OpenStreetMap
Diary Entries in English
Recent diary entries
Unique Mappers Team, Nigeria organized a training session to commemorate the International Women’s Day. Attendees of the program were trained on Digital skills. I was privileged to deliver a lecture on Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing as tools of Digital Marketing. The program was enlightening and motivating, as women were reminded that their dreams are valid, and we could be anything we’ve set our hearts to be.
It was indeed a great privilege to be among the 28 selected interns from the 1008 applications received by HOT from 81 countries. I must say, spending October to December 2022 with the HOT trainers and other resource persons in and around the world of open mapping was an experience worth the time and effort.
Post HOT Data Quality Internship program, I can confidently say I am a better mapper than I was before. But being a better mapper alone was not the aim of the DQI but rather how the information acquired will be shared and passed on from person to person so that together quality data will be created in the open mapping community.
In view of this, I have taken it upon myself to visit other local mapping communities in Ghana starting from UCC Youthmappers to share this piece of knowledge with them.
It has been a wonderful journey so far, and i hope to continue and make it much better!
We had a meeting with Mr. Victor Sunday. On the establishment of mapathon centres.
It was a privilege to be one of the Panelists of the IWD hosted by the HOT, North and West Africa Hub. Theme: “Safe Spaces for Women”. It was insightful. English and French were used as a mode of communication and I like that. Teg-Wende and Carter agreed that the submission is being taken note of and that women and girls will be given more attention.
Introduction
Hello, I am Aarya Ahjolia, a computer science undergraduate from Nirma University, Gujarat, India. I’m a passionate developer who loves solving problems.
GSoC’23 Project: Improving Valhalla’s Web App (ReactJS)
Since I’m proficient in ReactJS and have the knowledge of the code base of Valhalla Web app, I love this project to share my time with for Summer’23.
I’ll be updating my entire journey of GSoC’23 and give weekly updates in upcoming diaries.
Thanks for reading!
Posted by Pieter Vander Vennet on 9 March 2023 in English.
Last updated on 11 March 2023.
This is part two which highlights the results of the OSM user survey. Read part 1 about demographics and identity here
Which thematic maps do people use?
56 people gave insight in their favourite maps, yielding a total of 86 mentions of specific map themes or groups of themes.
The theme with the most mentions -namely 9- was the etymology theme. This is not a big surprise, as there has been a tremendous amount of changes made with Open Etymology-map. Some people mention curiosity for their local environment, others are interested in the link between OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia. It should be noted that nearly everyone who mentioned etymology indicates that they have hundreds of edits.
The second place goes to the waste theme with 8 mentions. I have to be honest, this came as a total surprise to me! At first sight, it is a bit of a boring topic - especially when contrasted with something like etymology. Yet, everyone needs to get rid of some waste every now and then. By the way, this theme was created by @Rlin and I have to admit that this is one of the most polished themes on MapComplete, using a lot of the available functionality. Thank you!
The third places goes to all cycling-related themes (7 mentions of ‘cycling’). Cyclofix had another 5 mentions, resulting in 12 total mentions. This was no surprise either, as cyclofix has been historic driver of many changes made with MapComplete. It is one of the oldest maps on MapComplete, yet it is still popular and is embedded on a few websites.
The third place goes to benches with 7 mentions - another very down-to-earth topic but with lots of value and lots of unmapped features.
Out of the other answers, it is clear that there are various reasons to use MapComplete:
Ruben Martin and I discuss recent highlights and what’s coming up in the humanitarian open mapping community.
What’s covered this week in brief?
Syria / Turkey earthquake response // Community Working Group mentorship programme // OSM Ethiopia community-led activation // Community research on barriers to women’s participation in OSM // International Women’s Day // Month activites and events // Mappy quote of the week
What’s happened this week?
Syria / Turkey earthquake response: The response to the Turkey Syria earthquake has continued, with more than 8,500 mappers contributing to the data.
The validation of the data is still a heavy task, and the validation team is working so hard to keep up with the volume of mapping. Please be careful with your mapping and make sure the data that you create and they review is as good as it can be! This video from Becky Candy should help you if you are new to mapping.
Also want to congratulate Said for receiving UN Mapper of the Month for his role in coordinating the data response in the days following the earthquake.
Posted by Pieter Vander Vennet on 8 March 2023 in English.
