Lately, I've found the OSM History Viewer (Wiki) to be a really useful tool for checking changesets created by other users. But it's quite a hassle opening a new tab to load the service then copy-pasting the changeset ID. So I created a bookmarklet such that whenever I am on a changeset page on the OSM website, I can just apply the bookmarklet and be whisked off to the History Viewer instantly.

Shown below is the bookmarklet URL if you want it too. It's just a quick-and-dirty piece of JavaScript hacked together in a span of 5 minutes. Enjoy!

javascript:a=document.location.href.split('/');if(a[2]+a[3]+a[4]=='www.openstreetmap.orgbrowsechangeset'){document.location.href='http://osm.cdauth.de/history-viewer/changeset.php?id='+a[5]}else{alert('This%20is%20not%20a%20valid%20OSM%20changeset%20page.')}

To install, just create a new bookmark with the whole geeky text above in the URL/URI field. Just ignore the auto-link added by the OSM diary software.

A friend of mine told me that the newest phase of the Congressional Avenue Extension, from Tandang Sora to Luzon Avenue in Quezon City, has been completed. So when I had to pick my sister up in the area, I grabbed the chance to map this new road! Well, there are still some parts of the dual-carriageway that are under construction, but it is quite passable.

I know lots of other people can relate, but I always love it when I am able to map new roads in OSM. It gives a nice feeling that you are doing your fair bit in keeping the world's best map updated. :-)

C-5 Road is a major artery in Metro Manila and the project to extend it south is quite controversial since a senator, and presidential candidate in this coming May election, is accused of using his position to influence the project for the benefit of his real estate businesses. But here in OSM, we don't care about the ethics of the road construction but whether the road is accurately mapped.

A portion of the extension, from Quirino Avenue to Sucat Road, has already been opened more than a year ago and it is already mapped in OSM, but I didn't realize that the next phase, the one from Sucat Road to Multinational Avenue, was already passable until I saw this changeset by Al Silva. Since he was only able to map the northbound side, I really went out of my way last Saturday night to drive both sides and get a GPS trace. I then subsequently edited the road into OSM existence and also cleaned-up the C-5–Sucat interchange.

I wish I had a more accurate GPS device since the track my GPS phone got didn't quite match the track obtained by Al Silva and since I don't know his equipment, I'm not sure whose track is more precise. But at least the road is now in OSM and is routable. Somebody can refine it in the future.

There an activity on the OSM Wiki where every week there is a Featured image to be displayed on the main Wiki page. I decided to do a similar activity for images specific to the Philippines. One advantage of this activity, aside from serving as an inspiration to OpenStreetMappers in the Philippines and recognizing excellent work, is that the Philippine OSM community now has a selection of images that can be used for promotional purposes here in the country.

Last December 12, we had a Christmas OpenStreetMap Micro Mapping Party. The previous one was in Davao back in July and the first was in Tagaytay in May. Starting in 2010, we plan to have quarterly Mapping Parties at least in the Greater Manila Area. So if you’re interested to join one, there will be plenty of opportunities next year for you to do so. :-)

Read more in my blog.

I never had the opportunity before to try the OSM Xapi and now that I did, I find it really, really cool!

I recently noticed that the Mapnik layer displayed the names of the provinces of the Philippines in low zoom levels and when I panned around, I observed that labels were missing for the newly created provinces like Dinagat Islands and Zamboanga Sibugay and that there was a label for Kalinga-Apayao which has already long been split into Apayao and Kalinga provinces. These labels were being displayed based on place=state nodes imported from the GEONet Names Server.

I had no idea how best to correct this (e.g., verifying that there were indeed missing place=state nodes so that I can add them) so I sent out an email to the talk-ph mailing list. Maning and Mike pointed me to Xapi and after trying it tonight using the following call http://osmxapi.hypercube.telascience.org/api/0.6/node[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:place=state][bbox=116,4,128,21] (I was unsuccessful when I tried it before) I was able to download the existing data and edited it to my heart's content in Merkaartor.

This is fun! :-)

The construction inside the Science Education Complex inside UP is currently in full swing. All the science departments will eventually vacate the old Palma Hall and will be transferred to the new buildings being constructed. The migration actually started more than 10 years ago (with the Math, Marine Science, Geological Sciences, and Library being the first tenants) but the transfer stopped due to budget problems. The migration then restarted a few years ago with Physics, and right now the Biology and Chemistry buildings are being constructed.

