Come closer and let’s have a quick, impactful conversation…

Hear me out. As a student, there are countless opportunities you can tap into, especially when it comes to personal and professional growth and one of the best social clubs to join is YouthMappers.

Imagine being part of a global movement where university students like you are trained free of charge to use powerful mobile mapping apps and software, contributing directly to sustainable development. It’s not just about learning new skills—it’s about making our communities visible, especially those that are too often overlooked. But wait, here’s the real question: How committed, dedicated, and ready are you to volunteer and contribute to OpenStreetMap? 🤔 It’s more than mapping—it’s about creating change, ensuring no place is left behind, and bringing solutions to real-world problems.

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Giving back to the community has been the focus. On 26_07_24, I had the opportunity to meet the UMaT YouthMappers chapter while attending the 5th WAIMM Students Conference (an annual 3-day conference). I introduced YouthMappers, the basics of JOSM, and OpenStreetMap, especially to the chapter’s ‘youngies’, and explained who we are and what we do. I also shared some success stories to vindicate the benefits of YM, such as broadening interpersonal geospatial knowledge, connecting and networking with like-minded individuals, and belonging to a community of youth who are mappers. We swiftly discussed Mapillary and how it complements JOSM data validation, and also what it takes for a chapter to be sustainable.

Link to the Facebook post with attached images: (https://web.facebook.com/CalvinMenttor/posts/pfbid0NRFz1kToPUASQdr8VQksd1yfduot5jDB8FtoHUns7oNWunagQ3F5e8yfHcFfHhinl)

On March 15th and 16th, OpenStreetMap Ghana (Sir Mawutor) and I visited UCC YouthMappers to familiarize them with how to fly a drone to map and to also map with Mapillary. It turned out to be an excellent result—a massive turnout. Appreciation to Dr. Julia (the Patron) and Dr. Mensah (the GIS lecturer) for creating an enabling environment for the Chapter and to the vibrant TEAM for rendering voluntary service to the membership. This is far-reaching. 🗺️🤌🏾

Link to the facebook post: (https://web.facebook.com/CalvinMenttor/posts/pfbid0SVoqAjDeEgqpPNrt2AS6yyerh3ZnMYH31x25LFaXsGBe5iV3N71dRuF5Ke2VSXrXl)

I am grateful to YouthMappers for providing me with the knowledge and abilities that would enable me to impact and transform deprived communities and contribute to sustainable development. 52 students, 26 countries, and 49 academic institutions—it was incredible to meet these young future leaders who are enthusiastic, passionate, and have the zeal for change through this inspiring leadership summit in Jamaica.

Big thanks to everyone who helped make the summit a success, including the speakers, navigators, photographers, and event planners. I have learned a lot in addition to mapping by learning about the traditions of my fellow nations and dispelling certain misconceptions about Jamaica, the host nation.

I would again like to thank YouthMappers for giving me international exposure. This built my confidence as a change-ready youth leader. I appreciate the recognition.

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Once upon a time a bunch of people decided to start collecting informative bits about stuff they‘re concerned with into a geo-referenced database. They mapped streets – hence the name of their experiment – and also PoIs. Records consist of a so-called tags, key-value pairs. In hindsight tags are differentiated into a primary tag, a.k.a. the substance/essence and a number of secondary tags, a.k.a. the attributes. There‘d be e.g. highway=secondary; name=Abbey Road.

One of those days, somebody noticed a problem: They wanted to map a so-called shared-space, where pedal cycles and pedestrians both allowed and traffic sings put up to show that intention. One solution might have been to tag a highway=cycleway;footway. Thereby turning the right hand side of the tag into a list. This looked ugly, a tag no longer would code for a 1:1 relation but a 1:n relation. Users of the data do not like that.

Some pondering later, the idea was born: Put the function/use/arbitrary detail of the mapped entity into the attributes where they can merrily coexist. foot=designated; bicycle=designated should from now on convey what previously was told by the primary tag. Only problem left: What would be the substance then? It must be something generic, something that provides as little information as possible over what the highway key already contains.