Last updated on 11 March 2023.
MapComplete user census
As you noticed, MapComplete ran a user survey during january. What did it tell us?
The use survey had a few goals, namely:
- discovering what demographies are using MapComplete (and which are missing)
- and discovering what needs and wants are still there
Basic demography
The first question is of course: who did fill out the survey? If we look to the numbers, a clear pattern emerges.
The age distribution looks pretty normal - there is a clear peak around the bucket 30-40, which falls down left and right.
The gender is not as balanced. Unsurprisingly, the majority of respondents is male:
Posted by umbraosmbr on 7 March 2023 in English.
Realization:
UMBRAOSM - Union of Brazilian Openstreetmap Mappers www.umbraosm.com.br https://t.me/grupoumbraosm
BRAZIL - PARINTINS - AMAZONAS - UNMAPPED AREAS IN THE TERRITORY OF THE CITY OF PARINTINS.
link para a task manage da hot: https://tasks.hotosm.org/projects/14395
Paritins is a city in the North of Brazil and is located in the state of Amazonas - Brazil, according to 2020 information, the municipality of parintins (AM) has 115,363 inhabitants and needs mapping throughout its municipal boundary.
Mapping in the city of Parintins/AM - Brazil will be done by beginner and advanced mappers and aims to include buildings, rural roads, rivers, points of interest (shops in general, schools, health clinics, squares) and green areas in the places of kills, thus improving the OSM data.
Many buildings are very close but not really touching. Try to map them as closely as possible without allowing them to connect with each other or the streets.
Posted by kwiatek_123 on 7 March 2023 in English.
Hello! I would like to present a python package written by me.
What’s the point of this package?
This package was created to provide an easy way to create automated scripts and programs that use diff and/or osm api. The main advantage is the classes (data_classes) that provide data of elements (node, way, relation, OsmChange, etc.) in a readable way and the possibility to use them in diff and api without worrying about missing data or dictionaries. You can easily find nodes in diff, add a tag to them and send the corrected version to osm.
More on github
I would love to see your project written using this package!
I started drafting this after b-unicycling’s report on her trip to Anglesey as it reminded me that when mapping solar power on the island, I’d noticed a lot of old windmills.
In most of Wales there were abundant sources of water power. So water mills were common before steam engines were available. Many were corn mills, but woollen mills were also common. There was even a tidal mill at Carew.
The only one of these Anglesey windmills I knew about beforehand was the one on Parys Mountain. The stump of the tower is visible from afar. It was used for pumping water out of the copper mines (at one point the largest in the world).
Unique Mappers Team (UMT) organized a meeting for the Keynote speakers, Panelists, Trainers and School Outreach Volunteers on Mar 6, 2023 ,12:30pm to 1:00pm (GMT+01:00) West Africa Standard Time, via the virtual platform -Zoom. The purpose of the meeting was to conclude and finalize on the plans which have being put in place for the International Women’s Day event, which will hold from 8th March - 22nd March, 2023. It was a great avenue to discuss with people of like minds.
Posted by Abigail Itorho on 6 March 2023 in English.
Really excited to have joined the meeting where updates were given by the Local Organizing Committee (LOC) as regards the forthcoming 2023 State of The Map Africa Conference, which is designated to hold in Cameroon. I look forward to the successful accomplishment of the plans in motion and how beautifully the conference would turn out.
Well, I finally got around to trying to undelete the bit of trail in Redwood National Park between Tall Trees and Emerald Ridge, which didn’t take long because I’d already done the hard bit of finding which way that was by finding the deletion changeset. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of things in this area that nag at me. For instance, while I was (not) discovering if there was any reason the trail was deleted, I sorted out the nag about getting the seasonal bridges correctly tags for that attribute. Maybe. It could be “seasonal=summer/autumn” (used on the bridges) or “seasonal=dry_season” used on the trail. Does dry season start when the rains end or when the creek starts to get low too? Because that creek stays high into the dry, making summer/autumn possibly more accurate. Dry/wet season also can require some lookup. If I saw something was “wet_season” in the southwest US deserts, a few years ago I’d expect that means winter, but now I know it might actually mean July and August, when the monsoonal moisture comes through, but when the southwest US coast I grew up on has average monthly rainfall of 0.04 inches.
