced though, so I hope soon we’ll see a worldwide service for producing high-resolution images.

Since the release of Nik4 some bugs were fixed: namely, scale (-s 10000 = 1:10000) is applied correctly, georeferencing parameters were corrected, and very large tiled maps (bigger than 16k×16k, mapnik’s limit on images) are created without errors and are properly georeferenced (you can load them in QGIS without any extra work).

Now the version is 1.4, and there are features to make producing maps more fun. For example, you don’t need to extract latitude and longitude to get an image of an area you see at osm.org: just run

nik4.py --url http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/55.9865/37.2160 osm.xml screenshot.png

and you’ll get 1280×1024 map near that point. Like a screenshot, but more flexible. Users from USA can now specify US Letter paper format (--paper letter, or shorter -a l). Style XML can be streamed from stdin, and the resulting image can be streamed to stdout.

Dimensions are not bound to width and height now: they are swapped automatically to better fit given bounding box. And you can set one of dimensions to 0 to calculate it from bbox. See this chapter of documentation for examples.

Finally, styles can now have variable parameters. If there is ${name:default} sequence anywhere in style XML, with --vars https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:name=value argument you can replace it with any value, or with the default value, if name is omitted. This allows for printing different routes with the same style, or exporting a map in many languages.

To update Nik4 with pip, run pip uninstall nik4; pip install nik4. For calculating bbox for a given route, you can use this page.

I recently needed to create a big georeferenced image from a mapnik style file, and found out no image exporting tool currently offers more than a direct interface to mapnik’s options. That is, I could not get “image in 300 dpi for printing on an A5 sheet”, I had to understand what scale_factor is, and what is the default resolution, and why lines had become so thick. And I’m a programmer — imagine a confusion of a regular user!

Today I have published Nik4. It makes everything easier.

Grab a 800x600 image at z13? -c LON LAT -x 800 600 -z 13 — and no suprises like when the output image differs from osm.org (nik2img puzzled me with that one). Print a region in 300 dpi on A5? -a 5 --ppi 300 --bbox X1 Y1 X2 Y2. You don’t have to think about scale_factor ever. Make a very large image? No problem, use --tiles 4 and wait a bit; you won’t run out of memory.

See https://github.com/Zverik/Nik4 for an extensive description and installation instructions (easy_install nik4 — there, no more instructions needed). Print more maps.

And for generating tiles there is just as simple polytiles.py.

If you tried rendering quality maps with Mapnik, you know its label placement is awful. Just a bit better than throwing labels on map at random. So for printing, postprocessing in a vector editor is mandatory.

If you tried editing Mapnik-generated SVG, you know it is completely unstructured. Which means, if you need to move a label, first you have to select all of its letters one by one, and then its casing, also letter by letter. And there will be a lot of frustration when you select roads underneath the label, or lose selection.

Yesterday I’ve made a small script that takes Mapnik SVG, finds labels and wraps them in groups. So when you open that SVG in Inkscape, you will move labels not by letter, but as a whole.

https://github.com/Zverik/mapnik-group-text

The only parameter, -d, controls the maximum width of a letter, including spacing between letters. The default works for me, but if your labels are tightly packed, or are printed in a very large font, you may need to use that parameter.

On this day last year I announced the Imagery Offset Database: a centralized storage for imagery offsets. It was planned as a way to provide every mapper, especially beginners, with a confidence that they are tracing correctly aligned imagery. And for those not knowing imagery can be misaligned, a way to not ruin a map. After the announce, tens of mappers started entering their offsets into the database, and I’ve never made a local offset bookmark ever since.

Aerial Imagery cannot be ideally georeferenced. Depending on precision of your measurement tools (GPX traces give 1 to 10 meter precision), you may notice that the imagery layer is positioned incorrectly, and use your editor’s controls to shift it to the right place, so GPS traces follow roads and paths on the imagery. This is common knowledge among experienced mappers, and I hope beginner mappers learn that soon enough.

Sadly, looking at new editors I can’t but conclude than either there is no misaligned imagery (which is probably false), or many mappers, including those who work on those editors, don’t bother with aligning imagery to GPS traces. How many of you pressed those little arrows for shifting a background layer in iD editor? Does your favourite mobile editor, with which you upload POI nodes to the database, account for shifted imagery? Do you make bookmarks of such offsets so you can quickly restore them later, or on a different computer?

A week ago Simon Poole added IODB support to Vespucci, making it the second editor supporting it. This is great news, number of editors supporting the database has doubled overnight. Support in iD has been stalled, and I didn’t expect Potlatch or iOS apps to support it. So basically, pay attention and don’t be suprised when buildings are misaligned with imagery.

