OpenStreetMap
Went back to Henderson to finalize the updates. I think i updated all i could with out starting to assume details. Also some mappers suggested straightening out the roads, so i did that across the entire town.
Final Edit:
as a reminder, this is how it started:
Source: https://gurs-import.karlas.si/project/1 (previous URL: https://osm.karlas.si/project/1)
Changesets/imports:
Over the past 3 weeks I’ve discovered, researched and mapped out the area of the abandoned Russian town of Тенкели, located in the middle of Siberia.
The location had only a rough outline of the town mapped along with the airport runway and main road. There were no buildings, no roads and the landuse was tagged incorrectly. The quarries were tagged as ‘landfills’. Apart from that, the nearby settlement, Суор, was also not even tagged. I decided to take matters into my own hands.
I found this video which proved a great help in learning the history and details of the place. Based on this, satellite imagery and images scattered along random, long forgotten forum websites (as well as TimeMachine snapshots from tenkeli.ru), I pieced together the most (if not only) accurate map of this settlement.
I plan to continue this project until the entire area is detailed up to a standard I deem sufficient
Picked another town nearby. Patterson NY. Added most of the buildings in the area. Now need to work on the lots and land cover.
Before:
I must be mad as I have started two proposals in a day.
I have also started a conversation (and am looking for proposals) on bicycle charging tagging.
I welcome all your comments on them.
97390 addresses completed
A few minor changes, so this is more an update, but with close to full details.
This is a backlog of before and afters. I went up the road a little bit to another town with not too much mapped. Mapped the buildings in the immediate town center and a bit of the green. I need to continue mapping the greens near the town center to fill it out a bit more.
Link to the map area Middletown Springs VT
Before
After
Picked another small town name in Vermont. There wasnt too much to map here. Dont have details on the ground.
Before:
and After:
I am a visually impaired user of Open Street Map, and I already contributed some places to the city of Simi Valley and a few surrounding areas. I think it would be nice to create a Navilens tag for Open Street Map. I don’t mean an actual Navilens QR code, just a tag saying that there is navilens available at a particular place. This is just a sort of true-or-false or yes/no tag. Navilens is a service that allows visually impaired people to navigate using special QR codes detected by a celphone from several meters away without the camera pointing to the code. Now if the Navilens tag gets implemented into OSM, Navilens themselves could contribute directly to Open Street Map for places that have Navilens codes, especially bus stops. We could also contribute to Open Street Map if we know for sure that a place has Navilens. That way, visually impaired people around the world know what places they can use the Navilens app for navigating.
As an OpenStreetMap contributor, I always pay attention to how maps are used in media and various software applications. It is fascinating to see OSM data appear in unexpected places. Previously, I noticed that OpenStreetMap was used in the movie Mission: Impossible.
Recently, I came across an example of OSM’s osmCarto style being used in the software of the Skyranger 35, a highly mobile air defense system.
Whenever I use files containing OSM data, I’m faced with two major
problems. These problems are inherent in the OSM data model and
inherited by the common file formats (.osm, .o5m, .pbf).
The first of these problems is about accessing the data: As a result of the data model users are forced to use either huge amounts of memory or a lot of time. Often even both.
The second problem is even worse: Quite often you have to guess properties of the data, which means using heuristics. But by their very nature, they can lead to wrong results. The most prominent example is probably the question, if a closed way element represents a linear object or an area.
To overcome these problems I invented a new file format. The main idea: Convert the data once (accepting the drawbacks caused by the two problems) and end up with data that can be processed fast, using only little memory. I also tried to keep the file size small and the file format simple.
I called the new format “OMA format” like “Open MAp”. It’s accompanied by a human readable version called “OPA format” like “Open PAper”. (Oma and Opa are the German words for grandma and grandpa).
It took me about a year to design the Oma file format, and write a converter and a library for querying the new file format. I still consider it in experimental state, as I would like to get some feedback before releasing a stable version. Hence this post.
All this is a lot of stuff and I can’t go into all the details in just one blog post. For this reason I’ve decided to keep this article brief and base it on a single example. In the coming weeks, I will be writing more articles about the new file format, which will provide more in-depth information.
My personal enemy that I take so serious, is someone who edits an area on a map as “under construction” and then it SITS for longer than 6 months in that stage. In some cases people have been living in that neighborhood for 3 years…and it’s been marked as “under construction.” Here I am today fixing areas that are fully developed now, fully established- and the average of the construction edits were made 2 years ago. Here’s hoping doordash, my personal use favorite Strava, or even pokemon go run an update for those poor folks.
This is purely a diary rant about residential areas and their roads not being updated. I almost wish there was a way to make “under construction” just be something for an existing thing being updated/fixed, not something being built. We’re mapping what’s there to be mapped. I’d rather new developments or roads have like a “coming soon” tag of some sorts that wouldn’t block in app access.
We can use strava as an example, i’ll set a route and it’ll make me avoid an entire neighborhood because “Deleted User” 3 years ago marked these 7 streets near the lake trail as “under construction.” Took me a sad amount of time, admittedly, to realize what was happening. Another example is Niantic not having in game spawns (pikmin, pokemon, ingress) if an area is marked “under construction” because the game labels the area as dangerous, so why would they give server room to RNG spawn their in game items there? Reality though is Ash can and SHOULD be able to catch his Pikachu there because he’s been living there for 3 years- Niantic just doesn’t think it’s safe.
So, here’s my little rant about the amount if neighborhoods i fixed today that i have personally been to, biked through, walked my dog through, that have been “under construction” the last 28 months.
I finally got back to mapping, after about 6 months of being inactive. I’m really happy!
– Em Português
The event will be held on March 31, 2025, in Portuguese, with fieldwork and remote activities designed to raise awareness of the importance of open data in the ecological dimension, in order to collaborate in environmental conservation and improve the quality of life of inhabitants, in the face of the obvious consequences of the climate crisis, which have worsened environmental conditions in cities and led to increased pressure on resources, especially energy.
🌳🌳🌳🌳🌳
| Two independent certificates will be awarded (morning/evening) | Register by March 30, 2025, 23:59 (UTC-3). Limited places (20) for the fieldwork activity (morning). Unlimited places for the evening activity. REGISTRATION LINK – Event page |
🌳🌳🌳🌳🌳
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.
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:
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.)
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.
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.
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?
I want better local information so here I am learning and updating Open Street Maps! (4 MAR 2025)
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