There's a bunch of new roads here and I finally had the chance yesterday to drive around the area after dropping off my sister to her morning class. See my GPS trace. I added the streets to OSM last night and so I believe that OSM has the most updated map of this area anywhere, online or dead-tree. It feels great to forge new territory in OSM. :-)

While it's hard to fail when the goal is "map as much as you can," I think that in many respects, the Tagaytay Mapping Party that occurred last Saturday, May 16, is a real success. This is the first ever Mapping Party in the Philippines and, I think, the first in Southeast Asia. We brought together eight OpenStreetMappers from Metro Manila, Rizal, Laguna, and Cavite (one is a newbie) many of whom have just then met each other for the first time, and we managed to gather thousands of trackpoints, hundreds of POIs, and tens of kilometers of roads. While we weren't able to do live editing after going out mapping (due to the lack of Wi-Fi), we did share stories, anecdotes, and details of mapping rigs over coffee (sadly, not beer).

Thanks to maning, we have a draft party render animation of the mapping party. Expect the final version to come out before the end of the week.

Here's to more success for OpenStreetMap Philippines!

I find this OSM diary entry and comment thread about map and geocoded photo copyrights interesting. This brings me to the particular situation of primary-source publicity maps, i.e., maps of places made by the people who own/manage the place.

Let's say you were surveying on the ground a large public zoo, and you happen to come across a "you are here" map somewhere there. Is is wrong to get your bearings by looking at the map or even comparing the map with your own to find out areas you have missed? While it's copyright infringement to take a photo of the map and distribute it (since the artistic and creative elements of that map is definitely under copyright), using the map as a source of facts, not creative expression should be ok.

Isn't looking at that "you are here" map which was created by the zoo owners for publicity purposes a form of on-the-ground surveying? Aren't street signs a textual form of "you are here" as well? Take note that we are all going into a really fuzzy gray area here.

For an even more fuzzier example, take the case of Japan addresses (see this Wikipedia article). In most dense urban areas of Japan, most highway=unclassified/residential roads are unnamed and places are addressed by using a building-number (gō), then block-number (banchi), then area-number (chōme) system. You can often find maps of the buildings per block so that you can locate a particular building in a particular block. These maps function in the same way as street signs do in Western countries. I've been to Tokyo and I've used these maps to locate buildings.

So, is it so wrong to use those building maps as a source of facts and information, especially when you're surveying them on-the-ground, the same way you use street signs to collect street names and access restrictions?

A large part of Barangay Cupang in Muntinlupa City, Metro Manila has been empty for quite some time now, so I went ahead and mapped all the remaining exclusive gated communities in that area—but only the road topology and landuse areas, no street names yet.

I also did and experimented using boundary relations for the first time by drawing then grouping the boundaries for barangays Ayala Alabang, Alabang, Cupang, and Buli. I got the information about the barangay boundaries from the website of the City Planning & Development Office of Muntinlupa City. It was fun guessing where the boundaries actually are based from the map provided in the website (which is apparently not drawn to scale); it seems the boundaries follow the rivers and creeks as much as possible.

That's quite enough mapping for me for the rest of the week. I have to go and take care of my other responsibilities now. :-)

As I said in other places on the Web, Bonifacio Global City is the area in Metro Manila that has seen the most drastic changes in development. Roads are pretty much reconfigured every now and then and new buildings are being put up since several years ago.

So, I drove around the area for almost one and a half-hours before going to work and writing down building names, new roads, and other notable stuff on a piece of paper (first time I ever did that despite having been an OSMer since 2007!). I also left my GPS phone in tracking mode and I'll be uploading the trace later for future use. After work, I set about updating as much data as I can and I'll be continuing the work in the weekend.

This is my favorite shopping mall in Metro Manila since it doesn't look like a typical Philippine mall. The Yahoo! imagery is woefully out of date for this area so I managed to go around and have a lot of on-the-ground look here (and looking at the you-are-here store directory maps—this is still surveying, right?—to help with getting the building footprints down pat).

It's still unfinished. There's still the matter of mapping the footpaths in and around the Greenbelt Park as well as the various driveways and parking areas, but it's a great start. =)

That is, I am now mapping with the help of GPS traces. :-D I have been contributing since mid-2007 but all of my contributions are based on Yahoo! imagery and personal observation. But now that I am the custodian of a GPS mobile phone (the Sony Ericsson W760, touted as the first GPS-enabled Walkman) I am now able to record GPS traces and I have uploaded a bunch of them concentrated on places where there are new streets not seen in the Yahoo! satellite imagery.

"Proper" mapping via GPS. The first such place that I have mapped with the help of GPS is the Frontera Verde area (map link in this entry). Before, the roads I placed were an approximation, but I'm surprised to say that I've managed to map the major roads almost perfectly even without the help of GPS, save for the L-shaped unnamed street that I had corrected via my GPS trace (which I loaded into Merkaartor and before uploading it to OSM).

Another street that I added with the help of GPS is Palm Coast Avenue near the SM Mall of Asia.

