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Diary Entries in English

Recent diary entries

Posted by lonvia on 6 March 2025 in English. Last updated on 8 March 2025.

I’ve just rolled out some updates for waymarkedtrails, the website for browsing route relations. The most notable improvement is that waymarkedtrails is finally able to understand member roles in route relations. This post gives a quick overview of what works and what doesn’t and what has changed with in the route views.

Forward/backward roles

The first group of roles handled specially are forward and backward roles which indicate that the route follows the given way only in the direction of the way or in counterflow. These oneway sections are now shown when details of a route are displayed:

Route with forward and backward sections

Waymarkedtrails will internally merge forward and backward sections into split sections and count them only once when computing the length of the route. However, this only works, when all ways of such a spilt section appear together in the relation and follow the order of the route. (See also the notes on ordering below.)

Roundabouts

See full entry

OSM History Viewer and OSM Route Manager are two ancient tools that help visualising and analysing changesets and route relations. In particular, they provide the following features: * Show the geographic and tag changes that a specific changeset has caused * Render a route relation (with support for nested relations), detect gaps and inconsistencies, and export the route as GPX * Analyze the history of relation members and show who last edited (and is thus to blame for) which section of the relation.

I have not maintained these services in many years and they frequently crashed or got overloaded. The user experience was also far from great.

I have decided to rewrite the logic of these tools and integrate it into FacilMap. While the don’t particularly fit the use case of FacilMap, the infrastructure (in particularly the UI elements) is there, making it convenient to integrate it there.

So far I have implemented the first functionality, changeset analysis. You can analyze a changeset by typing changeset <id> (for example changeset 6798641) into the search field, or by calling the URL https://facilmap.org/#q=changeset%20<id> (for example https://facilmap.org/#q=changeset%206798641) directly. As opposed to the legacy OSM History Viewer, the analysis and API requests are now entirely performed on the client side.

I will implement the other two features soon. Once done, the old services will be shut down and a redirect will be put in place.

Feel free to report any problems that you come across by writing to me or by creating an issue.

See full entry

Posted by Canyon Runner on 5 March 2025 in English.

Latest Update from Henderson.

All roads, sidewalks and parking lots were traced out. Traced out some of the park details as well. Unfortunately not too many commercial details or bing street side photos are available of this small town, so cant add too much more information such as stop signs, or storefronts.

Openstreetmap of Henderson Nebrasksa

For the next town, ill probably do something in the north north east.

Also, anyone have any updates as to when bing will work in JOSM again?

Location: Henderson, York County, Nebraska, United States
Posted by Peter Elderson on 3 March 2025 in English. Last updated on 2 April 2025.

Introduction

This diary entry describes my view on how best to map and tag pedestrian crossings and bicycle crossings. Best, considering detail, correctness, time consumption, clarity and usability. The many words in this diary may make it seem complicated, but the actual tagging is easy and direct node tagging of what you see on the road, with as little redundancy and required expertise as possible. As follows:

A simple unmarked, uncontrolled crossing, without special characteristics such as tactile paving, lowered kerbs or traffic island, is just an intersection node without any tags.

A simple zebra can be tagged with highway=crossing + crossing:markings=zebra. The usage of highway=crossing + crossing=zebra is seen as entry level duck tagging.

A simple crossing with other markings can be tagged with highway=crossing + crossing:markings=dots/dashes/lines/surface

If traffic lights control the crossing, add crossing:signals=yes

If there are special kerbs, add kerb=lowered/flush/…

If there is tactile paving, add tactile_paving=yes

If there is a crossing island within the crossing, add crossing:island=yes

If the crossing path goes uninterrupted over the road it crosses, so that the road is interrupted rather than the crossing path, add crossing:continous=yes

Scope:

  • Footway crossing any higher order way, including cycleway and busway, excluding rail.
  • Cycleway crossing any higher order way, including busway, excluding rail.
  • Mentioned, but not detailed: paths, including combined footway/cycleway paths as mapped regulary in Germany.
  • Mentioned, but excluded: designated horse crossings.
  • Mentioned, but excluded for now: how to map a crossing as a way.
  • Mentioned, but excluded for now: detailed mapping of the operation of traffic signals.
  • Mentioned: level crossing over tram railways

Basic principles:

See full entry

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

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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.