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Diary Entries in English

Recent diary entries

Posted by keyyushi on 2 March 2025 in English. Last updated on 28 June 2025.

Currently Working On / Have Worked On:










Ayaş

  • Most roads in the district center have been mapped.
  • Almost all roads in the district center have been named.
  • Most school information in the district center has been updated.
  • Some building information in the district center has been updated.
  • Some important POIs in the district center have been added or updated.

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Beypazarı

  • Some roads in the district center have been mapped.
  • Almost all roads in the district center have been named.
  • Some building information in the district center has been updated.
  • Some important POIs in the district center have been added or updated.

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Etimesgut

  • Few roads in the district center have been mapped.
  • Few roads in the district center have been named.
  • Most road surfaces in the district center have been mapped.
  • Most road lanes in the district center have been mapped.
  • Most road lighting conditions in the district center have been mapped.
  • Few school information in the district center has been updated.
  • Most building information in the district center has been updated.
  • Most important POIs in the district center have been added or updated.
  • Some garbage bins in the district center have been added or updated.
  • Some bus stops in the district center have been added or updated.

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Güdül

See full entry

Posted by SimonPoole on 26 February 2025 in English. Last updated on 18 July 2025.

Some of the readers may have experienced the sinking feeling when they just attempted to upload dozens if not 100s of changes and a network glitch resulted in the editor app failing the upload.

What’s the problem when that happens?

It is literally that your editing app doesn’t know if any new objects it created locally have been successfully created on the server or not. If they have been created, retrying the upload will create duplicates, and if you don’t retry you potentially loose your work.

This post is related to work that I’m doing for version 21 of Vespucci that automates all of this, but the interesting thing is that you can easily handle many of the cases manually without editor support.

As you may know OSM changesets are not atomic, but individual uploads are (yes, you can upload multiple times in to the same changeset). With other words if your upload succeeded, but your editing app lost the response from the server, all your changes will have been successfully made, and, the other way around, if your upload fails it will fail completely.

The other point to note is that changesets are opened in a separate operation and are only automatically closed after a timeout of an hour if they are not explicitly closed after the upload by your editing app.

A normal upload operation will roughly contain the following steps

  • open the changeset.
  • upload the data and process the response. Depending on your editing app it will update the downloaded data in place, or throw it away and re-download from the server.
  • close the changeset.

This means that there are simple cases that you can handle manually, assuming you are not uploading more than once per changeset (more on that later):

See full entry

2021 was my most productive year in OpenStreetMap mapping. It was all downhill from there due to a variety of factors, highlighted by an abrupt career change that I never anticipated (COVID-19 pandemic did a lot of damage to everyone), and derailed me from my tracks.

Four (4) years since, despite being busier as a government employee with multiple designations, I decided to go back to mapping. I allocate a part of my free time to reacquaint myself with a long-lost love, and continue updating the places that became part of my journey.

Also, I became a father in the last quarter of 2024. To honor my only son, Daniw (an Iloko term for “poem”), who has exhibited a profound interest in exploring the outdoors at four (4) months old as of this writing, I shall be using a new name bearing his name.

Ngawit Aman Daniw means “Ngawit, the Father of Daniw” in Cordilleran lingo.

See our photo here: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=2294431287573827&set=a.119524685064509

“Ngawit”, by the way, is my Bontok Igorot name. I was adopted by the community in 2020 together with my life partner, Carla, through a Sangguniang Bayan Resolution. She was given the name, “Khayapon”.

You can read more about this narrative here https://nordis.net/2020/10/04/article/feature/culture-and-lifestyle/filming-their-way-home-to-the-cordillera/?amp

Hello, everyone! I am happy to be back!

Location: Sitio Imbakaan, Centro I, Sanchez Mira, Cagayan, Cagayan Valley, Philippines
Posted by miurahr on 16 February 2025 in English. Last updated on 22 February 2025.

OSGEO Hokkaido team and SotM Japan team hosted the FOSS4G Hokkaido and State of the Map Japan 2024 in 15th February in Sapporo, Hokkaido.