This marked the inception of highway=path as a light and unspecific shim over highway. All it says: It is probably narrow (But don‘t depend on that.) You likely will not see cars moving there. (With few exceptions.)

So they married, and everyone lived happily ever after.

I’d like to announce the release of the new major version 4 of pyosmium.

pyosmium was originally created as a thin Python wrapper around the osmium library, a fast and flexible C++ library for reading, writing and processing OSM data. With the new version 4, pyosmium adds a convenience layer on top which gives the library a more pythonic feel and speeds up processing considerably.

The most important new features are:

• Iterative processing. OSM files can now be iterated through with an simple for loop. (Processing a file using handler functions is still possible.)
• Filter functions allow to quickly skip over uninteresting parts of the file, making it now possible to use pyosmium scripts with large OSM files without pre-filtering.
• Writers with automatic reference completion. One of the challenges of writing OSM files is that for every way and relation written, you usually also need to write the nodes and members. pyosmium now implements writers which help with that.

Here is an example how to quickly find the most frequent tags used together with amenity=school using the new iterative syntax:

import osmium
from collections import Counter

tag_counter = Counter()
total = 0

for o in osmium.FileProcessor('planet.osm.pbf')\
               .with_filter(osmium.filter.TagFilter(('amenity', 'school'))):
    tag_counter.update([tag.k for tag in o.tags if tag.k != 'amenity'])
    total += 1

for tag, cnt in tag_counter.most_common(10):
    print(f"{cnt:6d} ({cnt*100/total:5.2f}%) {tag}")

Running this on a full OSM planet file takes less than 5 minutes on a 12-core machine with 128GB RAM.

Or do you want to create an thematic extract of schools:

import osmium

with osmium.BackReferenceWriter('schools.pbf', 'planet.osm.pbf',
                                overwrite=True) as writer:
    for o in osmium.FileProcessor('planet.osm.pbf')\
                   .with_filter(osmium.filter.TagFilter(('amenity', 'school'))):
        writer.add(o)

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A project I worked on, the Toronto Public Washroom Import recently finished up and I thought it would be interesting to do a quick lessons learned:

Top three things that went well:

• Having help from other people makes things much easier — I am grateful to RockTeam for helping with the changesets and for Jarek_Piórkowski and a couple members of the Civic Tech Toronto community for their input on the import plan.
• Doing a couple “test” imports and recording an instruction video significantly improved the written import plan and instructions. It’s also very helpful to have mapped a couple of the relevant features via survey as well.
• For the script that converted the City data to OSM tags, setting and validating assumptions about the City data using Pandera helped give me a lot of confidence that the output wouldn’t be affected by upstream changes to the City data.

Top three things I would change if I did it again:

• Increased the time assumption for how long it would take to complete all the changesets. I had originally expected it would take two weeks at most, but it took closer to three (even with two people doing changesets).
• For the initial data profiling, I might try using e.g. Tableau public, since it would be a little faster and easier than e.g. using .value_counts(dropna=False) in pandas.
• Have the data transformation script estimate how many washrooms should be conflated vs. net new in each changeset - this would provide a simple comparable metric to ensure that the conflation plugin was configured correctly for each changeset.

Top three resources that were helpful:

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On Saturday, September 14, 2024, Pakistan hosted its first-ever mapathon, a collaborative event aimed at contributing to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) community. The mapathon took place in Islamabad, Karachi, and online, bringing together a diverse group of participants.

In Islamabad, mappers gathered at the “Calmkaj” workspace, while in Karachi, they convened at the Habib University computer center. The day began with opening remarks by Mr. Shaji from COP, followed by an introduction to maps by Ms. Zainab Makti, a lecturer at Habib University.

I then provided an overview of OpenStreetMap, covering its purpose, community, global impact, and applications. Given the presence of many new mappers, I conducted a hands-on training session on editing and participating in Maproulette challenges. Training materials were also shared through WhatsApp and other social media groups prior to the event.

