Day-27

• I wish you all a fantastic new year, 2024 to you. I hope this year will bring new challenges, new things to learn, and new findings with atma samikhyan.
• Pascal’s sites are up; I am in the top 4 now.

Bhubaneswar, Odisha

• Almost all central Bhubaneswar building mapping I have completed.
• The next task will be to complete the peripheral areas.
• Next, I will start adding PoIs into the buildings. I am unsure if marking buildings and adding PoIs simultaneously is recommended or if I plan to return for the PoIs in the next phase.
• I am going to Bhubaneswar next month to gain some on-the-ground knowledge on new developments around.

Rest of Odisha

• Malkanagiri roads addition is almost complete.
• Koraput roads addition just started near the Andhra Pradesh and Odisha border.

Looking ahead

• The progress is pretty slow, and I do not know how many days or months I will need to map the entire Odisha. Can I do it?
• To speed things up, should I start an OSM Odisha group? I’m not sure if any other person will be interested.

I completed my first 100+ physical addressing on Magnolia Ave., Birch Run Ave., Redwood Rd., Hickory Rd., Elder Pl., Hemlock Dr., and Beech Pl. The project took about 3+ hours to complete. I’m new but will soon get into other tasks. ChangesetID: osm.org/changeset/145716852

addr:city=Denville

addr:postcode=07834

addr:state=New Jersey

addr:street=

addr:housenumber=

I got my husband to join me and help me with mapping today. We went from approx. State Line Road in KC on 43rd St (we think of it as 43rd though there is a stretch that’s Westport Rd) and down to the west end of it just beyond Mission.

We went to Sway Coffee Roasters and had a nice cup of coffee/tea, and got to say hello to some sweet dogs that another customer brought with them. The dogs visited everyone within leash distance and everyone seemed happy to see them. Little random encounters are what make me love the city so much.

My plan next is to visit the stretch of 43rd east of Gillham Park, and to touch some of the “nodes” I skipped over when going along the length of it, like St Luke’s and various parks etc.

QPFF+F9R, QPFF+CFR, Grand Trunk Rd, Wah, Cantt, Rawalpindi, Punjab 4700, Pakistan

Satellite Town is the Controlled Area near by GT road and Basti Lalarukh wah cantt. A ghost Town in triangle shape with the flavor of dead end.

Leboya Bay Edits

It was fun editing Leboya bay, it was missing some information and buildings. We went for three days camping and I had fun surveying the area and discovering what the camping site had to offer.

Based on a coincidence, I used Overpass in my area to try to identify objects marked for removal that are older than period X. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage it so easily and at the same time had the idea whether it wouldn’t be better to check this on site via street complete. In the course of the GitHub issue, however, it turned out that it doesn’t really fit the core of Street Complete.

So back to Overpass and the good old query in advance to be able to check it later on site. With the help of other OSM users on Telegram, the following query was created, which can be easily customized:

https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1Fml

To be on the safe side, the overpass query is shown here as code:

//Check for Stages of decay
//based on the idea of:
//https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/5402

[out:json][bbox:{{bbox}}][timeout:800];
//gather informations about non-excisiting objects
//and store the data as "gone"
(
  nw[~"^demolished:.*$"~"."];
  nw[~"^razed:.*$"~"."];
  nw[~"^removed:.*$"~"."];
  nw[~"^destroyed:.*$"~"."];
)->.gone;

//substract any gone-object, that was last modified
//within the last X years
(.gone; - nwr.gone(newer:"{{date:1year}}"););

out geom;

Start time: 6:42pm End time: 7:49pm

Tidal and non-tidal wetland

A major rewrite here takes into account tags such as natural, reef, wetland, surface and tidal before deciding how to show wetland areas. See the picture above, which is here, and here in OSM.

The beach between high and low tide can be clearly seen here (in OSM, here). There are blue dots in the sand rather than black. A deliberate decision was taken to show more detail for areas above low tide. See e.g. here between Wales and the Wirral (see here in OSM).

Island and islet names

… See full entry

Over the last few days I have been chipping away at validating tasks for the #osmIRL_buildings project.

I have now just finished validating all of Howth. There is still a good bit left in the rest of the county, some of it will definitely be quick due to some areas being rather rural.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, I’m working on moving the JOSM plugin repository from svn to git.

I’ve managed to get something for most authors, but I am still missing attribution information for 47 authors with 95 commits between them.

If you have previously contributed to the JOSM plugin svn repository or the OSM svn repository (which used to include the JOSM plugin svn repository), please reach out to me via OSM messages or email (tsmock@meta.com, taylor.smock@kaart.com, or smocktaylor@gmail.com) if the attribution for your contributions is missing or wrong.