The idea to organize two related conference was raised by Hokkosha in June 2024 and now is realized.

You can find the record at YouTube

Here is a link to the presentations.

Posted by aleesteele on 14 February 2025 in English.

This is cross-linked from my blog, posted on 11 July 2023

I recently joined the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team in modering their Community Working Group and Tech Working Group’s discussions on AI-Assisted Mapping.

This, in part, was a reminder that I (still!) haven’t published an OSM diary that summarises my MA research, and that publication is still process. But it was also a reminder that I have yet to really summarise or bring together what I have shared so far.

Here’s a short summary:

Moderation: “Perspectives on AI-Assisted Mapping”

  • Session 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTtTh6gHEwI
  • Session 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pfdDV9xSoo
  • These two sessions - recorded as hour-long discussions with unrecorded 30 minute discussions at the end, were really interesting (and much-needed!) community spaces for the OSM community. I’m grateful to have been given the trust needed to facilitate, and learned a lot from folks there. Most notably, I think the discussion primarily ended up focusing not on “what we should be building” but what AI means to mappers in the first place (these being very different things)!

Talk: “Crisis Maps, Community, and Corporations (an Anthropologist’s perspective)”

  • Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0a84F0pdNU&t=351s
  • Slides: Coming soon!
  • This was given at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit in 2021 in the form of a talk. It shared some of my initial thoughts around crisis mapping specifically, and citations in that direction. In particular, I focused a bit more on what defines the kinds of crises that become maps, and informational asymmetries within the community.

Talk: “Mapping crises, communities and capitalism on OpenStreetMap: situating humanitarian mapping in the (open source) mapping supply chain”

See full entry

Some days ago, I searched online for a bus route that was supposed to be newly introduced to go from Kilkenny to New Ross. I didn’t find it, but I found another one which pleased me even more which goes from Kilkenny to Fiddown (ref=891). The reason it pleases me is that the other route is already partly covered by another bus company and I don’t really need it, and the 891 covers a route that goes past several historical sites and at least two hiking routes. Since I don’t drive, I will certainly avail of it myself. I don’t mind organizing myself lifts, and I enjoy the company of my “drivers”, but sometimes it’s good to be more independent. For context, the bus route started on January 20th 2025.

Street-level imagery

So I decided to track it, because I don’t really trust Transport for Ireland’s route maps, and I can’t be sure that they didn’t use proprietary map material to provide the routes online, even though their background map is OSM. But I have seen routes on their website which they seemed to have taken out of thin air which had nothing to do with the actual route the bus takes.

See full entry

Location: Rogerstown, Kilmaganny, The Municipal District of Callan — Thomastown, County Kilkenny, Leinster, Ireland

Prerequisites

To follow along with this tutorial, please setup and configure a Oracle Cloud instance for mapillary tools. Please refer to this guide for instructions on how to accomplish this.

Uploading a 360 video to Mapillary on Oracle Cloud instance from ARM computer

  1. Login to Oracle Cloud Instances.
  2. Select your Mapillary instance configured from this guide.
  3. On the top bar, click Start to boot your instance and note any public IP address changes.
  4. Open Terminal and SSH into your Oracle instance.
    • ssh -i ~/.ssh/oracle_mapillary_keys/[your private key (not .pub)] opc@[IP Address copied from Oracle]
  5. Open a second terminal window and copy files from your local machine / SD card / elsewhere to your Oracle instance. This will place the file into the folder on your instance you created during configuration.
    • scp -i ~/.ssh/oracle_mapillary_keys/[your private key (not .pub)] [/path/to/local/360/file] opc@[IP Address copied from Oracle]:~/mapillary
  6. Wait for these file(s) to transfer to the Oracle instance and switch back to the instance terminal window. Upload the transferred files to Mapillary.
    • mapillary_tools process_and_upload ~/mapillary/*.360
  7. Wait for the upload(s) to complete. Delete the files off the instance and gracefully exit the instance.
    • rm ~/mapillary/*.360 && exit
  8. Return to Oracle dashboard on the web, select Stop from the top bar to stop the instance from running while not in use.