Boot scrapers have fascinated me since Helge Schneider’s musical “Mendy das Wusical” in which they play a very important role. #stiefelabstreifkante (It’s a somewhat absurd musical by my favourite German comedian…)

I remember that when I moved to Ireland I kept sending my sister pictures of the ones I came across, because she also likes the musical and the comedian.

For some years now I have been thinking that it would be interesting to map them. Partly because I wanted to know how many there are in Kilkenny and where and also, you never know who might be interested in this data in the future, so OpenStreetMap is the obvious choice to record them.

A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

At this point, if you get tired of reading - I’ve made a video about it: watch video on YouTube

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While I was mapping house numbers and other things in Ballyragget today, I noticed something curious: Buildings with “Step” or “Steps” in their name. There is a “Step House” in Ballyragget (check on OSM), probably called thus, because it has 5 steps leading up to the front door (a common feature in Georgian buildings). To my knowledge, there are only one or two more houses like that in Ballyragget, so having steps outside your front door must have seemed remarkable enough for people to give it that name.

A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Then two other cases came to mind: the Steppes Bar in Callan (check on OSM) which seems to be named after the steps to the left of the entrance. Weird plural, but maybe it’s from ye olde times.

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I’m doing really, really detailed reed beds in Etulia Nouă, Moldova.

Moldova and it’s state

Moldova is not very detailed. In fact, most natural features aren’t even mapped. There are only roads, rough shapes of towns and town nodes. I’m currently creating lots of detailed reed beds and natural features there, especially near Lake Cahul.

Start detailing!

I invite everyone to start detailing the undermined country of Moldova. It’s really beautiful! I’m detailing areas around Etulia Nouă, but you can pick any area you want, like Bălți, Giurgiulești, Comrat.

I enjoy reading people’s diary entries, so I’m starting my own. My current project is mapping public bookcases (PBs) in neighborhoods near me.

I started this project because I chance upon PBs when going for walks and can never remember where a PB is when I need one. There’s a map of Little Free Libraries (LFLs), but adding PBs to this map is “pay to play” which I don’t like, in addition to not displaying unaffiliated PBs. Other secondary goals include:

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It seems I have developed a reputation in Ireland and the UK about my history mapping, because SK53 had tagged me in a toot about Martello towers. At first, I somewhat brushed it off, but as he probably knew, my interest was eventually triggered and I looked into the matter.

I remember that DeBigC was the first to tell me about Martello towers, but I can’t remember if he used a specific example or just shared his interest.

For those who aren’t familiar: Martello towers were built by the British Empire at a time when they were still ruling the waves, especially around the time of the Napoleonic Wars, when there was a threat of a Napoleonic invasion into British territory. They continued building them in port towns, so mostly along the coast, but not all of them are coastal. Apparently (according to Wikipedia), they are usually round and built in two levels with the guards living in it (i.e. building). They placed a cannon on the top which had a 360° reach, although one hopes that they only pointed it seawards.

The good news was that a lot of them were already mapped on OpenStreetMap, mostly with name=Martello Tower. The bad news (as pointed out in the toot) was that there was no consistent tagging scheme. Most of them were mapped as man_made=tower, and some had some sort of historic tag on them (ruins/ castle/ yes etc), but few were mapped as buildings. So, I came up with historic=martello_tower, skipping the proposal process and documented the tagging scheme in the wiki.

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In this post, I’ll try to give some insights into the more recent work and workflows of the global State of the Map (SotM) program committee. After having been a member of the SotM program committee for the last couple of years, I figured this might be useful or at least interesting for other program committees or content teams.

Please note that the views and experiences expressed in this post are my own and that they are mostly based on my memory. I’m also trying to just describe how we worked, which may not be the best way, maybe not even a recommendable one, but one that seemed to work for us. Just because it worked for us doesn’t mean it will work for others though, and vice versa.

In some way, this post is also a follow-up to a previous post of mine where I wrote about the software and services behind the State of the Map. I’ll try to avoid duplicating content, so see the previous post for more information about the tools and services that were used.

Organisation

As long as I’ve been on the program committee, it was always organised such that it was mostly split into a ‘core program committee’ (I’ll refer to it as ‘core team’ in the rest of this post) and the full program committee (I’ll refer to it as ‘program committee’ in the remainder of this post), which included all members including the core team. I don’t remember if this split was a conscious decision, if it just emerged based on asking the program committee members about who wanted to help with which tasks, or if there was another reason. But at least so far, we haven’t had a reason to change this.

Program Committee

The primary tasks of the program committee were reviewing and rating the submissions of the talks, workshops, etc. and providing feedback on e.g. the draft for the call for participation before it got published. Once the call for participation was published, the program committee members were also encouraged to announce it in their local communities.