… See full entry

Quite a lot of news sources have asked almost all cartographic providers if they will change Crimea’s owner on their maps. No international provider answered positively. In Russia companies are more willing to comply: Mail.ru maps are showing Crimea as a part of Russia, and Yandex now has two separate maps, for Russians and Ukrainians, which show Crimea in different colors. Wikipedia contributors started a tiny edit war between images that show Crimea as a disputed territory or a part of Russia.

Members of Russian and Ukrainian OpenStreetMap communities have discussed the matter during the first few days of the Crimea situation, and have come to an agreement ten days ago. We declared a moratorium on touching administrative borders in Crimea, as well as name tags (since some mappers started changing Ukrainian names to Russian), active until 1st of June, 0:01 MSK. Until at least then Crimea stays a part of Ukraine on our map. Every edit altering name tags or administrative borders will be treated as provoking an edit war and reverted, users who do that repeatedly will be banned. There were some cases of that already.

Of course users are encouraged to map non-political things, like buildings and landuses, and add language-specific name tags: name:uk, name:ru and name:crh. Right now there is a mapping event in progress, focusing on improving Crimea’s coverage on OpenStreetMap, which has attracted around 70 mappers.

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Как всегда, забыл про дневники OSM, хотя новички в первую очередь смотрят именно их. Новички, знайте: у нас есть форум и новостной блог.

Идёт пятый день эпичного картопроекта «#крым», в рамках которого мы — уже 65 человек — вместо своего двора открываем в JOSM крымские деревни и луга, и обклацываем по бингу и ортофотопланам всё, что видим. На сайте проекта всё написано, и есть карта, где нельзя не заметить разницу между пятничным и сегодняшним покрытием. Иногда мы собираемся сообща улучшить карту города, но впервые поставлена задача обработать целый полуостров, и мы справляемся с ней лучше, чем можно было ожидать.

В этом мероприятии нет политики, если вы не привнесёте её сами: до 31 мая действует мораторий на изменение административных границ и тега name в Крыму. Наша цель — просто собраться вместе и почувствовать, что сообщество OpenStreetMap — это картографическая сила, равной которой нет. Карта Крыма из OSM уже почти на всей территории лучшая в мире, но наша задача — довести её до такого состояния, чтобы мы сами могли ей гордиться.

Картопроект заканчивается вечером 31 марта. Чтобы обозначить себя как участника, в комментарий к одному из загружаемых пакетов правок добавьте хэштег #крым или #крим. Обсуждение идёт на форуме.

Olympic facilities being mapped really good in OpenStreetMap has been a subject of many articles recently, mainly with comparison to Google Maps (which are nearly empty, of course, unlike Yandex Maps). This has been good for OSM awareness, and Russian mappers welcome that. In Russia a lot of Olympics-related projects (including the torch relay) were using OpenStreetMap, and most of them even attributed us correctly.

But there are comments that bug me, which imply that, as it usually happens with humanitarian response, in case of Olympics some mappers just organized themselves on a weekend and mapped the whole area from Bing imagery and probably official data (of which there is none, by the way). That is completely untrue: we had no mapping parties or other events targeted at mapping the region.

… See full entry

Yesterday I’ve created another repository in MapBBCode project. It is a small script, which does great things.

[map=16]16.3866,119.95855(Complete)[/map]

The Rails Port does not support MapBBCode, and probably never will. But copy and paste the following line to the address bar to witness the magic (you’ll have to restore “javascript:” prefix in Chrome and IE):

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:javascript:(function(){document.body.appendChild(document.createElement('script')).src='http://osmz.ru/mapbb.plain.js';})();

MapBBCode Loader searches for BBCode on the current page, and if it succeeds, it appends Leaflet and MapBBCode libraries and replaces all [map] bbcode with maps. And if there is a specially marked button, the script adds a map editor to it. Basically, this script allows integrating MapBBCode into forum and blog engines which do not have native plugins for that yet.

I guess nothing can stop MapBBCode from conquering the internet. Even closed-source forum engines (I’m looking at you, vBulletin, which requested $250 license for access to documentation) and lazy administrators. The complete instruction of five simple steps for embedding MapBBCode anywhere is published in the GitHub repo.

The loader requires MapBBCode 1.2, which is now in development and may contains traces of bugs.

Update: it seems Leaflet can’t stand CSS in OSM diaries. And in Firefox you cannot run javascript from the location bar. In Chrome and Internet Explorer “javascript:” prefix is automatically removed when you copy the string, you have to add it back yourself. Basically, it works without fixing only in Opera browser.

But that is not the point: the loader is not supposed to power such one-off demostrations. It serves as a plugin replacement for engines that are hard to modify. For example, shtosm.ru is powered by a closed-source engine, and only MapBBCodeLoader has allowed for maps in it.