The power of having GPS to do mapping has affected my driving habits. I now try to plan my trips to maximize unmapped areas, go around unmapped roundabouts at least once, and take detours, all of which are best exemplified by this GPS trace. :-P

… See full entry

I've started refining the SM Mall of Asia complex (building upon the initial work done by ianlopez1115). To be specific, I've edited the Main Mall and the North and South Wings such that they now have approximately correct shapes (including the zigzagging edges flanking the two pedestrian streets). I'll continue with the Entertainment Mall to the west sometime this week or the next weekend.

In addition, I've more or less completed mapping the Blue Wave commercial center located about half a kilometer to the east of SM Mall of Asia. I pass by this area almost every workday and I've taken plenty of dinners in a the fast-food restaurants located here so I pretty much know how to tag the area through the help of the Yahoo! satellite imagery.

I have a lot of online projects and activities and OSM is getting an inordinately large slice of the pie. Also, whenever I go out, I notice little details that I need to add/update or verify in OSM as soon as I get home. Fixing these details immediately will take up too much time.

As a sort of compromise, I've taken to adding lots of stuff into OpenStreetBugs. I'm making OSB as a sort of to-do list for when I have more leisure time to edit OSM. It's ridiculously easy to add stuff in OSB so it fits my needs appropriately. :-)

I knew of the OpenStreetMap Routing Service before but it was only recently that I got to play around with it. It's a pretty nifty service and I've been trying out various routes within Metro Manila since I've pretty much driven most major streets in this metropolis and I wanted to cross-validate what I know with the service's algorithm and the OSM data.

As a result of my playing around, I've identified several major errors in the routing-related data in OSM (e.g., one direction of a dual-carriageway trunk bridge had a reversed oneway tag) and isolated a possible routing algorithm issue.

The Routing Service is definitely a must-have tool for verifying the OSM data (Maplint can only do so much). :-)

After seeing someone using Merkaartor to edit in OSM, I decided to give it a try last night. Before this, I've been exclusively using Potlatch. Potlatch is a pretty good application and is definitely the best Flash application I've ever seen but I quickly ran into one of its limitations while I was doing Eastwood City and Bonifacio High Street (in Metro Manila, Philippines). The limitation is that at the highest zoom level, you cannot place nodes more accurately: the nodes snap to a 3-pixel "grid". This 3-pixel grid translates to a resolution of almost 3 feet at the latitude I'm working at. This is more than good enough for roads, but not adequate for buildings. (I'm kinda OC ["obsessive-compulsive", slang in Philippine English] when mapping the details of buildings, and this limitation prevented me from making nice right angles of small idented corners of buildings. See this view of Bonifacio High Street for an example of non-perpendicular corners. I find this lack of right angles maddening! :-P) I asked Richard, Potlatch's creator, about it and he acknowledged this limitation (our conversation is at the OSM Wiki).

If you're using Potlatch, then Merkaartor gets some getting used to with regards to its interface. The workflow is pretty much the same as in JOSM: you go to an area, download the data, edit at will, then upload the changes. I like it because it doesn't have the aforementioned 3-pixel limitation, and in addition, it blows up the Yahoo! map tiles if they're not available in a higher zoom level; Potlatch just shows Yahoo!'s "We're sorry, the data you have requested is unavailable" tiles. (I'm not sure if Merkaartor's behavior is allowed by Yahoo!'s TOS).

I'll still continue to use Potlatch as a general editing tool since it's pretty quick and I'm used to it. I'll just bring out Merkaartor if ever I want some finely wrought detail. :-)

(This is also cross-posted, with some changes, to the talk-ph mailing list.)

Went crazy today and fixed as much of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport as I can. I added a helluva lot of taxiways (even the turning points--I'm not sure if I did it as expected--since the white painted lines are easy enough to trace from the Yahoo! satellite imagery), added the refs for the two runways, and refined the shapes of the terminals.

So Eastwood Mall just opened last weekend and I finally got to see the area between the huge central building (tentatively named One Central Park) and the 1800 and 1880 Eastwood Avenue last Monday after work. I've subsequently refined the building footprints in that area. Since I don't own a GPS unit, the positions and shapes of the new buildings that aren't on the Yahoo! layer are approximate and interpolated from other known buildings.

The updated data should now show up in today's Mapnik update. :-)

I'm currently at the Google DevFest in the University of the Philippines, Diliman, where people from Mountain View and elsewhere are presenting and demo-ing various web-related Google APIs. Pamela Fox of the Google Maps team is currently talking about Google Maps API (and Map Maker, Earth API, etc.).

I talked about Google Map Maker vs. OpenStreetMap before and found Google Map Maker wanting (just like the reaction of many OpenStreetMappers).

Anyway, Pamela Fox hinted that Maps API developers might be able to use Map Maker map tiles as an option instead of the regular Maps map tiles. However, there's no mention yet about the licensing issues of the map tiles and the raw data. I plan to talk to her later regarding this.

(I also want to ask if Google would be inclined to go the way of Yahoo! in letting OSM use the satellite images as well for tracing.)