Core Team

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Mapping a large urban area in its entirety is quite a rare task.

Pyongyang, the city I mapped, is an urban area 15km wide by 12km long. It took me over a year from April 2022 to May 2023 to complete, particularly the buildings and roads. But I’m really pleased with the result: just look at the state of the map!

Mapping a capital in its entirety is rare, and for several reasons:

• Firstly, because all the major urban areas in the West have already been mapped. This leaves the countries with the fewest contributors, whose capitals may already have POIs… but rarely all the buildings and roads.

• Secondly, because you need a good amount of motivation, when you’ve reached the 60,000th building and you’re still halfway there… well… you have to hang in there! I also think it’s hard to imagine embarking on such a lengthy mapping project. Imagine if you wanted to undertake a project like this for Hanoi… unfortunately it can be discouraging from the outset.

But mapping by small parts, by neighbourhood, is a method that worked quite well for me, so maybe it will work for others!

In short, there are still many capitals to be mapped on these basic themes! But getting started, and above all keeping going, is a fairly difficult task because you need to stay motivated. If you do, hang in there!

Mapping Pyongyang

Beginning of the idea

When I started mapping in North Korea and writing the contribution guide to the country (cf. my previous diary) I never thought I’d be embarking on such a task because… it’s a capital in fact! It’s big, it never stops, it’s long, you never see the end of it! But in fact it is ;)

But I didn’t start mapping in North Korea by saying to myself “I’m going to map the whole capital”. In fact, for a long time I never even thought about it. In fact, it’s a project that’s taken place in several stages.

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• Sparse OSM tools: osm.org/user/ivanbranco/diary/401437
• OSM Links from another user diary: osm.org/user/GrapeMapping/diary/401815
• Quick interactive analysis of the map stats and how they evolve over time (e.g. “how many trees are in the map in Italy”), includes estimation of completeness https://dashboard.ohsome.org/
• Gallery of cartography projects, mainly about Berlin https://hanshack.com/
• 30 Day Map challenge: https://30daymapchallenge.com/
• Even more beautiful maps: https://tjukanov.org/

… is what I am doing these days.

I’ve installed Terracer in JOSM software and I am learning JOSM along the way a bit. I also got Every Door on my mobile. It is much more versatile for correcting information about amenities than StreetComplete and at the same time still quite convenient to use.

Most of my tags still come from StreetComplete though. I find it particularly rewarding to answer questions for disabled or visually impaired people. I regularly see two elderly people on my local high-street and I see two kids, boy and a girl walking with sticks and I do hope that maybe one day the detail that people are putting into OSM will make some viable navigation apps for them. I also learnt about traffic lights with vibration mechanism underneath.

The difficulty is arbitrariness in tagging buildings. On the estate I live there’s a very old house which my wife describes as a “farm house”, but there’s no farm here any more and the building is used for residential purposes. I also learnt a very reasonable distinction between house, terraced or semi-detached house. I’d like to follow the tagging “building=house” “house=semidetached” or other to be more specific.

And how difficult must be to be a postman! Corner houses are particularly tricky. I came across semi-detached corner houses which seem to belong to different streets. There’s also lots of houses with names and no numbers and I think quite a few new blocks which do not exist on OSM. Will need to review with aerial imagery. I know of the offsets, but the GPS on my mobile is very unreliable so haven’t figured out yet how to correct it yet.

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On September 26 IHE Delft and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team organized a mapathon to map the areas affected by the earthquakes in Morocco and the floods in Libya.

Many new mappers attended the mapathon. We collectively uploaded 813 changesets containing over 50.000 total map changes in the span of only 3 hours.

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Intro

The Belgian train operator NMBS (Dutch)/SNCB(French) is seeking to improve travelers guidance along its stations and for this it wants to improve the OpenStreetMap data quality of its stations osm.wiki/WikiProject_Belgium/Stations. One such project aims to have a better view as to where a certain train wagon would stop on a given track. This as to now exactly where the 1st Class wagon is, the bike wagon is and so on. However to be able to show this it needs a detailed view of platform zoning, the rail signs and the signaling. (Below you will find what those signals exactly mean.)

Zoning

What:

Some stations divide its platforms in zones. You have in general two types of zoning (I call those two types) general zoning and specific zoning platforms. On general zoning platforms you will find panels A B etc. besides the platform number. Often you will even see those numbers reoccur multiple times on a specific platform. On specific zoning platforms however you will find panels like B2, B1, A1, A2 and those are uniquely placed along the platform.

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Right! I finally started using OpenStreetMaps.