With over 60 participants in total (20 onsite in Islamabad, 30 in Karachi, and 16 online), the mapping session was a productive and engaging experience. I closely monitored edits and provided assistance to new mappers, ensuring the quality of contributions. To maintain enthusiasm and encourage participation, we announced prizes for the top Maproulette scorers.

Throughout the day, we enjoyed a lunch break provided by the COP team and participated in a fun quiz based on the training session. The event concluded with the distribution of prizes to the top three Maproulette performers.

The mapathon was a resounding success, attracting 30 new members to the Pakistani OSM community. Participants expressed interest in working on various mapping projects, including pharmacies and health centers in Peshawar and Islamabad, banks and their branch codes, water sources and union councils, and mangroves.

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Mexico

State of the Map 2024, Nairobi-Kenya: An Unforgettable Experience!

Wow! SotM 2024 in Nairobi, Kenya!!! I couldn’t contain my excitement when I received an email confirming that I’d been granted a full scholarship to attend the event. It was my first time attending the global State of the Map conference, and the thrill of meeting so many people from diverse backgrounds and regions was overwhelming. I even screamed when I read the news—why not? I was about to meet in person people I had only ever interacted with online, and the feeling was indescribable.

The first thing I did was reach out to my fellow OSMers, who I consider family, to confirm who else was attending. The joy from those who affirmed they’d be there was palpable. We kept in touch, discussing our preparations for the big day. Butterflies fluttered in our stomachs as excitement built. We knew exactly when everyone would arrive in Kenya.

Arrival in Nairobi

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I spent 11 nights backpacking in Glacier National Park this summer (on two separate trips), and noticed that existing mapping of the campsites is minimal. Each site generally consists of several tent sites, a food preparation area with bear-proof storage (a pole for hanging or a bear box), a toilet, and usually a fresh water supply. Usually there is a schematic map of the campsite posted, like this one shown below.

While I was there, I took a number of photos of camp site maps (I have not been able to find them online from the National Park Service), and did quick GPS surveys of a few sites with my Garmin watch.

I have made a first attempt at adding a full backcountry camp site map for Hole in the Wall Camp in this changeset. My approach was:

• Place the camp itself at the main trail junction, usually where the camp map is posted, tagged as tourism=camp_site. This is the way camps are tagged in OSM now (locations are rather approximate).
• Map the paths between parts of the camp, tagged with highway=path
• Add each official tent site as a node tagged with tourism=camp_pitch
• Add the toilet with amenity=toilets. In the case of Hole in the Wall, tagged with toilets:disposal=chemical, but in most cases it will be toilets:disposal=pitlatrine.
• Tagged the food preparation area with amenity=bearproof_storage, bearproof_storage=hang. This one is not very standard, I followed an example from this forum post.

A few notes and limitations:

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Holy

It is definitely good knowing how to use field tools to map on specific projects.

There comes experience 😊 regardless of previous teaching on how to use these tools like ODK, Vespucci, Mapsme and others; in the field you definitely have to use your own discretion to relate and adjust to what is given to maintain your nobility at work.

I became interested in the issue of localizing the map of Ukraine into English and decided to raise it in several forum discussions (first, second, third) to delve into the nuances and find optimal approaches to filling out the name:en tag for objects in Ukraine.

My goal was to understand how to correctly fill in the name:en tag and determine whether it should contain a translation or transliteration. While this may seem like a technical issue, it actually has deep cultural and historical roots, and the answer is not immediately obvious. However, through the discussion, I believe I found a solution and would like to share it in this diary.

Endonyms and exonyms: what are they?

First and foremost, it is important to understand the difference between endonyms and exonyms.

Endonym refers to the name of a geographical object in the language of the people who live in that area. For instance, for the residents of Ukraine, the name of the capital Kyiv is an endonym. Endonyms always reflect the authentic name used by the local population.

Exonym refers to the name for the same geographical object used by people or countries outside that area. Examples of Ukrainian exonyms include Viden for Wien, Niu-York for New York, and Florentsia for Firenze. The Spanish name for the city Lviv is Leópolis, and the German name is Lemberg. Historically, such names were formed quite chaotically, influenced by various linguistic traditions or political processes.