Dear community,
anyone has an idea where to find shape files from Latam/Peru? Best wishes and hugs, Anne
Posted by Kateregga1 on 6 March 2023 in English.
During the COVID-19 outbreak, online conferences became more popular as that was the only way for conferences to happen, State of the Map Africa 2021 happened online as well, which made the conference more accessible to people than before, a record 597 participants joined through Hopin the conference platform which had features that allowed participants to actively engage and interact.
Post COVID-19, there is now interest in organizing hybrid events instead of going back to completely offline conferences, to take advantage of the benefits that come with an online event that makes a conference more accessible. During the State of the Map Tanzania 2023 conference we tried out the hybrid set up, with a view that it would also help us prepare for State of the Map Africa 2023, in Yaounde Cameroon, which is going to be a hybrid event. Below I share lessons learned that may be helpful for other conference organizers in setting up a hybrid event
To set up a hybrid conference, you need at least five basic things
- A conference platform for online and offline participants to engage and interact. The conference platform should have an option for embedding livestreams from YouTube or directly from a streaming software. The platform should also have chat, Q&A, polls, reply and comment features. Options for speed networking, booths for sponsors, etc. There are hundreds of conference platforms out there, below are some that have been used at State of the Map and related Conferences;
The idea
This entry will describe one application of our GNIS matching program using a very narrow slice of the dataset.
While looking through the Populated Place feature class, I noticed a rather substantial number of names for mobile home parks. I was immediately reminded of the MapSwipe effort in coordination with YouthMappers and the ASU Knowledge Exchange for Resilience.
The full GNIS file has ~7000 entries that look like they will very likely be the location and name of a mobile home park. Running the GNIS Matcher against the ones in Arizona gives 516 places to check the map for either tagging improvement or new geometry.
You can check out the project here.
How to map
There is an amazing guide produced by ASU that has a huge amount of detail about mapping mobile homes. Definitely look it over.
Tagging
An area drawn to represent a mobile home park should have tagging like:
landuse=residential
residential=trailer_park
name=Estrella Villa Mobile Home Park
There is occasionally some confusion between this and a similar tag tourism=caravan_site. This tagging may also show up in places with trailers/RVs but the intent is for that to mark temporary stopping locations, similar to tourism=camp_site.
The matcher would also like a GNIS ID included. The appropriate tagging looks like:
gnis:feature_id=2669824
Drawing areas
In general, try to draw a boundary that encompasses all of the residences. There are often clues in aerial imagery that help delineate the specific park from other areas (guide). Look for fences, pavement differences, and road connectedness to guide your judgement. If there is high ambiguity, it may be helpful to leave a Note for local mappers.
Street side imagery from Mapillary or Bing Streetview is often helpful and has the appropriate license for OSM use.
Examples
No area found, needs mapping
Hello community. While I was mapping, I noticed there are not many electrical charging stations yet on OSM. Since the world is fighting to lower the carbon emissions, and electrical vehicles are bought in high demand.
We should not forget to add public electric charging stations on the maps. It can help a lot to be the first all in one service that you not need to install another centralized app for finding your nearest charging station.
I am a developer at an energy research institute, and so the topic of electric vehicles and charging stations is one that comes up often in my discussions with colleagues. One colleague mentioned that they were struggling to do a study in a specific city but was lamenting how hard it was to find data for them. Naturally, I suggested using OSM.
While not outright shot down, the idea was politely dismissed, citing that the OSM data is simply too unreliable and not detailed enough to perform the kind of analysis that they wanted. My initial reaction was to jump to the defense of OSM, but I realized that I don’t really know the data quality of this specific corner of the database.
I was already planning to attend the Karlsruhe OSM hackacthon at Geofabrik on February 26th and 27th, and so I decided I would make it my mission to analyze the quality of the charging station data as deeply as I could in those two days (and some time thereafter). Obviously, as with any analysis of OSM quality, seemingly simple questions balloon into exponentially difficult answers, fraught with tedious subtleties.
Despite this, I have come to a few conclusions that I thought I should share that are specifically targeted at assessing the quality of OSM charging station data for use in electrical engineering research. First, here are some definitions I will use so as not to repeat tedious, specific technical definitions:
- Charging station: An OSM feature tagged with “amentiy=charging_station”
- Charging station point: Such a feature with a “node” geometry type
- Charging station polygon: Such a feature with a “way” geometry type