Thanks to a friend who pointed me to Magic Earth I now have a viable navigation system which uses OSM data and thanks to StreetComplete I am slowly learning about tagging. The multiplicity of apps is not ideal, but a staged approach to OSM concept is clearly necessary. My previous attempts to become an OSM users failed because I was overwhelmed by complexity or perhaps I should say expressiveness.

In the foreseeable future I will be just using StreetComplete to improve my local area, but I am already seeing some issues that require more in-depth changes. Also, there are some edits that I have already submitted, but after reading the wiki I do not believe them to be accurate any more.

Here are a few topics I need to chase:

• terraced houses - the terraced houses in my area are all lumped together. They are not divided up, so assigning numbers requires usually a comma separated list. I would like to fix it and break the rows into single terraced houses with one number each.
• I need to figure out how to mark multiple buildings belonging to a school, church or a care home for elderly.
• terraced bungalow houses - I am guessing they are terraced houses as bungalow definition clearly states detached. My area has many rows of single storey houses
• I may have messed up some bollards by marking them as fixed, whereas in fact some are removable with key. Will need to keep an eye on this and maybe learn to use Vespuchio to fix those in the future.
• Sometimes I am not entirely sure whether a road is asphalt or concrete with some coarse aggregates inside. I was assuming it’s asphalt as that’s what we typically put, but maybe I should take some photos and ask someone who knows better.

• This post is a (machine) translation of the article “‘돌비알’(natural=scree), ‘자갈밭’(natural=shingle), ‘너덜겅’(natural=blockfield) 견줘 보기” into English.

natural=scree, natural=shingle, natural=blockfield

돌비알(scree;talus)

• Something like a rock, built up almost exclusively by weathering and crumbling.
• They build up as they are swept away, creating a steep slope.
• The stones that make up the talus are generally small or variable in size.
• Even if the stone masses are large, they are often sharp because they have not been worn down much.
• ‘scree’ in Wikipedia

자갈밭(shingle)

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Once upon a time, I was asked why I had only marked the south end of a trail and not the north end.

Well, I said, I haven’t been there, so I don’t have a GPS track. All I have is that USGS line and the one thing I know about it is it’s wrong. As long as it isn’t mapped, someone will be more likely to put down the correct line when they do want to map it. They might not even notice it’s needed if a bad line is there.

Then I said I might come down on the side of mapping everything you can as best you can sometime later.

Well, it’s later. Now I say map it all! And put down the source as you do it. Not just in the changeset note, but actually on the segment. And it can be good to make a guess about trail_visibility. I have more tools now.

Strava heatmap is the best as an average of GPS signals, if you can get it. I have found what is probably the firefighter loop through nearby private lands and not actually available to the public as a hike on there. It looks like a nice loop out there in Kneeland where there’s no public hiking. Only the most popular trails have enough heat to be an average. A random spattering of others have some kind of clues.

I can download system trails from the Forest Service’s data clearinghouse. Most of these match the Forest Service Topo (another source), but some have updated. Some of them match the USGS lines. Okay, a lot. And apparently Six Rivers has no system trails at all. They are seriously slacking. (And now a section of their roads has vanished from the Interactive Visitor Map. What is wrong with you, Six Rivers?)

And there’s ever more imagery. Sometimes it’s just visible. All the other lines available helps to differentiate the actual bit of trail from random fallen trees that make a line on the ground. A ridge trail might have a fuel break competing with trail, so there are plenty of bad signals just looking at photos. Down the gully, that might be just water course. Or trail. Or both.

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In the previous episode…

We finally managed to tackle a very popular feature request: datalayers’ fine-grained permissions 🎉. This is a huge step forward, allowing for a given map owner to only open a particular datalayer to edition. It will help people with contributive maps who need to setup a stable/fixed base layer. It also paved the way for even more control over the objects that are allowed for addition and/or edition. Please share with us your desired workflows.

On the UX side of the project, we made a couple of adjustments and fixes to make the editor more intuitive and consistent. Do you see these new crispy icons on the screenshot above? Hopefully it will bring more users, hence more contributors! A couple of new faces jumped in recently and we’re so happy about that 🤗.

You can also look up for icons by name in the ‘Shape properties’ panel, one of our next steps will be to ease icons’ management and additions, another long-awaited feature:

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Hi, I’m Mitsjol.

I’m still pretty new to the world of OpenStreetMap and this is my first diary entry here. Currently, I’m primarily focused on adding details to my charming hometown of Middelburg.

Recently, I stumbled upon a millstone in my hometown. This millstone, a large round stone once used for grinding grain, caught my attention and I wanted to add it to OSM. However, when I tried to add it to, I faced a challenge - there was no fitting tag to accurately represent it.