What I need from you:

• The name you want your patches to be attributed to
• The email you want your patches to be attributed to
  • As a reminder, this email will be publicly visible via git history. GitHub and GitLab both have noreply email addresses if privacy is a concern for you.
  • Grant Slater (firefishy) has the map used for migrating http://svn.openstreetmap.org/ to git. This will likely be used as a “last resort”; if the attribution from that conversion is OK, then no action is necessary.
• Optionally, the timezone offset for your patches (UTC±offset)

Notes on the conversion:

• patch by <foo> commits have been modified such that the originator (“<foo>”) is shown as the author, while the committer remains unchanged.
• Doesn’t do much to reduce repo size – git lfs could be used for this prior to the final conversion
• The dist directory for plugin releases has been excluded from the test repository due to size constraints
• Does not split plugins into their own repositories. This can be done later.
• plugin externals were converted to submodules; if a plugin had externals in it, those were not converted

WIP Repositories (please do not fork these; I may rebuild them at any time as I get new attribution information):

• JOSM core: https://github.com/tsmock/josm
• JOSM plugins + jmapviewer: https://github.com/tsmock/josm-osmsvn-svn2git

Earlier this month during Wikidata Data Modeling Days Hannah Bast from University of Freiburg presented QLever, a SPARQL query engine with some really cool features (slides, recording). After a month of using it, in this post I’ll discuss how it’s relevant for the OSM community and my experience so far.

What’s SPARQL and why should we care?

SPARQL is a query language for RDF data, which can come from RDF-native knowledge graphs (there are thousands of them, public and private, the best known in the OSM community is Wikidata) or other sources (for example OSM) converted in RDF with some tool or middleware

SPARQL includes an optional extension for geospatial data, geoSPARQL. Query services implementing it allow to run all kinds of spatial queries with a naming similar to other query languages based on OGC standards (like SQL on PostGIS).

One notable feature of RDF and SPARQL is that they are made from the ground-up for interoperability between different data sources (“linked data”). SPARQL natively supports querying multiple RDF data sources in one single query through “federated queries”. This works by specifying inside the query to the first service the URL of the second service and its query, then specifying how the result should be merged or joined to the data from first service. If the second service is not blacklisted, the first service will handle autonomously the communication, merge the data and return directly the final output.

QLever

QLever and osm2rdf are two projects by the University of Freiburg; they were introduced respectively in 2017 and in 2021 but only recently started getting attention in the OSM world.

osm2rdf is a tool for converting OSM data into RDF. It transforms geometries from OSM’s node-way-relation format to Well Known Text (WKT) and can indirectly materialize containment and intersection relations between elements to improve spatial querying speed. It’s FOSS and extracts of the data it generates are available online.

… See full entry

I have started an independent collection of OSM SLA statistics. Approximately once a month, I will publish my results with the aim of enhancing transparency regarding the reliability of OSM services. I use uptime-kuma to run monitoring. I also verify connectivity with non-OSM services (to prevent false positives). The current configuration includes checking the availability of openstreetmap-website and openstreetmap-cgimap (API). Tile layer availability is not currently included in the checks. The health-check resolution is set to 30 seconds, and the checks are executed from a single server in the Hetzner datacenter in Germany. For the endpoint to be marked unavailable, two consecutive checks must fail. This should be well-representative of an average user experience.

Summary

Total API downtime: 2 hours 34 minutes 13 seconds

API SLA: 99.643%

Total website downtime: 43 minutes 15 seconds

Website SLA: 99.900%

Note that some functionalities of the website require API to also be available.

Details

2023-11-30 10:07:24 - 2023-11-30 10:09:40

• Total downtime: 2 minutes 16 seconds
• 🚩 API unavailable

2023-11-30 10:16:16 - 2023-11-30 10:21:31

• Total downtime: 5 minutes 15 seconds
• 🚩 API unavailable

2023-11-30 21:34:44 - 2023-11-30 21:36:14

• Total downtime: 1 minute 30 seconds
• 🚩 API unavailable

2023-12-01 04:27:18 - 2023-12-01 04:29:00

• Total downtime: 1 minute 42 seconds
• 🚩 API unavailable

2023-12-01 17:26:20 - 2023-12-01 17:29:20

• Total downtime: 3 minutes
• 🚩 API unavailable

2023-12-01 17:45:06 - 2023-12-01 17:50:39

• Total downtime: 5 minutes 33 seconds
• 🚩 API unavailable

2023-12-01 17:50:39 - 2023-12-01 18:04:09

• Total downtime: 13 minutes 30 seconds
• 🚩 API unavailable
• 🌐 Website unavailable

2023-12-01 18:04:09 - 2023-12-01 18:06:51

• Total downtime: 2 minutes 42 seconds
• 🚩 API unavailable

2023-12-01 18:09:38 - 2023-12-01 18:10:23

• Total downtime: 45 seconds
• 🚩 API unavailable

2023-12-01 18:12:25 - 2023-12-01 18:17:09

… See full entry

The 30th of November saw the 4-year anniversary of the #osmIRL_buildings project, an ambitious project of the Irish OSM community to map all the buildings on the island. Co. Kilkenny had been the first project to be finished in the task manager in April of 2020, and I thought that it was high time to look at it again.