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Last week we released Rapid v2.4, the most advanced web-based editor for OpenStreetMap. This release wraps up several months of work, includes numerous bugfixes, and a few notable features:

🈺 Improved Text Localization

Now Rapid can again be localized into different languages. The Rapid Editor project on Transifex allows anyone from the community to translate Rapid.

📷 Improved Handling of Street-level Imagery and Detections

We squashed a bunch of bugs and made many improvements to how Rapid handles street-level imagery, such as Mapillary. Now users can select a detected feature or traffic sign to learn more about it, and Rapid will highlight the imagery that shows that detection, both on the map and in the viewer. This will be especially useful for mapping pedestrian features, such as traffic signs, crosswalks, bike racks, and more.

👩‍💻 Use Rapid

👉 Bookmark Rapid and make it your editor of choice:

• https://rapideditor.org/rapid#map=2.00/0.0/0.0&background=Bing

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Introduction:

Over the past year, I have been working as a backend developer on the Field Mapping and Tasking Manager (FMTM) project for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). My role has involved system design, feature development, and bug fixing, all aimed at enhancing the efficiency and usability of field mapping for humanitarian purposes. One of my key contributions has been developing and refining the FMTM Splitter —an algorithm designed to streamline field mapping by dividing map Areas of Interest (AOI) into manageable tasks for mappers.

In this post, I will discuss the workings of the FMTM Splitter, the challenges we’ve overcome, and how OpenStreetMap (OSM) data plays a vital role in making this tool effective for humanitarian efforts.

The FMTM Splitter: Two Key Algorithms

The FMTM Splitter is crucial for breaking down large AOIs into smaller, manageable tasks for field mappers. The goal is to ensure that mappers can efficiently collect and update information without having to cross major obstacles like highways or rivers. This makes the mapping process not only faster but also safer and more convenient for field mappers.

We developed two main algorithms for splitting AOIs:

SplitBySquare:

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dear diorey

Didn’t do anything today sadly apart from a few streetcomplete stars

16th of September, 23:27, Poland

Well, let me share my experiences at “State of the Map 2024” in Nairobi at the University of Nairobi which I must say was like the coolest place ever for a bunch of map nerds like us to meet. As far as I can tell, it’s the place where all the folks behind OpenStreetMap, get together from all corners of the world to share their experiences, get excited about the mission of making this world more navigable with the help of our maps. It was very much like attending a large family reunion with an attempt at small talk that quickly degenerated into everyone’s passion for Open geospatial data.

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Since the beginning of June, I have been working on researching and locating the holy wells of County Kilkenny. I have more or less identified about 213 of them which are described in sources going back at least 90 years (Schools’ Collection etc). In some cases, it is very difficult to locate them, because their location was only given as “in such and such a townland in that person’s field”, and it is very difficult to find out who owned a field 90 years ago.

In addition to that, I have more recently started an oral history project collecting people’s memories and stories about holy wells, patterns (which is a type of originally religious festival in Ireland where people do or did things in a certain pattern around a sacred site usually on the patron saint’s feast day) and other related things. I’m uploading them to Wikimedia and add transcripts, if you’re interested: Category:Oral history about holy wells in County Kilkenny.

What has that to do with mapping, you may ask. Well, apart from locating these holy wells and holy well sites which are protected monuments (and sometimes still water sources), I’m getting local place names from my interviewees as well. Names of roads, cross roads, field names etc which are also not recorded on any map yet, but are frequently still used by locals or were used in the past, so recording them now will help locate things referred to in older sources. Some of these, like Bóthar Chiaráin (Kieran’s Road after St Kieran) potentially go back 1300 years or so.

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YouthMappers Pre-Event at American Spaces.

The State of the Map (SotM) 2024 in Nairobi started with the most exciting YouthMappers pre-event at American Spaces. It was clear that the conference was going to be full of inspiration and action. Our host Laura was there to welcome YouthMappers early birds from different parts of the world gathered in the venue gearing up for the day’s activities just to prepare for the conference.

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