This got me thinking. How many other millstones around the world are missing from the map simply because there isn’t a dedicated tag for them? There must be a lot, because I’ve also seen them during travels. For instance, in the UK’s Peak District alone, there are estimated to be around 1,500 millstones scattered throughout the landscape.

So I took a significant step in contributing to the OpenStreetMap community by proposing the addition of a new tag - “historic=millstone” on the OpenStreetMap Wiki.

I decided to use “historic=millstone” as the primary tag, although I considered “man_made=millstone” with an optional “historic=yes” tag as an alternative. However, I believe that “historic=millstone” is more accurate and relevant for the majority of millstones that we encounter on the map. Not many new millstones are made in this day and age.

I provided examples from various parts of the world to illustrate the diversity and ubiquity of millstones. From Ireland to Japan, these stones can be found all over the world.

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Not sure why someone would want a diary, but what the heck. Not adding anything today.

In Croatia some residential areas are well kept, while others are quite lacking. Example: Zadar vs Preko.

What to map?

This begs the question which entity should be mapped first with the largest gain for the effort? This can only be answered in the need of the beholder. For a tourist it would be street names, since accommodations are bound by an address and after the town name, the street name is the next factor to reduce the search area of the location.

There is a major requirement for this to fruition and that is that the town has to have varied street names. Depending where in the country one is traveling, it is quite typical that the street names are equal to the town’s name (e.g. Lazina). In such a situation latitude/longitude coordinates should be a requirement of the host to provide over the house number, because lots are not linearly arranged. Plus lots of such towns don’t have house numbers and/or buildings on the map.

Where are the buildings?

Lots of towns have buildings, though these are usually only a fraction of what actually exists. E.g. in Preko:

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Abstract

Most GPS navigation systems today rely heavily on street names and place names for route guidance. While this works well in some situations, it can be confusing and less user-friendly, especially when navigating unfamiliar areas or for people with language barriers.

This project aims to change the game by introducing landmark-based navigation into Valhalla, the OpenStreetMap (OSM) routing engine. Instead of hearing complex instructions like “Turn left onto Obmannamtsgasse,” users will get simple and intuitive directions like “Turn right at the Tesco supermarket.” This landmark-based approach makes navigation more accessible and user-friendly, reducing stress and improving the overall experience.

The high level implementation overview of this project is available here

Landmark Based Navigation Project - Github

Now let’s dive into the details!

Implementation Details

In simple terms, this project enhances Valhalla’s routing capabilities by bringing in landmarks as navigation support. We pull Points of Interest (POIs) from PBF files and store them as landmarks in a special intermediate storage. Then, we associate them to the map’s edges and store them into graph tiles. When clients call Valhalla services, these landmarks become part of the route directions and make navigation easier.

About Landmark Itself: Data Source and Selection Criteria

POIs are naturally supported in OSM PBF Format (“Protocolbuffer Binary Format”), a sort of digital map format. OSM uses “tags” in the form of “key=value” to describe places and things on the map. One special key, “amenity”, helps us find places that are useful or important for folks like visitors and residents. We use this key to select landmarks.

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Why and How I Mapped all the Landcover in Belize

I joined OSM in 2016 when my friend suggested I do something useful. He knew I was interested in geography as I was trying to map on Google. But then a year later Google shut down mapping for users because of an Android pissing on Apple incident in Pakistan.

I then became really interested in OSM and started mapping. I had a desire for all the landcover to be mapped. I first started around my town of Spanish Lookout, then decided to do my entire district of Cayo.

It was slow work, but I persevered. After I completed the second and third districts of Stann Creek and Toledo, I learned a few tricks of mapping. By that time it was the year of 2022. The mapping tips I learned were so useful that by September of 2023 I had completed the other 3 districts, Corozal, Orange Walk and last of all Belize district.

There were a few other mappers that helped, but I did roughly 92% of the entire country. And in that time I would estimate that about 99% of roads and 97% of buildings have been mapped as well.

Going Forward

Going forward I’m planning on keeping the country up to date and continuing to map all buildings, power lines, speed bumps, etc.

And also I’m thinking of mapping all surrounding districts of Mexico and Guatemala, which we’ve started already.

Percentage of Landcover in Belize

Type	Area Sq. Km.	Percentage
Wood/Forest	14,813	64.5%
Meadow/Grassland	2,366	10.3%
Wetland	1,470	6.4%
Scrub	1,381	6.0%
Farmland	1,053	4.6%
Water	782	3.4%
Orchard	295	1.3%
Residential/Ind/Com	224	1.0%
Beach/Sand	2	0.0%