Since I live in that county, I had noticed missing buildings once in a while being on the road or mapping other things remotely. Relatively new (summer 2022) aerial imagery had been made available by Esri World which wasn’t as clear as Bing, but more recent.

So I decided to make a private task in the task manager and update the whole county by myself. I like to have side quests to make it more interesting, so I decided to also look for unrecorded archaeological sites. The summer of 2022 had been very dry, so crop marks would be more visible on the Esri World imagery. I wanted a private task, so nobody would map any of the tiles, and I might miss something. I usually map the bulk of the other tasks anyway, but I did not want to take any chances. This was going to be the most thorough search for crop marks and other clues to archaeological sites Kilkenny had ever seen. Or so I believe.

All in all, it took me 11 days or 75.5 hours (average time per task multiplied by tasks), but I had excluded Kilkenny city, because I usually have an eye on that all the time.

… See full entry

I started mapping by updating shop details in my area and have now moved on to helping OSMirl in completing the various tasks to get all of Ireland on the map.

I have also started adding buildings to my home city of Port Elizabeth, South Africa. The majority of the suburb (that I’ve worked on) does not have any of the houses mapped.

started to map minor roads and paths in Hahei in the Coromandel, because there sure are a lot of them. already done about 3 minor roads. not that anyone is ever going to use them other than the few locals that already do, but it’s probably got some use

As always at the end of the year comes the time for summaries and plans for the coming year. Since a great deal of my activities is related to OSM I would like to share my plans with you for the the coming year of 2024. Despite not managing to achieve everything I planned (this year, the previous year), there was still a lot going on. So let’s start with a summary of the events of the year 2023:

• I managed to conduct workshops and lectures promoting OSM in several new places, including the Wroclaw University of Technology and Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan.
• As every year, I promoted OSM’s go at GisDay held at the University of Lodz.
• I conducted several Mapathons, supporting UN Mappers projects.
• I established cooperation with colleagues from Croatia actively supporting them in updating data, and testing the use of building data from city resources and Overture Maps.
• For the first time I took part in SotM, and I intend to participate in such events periodically.
• The OpenAedMap project has received support from CloudFerro, which has allowed us to expand the functionality of the site, and secure the platform for the future.
• The OpenAedMap.org project has gained support in the form of signing more patrons. The Center for E-Health, Warsaw University of Technology and the Medical University of Wroclaw have taken patronage of the project. I hope to expand the list of organizations supporting our initiative even further next year

Unfortunately, the list of plans that didn’t work out is much longer than I would like. This is what happens when there is not enough time or resources, and sometimes things just don’t go as intended.

… See full entry

hi!!!!!! i am new to osm and mapping in general. made my first edit/change yesterday! hopefully many more to come.

Day-20

Neis sites

• Neis sites are down for a few days.
• I started my first topic on Discourse regarding this issue. It looks like a single point of failure and actions need to be taken immediately as so many contributors use Neis’s sites and it is not even open source yet.
• This website makes the editing more fun and a game-like experience.
• Surprisingly, I have still been contributing to OSM without the country rankings or main area mapping slowly increasing.
• The last time I checked before the site went down, I was the top 6th mapper in the last two months.

Every Door

• I also learned about an app, Every Door, from my OSM Bengaluru Telegram group. We had a mapping party at Yelahanka this Saturday, but I could not join.
• I localized the Every Door map in Odia language. Let’s see when it will be released to the App.
• This App can help me maintain my 100-day streak.

Yesterday I mapped a tiny area with lots of shops, bars, etc. This stretch of 43rd is so dense and diverse, it is really interesting. There are high-end establishments, but also a church and a food bank, convenience stores, a Mediterranean market. Next survey of the west portion of 43rd I think will go quicker as it becomes more suburban.

Some highlights:

• I realized I need to add bulletin boards to my ‘look-for’ list - I found two of them in this little stretch, at a cafe and a record store.

• Did not know there was a Mediterranean market so close to my neighborhood!

• Found an interesting looking cafe I had never heard of (though it was closed at the time - will check out later)

• Random excrement bag dispenser in a residential area on the way back - it’s silly but I love finding these, like a rare item in a video game :)