I maintain a web map style that shows walking and cycling route names. For the cycle routes, it shows the ref. For some time I’ve massaged some of the names so that e.g. National Byway loops show as “NB (loop)” just like on the signage. However, as can be seen from the example above, some hiking route names are a bit convoluted - they’re more like descriptions than names.

For example, osm.org/relation/3971851 is the England Coast Path. Open up the list of members to see the names, which includes such delights as “King Charles III England Coast Path: Southend-on-Sea to Wallasea Island”. I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t say that on the signs there.

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There’s a saying in a certain article on the OpenStreetMap wiki that “tagging for the renderer” is equivalent to “lying to the renderer.”

Not only that, but the article also restricts the definition and meaning of “tagging for the renderer” as “the bad practice of using incorrect tags for a map feature so that they show up in the mapper’s renderer of choice. Such tagging goes against the basic good practice principles.”

I think that “tagging for the renderer” as a term should first be treated as neutral. On its own, there is no implication that “tagging for the renderer” forces us to lie to the system. Sometimes, people want to do tagging for the renderer simply because they want to place cool symbols around their area in OSM Carto.

Take me, for example.

Several months ago, I decided to download the entire openstreetmap-carto GitHub repository to analyze all of the (cool) icons contained within it and determine which tag combinations were needed to summon such icons on the OSM default map tile.

I found that the charging station icon was really cool. I loved its light blue color scheme, and its visibility on the map tile was quite good—it was already displayed at zoom level 17, on par with bank, gallery, and embassy icons.

I wanted to place this icon around my neighborhood soon. But alas, I didn’t know where any charging stations were located. So I shelved this idea for weeks and months.

Then, during a work trip to Bandung, while walking past the campus I attended as a student several years ago, I finally saw one. A charging station in the wild! It was stationed right in front of the parking area of the Labtek V building.

I was so elated—it felt like finding a legendary Pokémon in the wild! At that moment, I immediately stopped walking, opened Vespucci, and mapped the charging station.

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Please note: This blog post is part of a series of blog posts about the new OSM file format “OMA”. This is the second post. At the end of the article you’ll find links to the other blog entries.

 

This time I will give you an example of how to query Oma files. I wrote a prototype of a library for working with Oma files. I called it OmaLibJava.

To explain how to use this library, let’s say, we want to create an overview map of all the power facilities in a certain town.

 

The Classical Approach

The classical approach with OSM files would be, to first reduce the size of the file by creating a smaller file containing only the data of interest. This is typically done in two steps: remove everything that is not a power facility / remove everything that is not in the town. The order of these two steps is not important for the result, but might have a huge impact on the duration of the process.

Although it is not necessary – or even counterproductive – this can easily be done with Oma files too. For example, the following small Java program extracts all power facilities of Germany:

import java.io.*;
import de.kumakyoo.omalibjava.*;

public class ExtractPower
{
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException
    {
        Extractor e = new Extractor("germany.oma");
        e.addExtract(new BlockFilter("power"),"power.oma");
        e.run();
    }
}

Running this program on germany.oma on my computer takes 8.5 seconds. It creates the file power.oma, which is about 22MB in size and contains all power facilities of Germany.¹

Let’s have a closer look at the program: the library contains a class called Extractor, which reads an Oma file (here germany.oma) and writes several extracts simultaneously (here only one, called power.oma).

An important part is the filter BlockFilter("power"). This tells the extractor to keep only elements with the key power. I’ll tell you more on filters in a moment. But first I want to show you why you don’t need this step.

 

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My edits are not git commits.

If anyone that is interested in knowing my change set history I would be more than happy to send them a link to one.

The ability to edit my bio and profile picture are all the personalization that I require.

Since OKANA is finally open next door, I think it might be time to bring this landmark’s map up to snuff

I am no expert on indoor mapping but I will research and try my best, flagging for review any edits I’m unsure of.

Feel free to help!

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.

Henderson, Nebraska

Final Edit:

as a reminder, this is how it started:

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Source: https://gurs-import.karlas.si/project/1 (previous URL: https://osm.karlas.si/project/1)

• YYYY-MM-DD = date of import
• XXXXXX_X = number of task in Simple Task Manager
• Name of the settlement
• X i. b. = number of imported buildings according to the source.

Changesets/imports:

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Tenkeli (Тенкели) Mapping Project

Overview

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

Changes made

• Added nature landuse in the vicinity
• Removed unsupported and old tags
• Added every building in Тенкели/Суор with their respective tags
• Added the road system with specified smoothness and surface types
• Added lakes/reservouirs
• Adjusted rivers
• Cleaned up existing things

Stats (as of 11/03/2025)

1. Changes - 41 266
2. Changesets - 67
3. Average Changes/Changeset - 615,91
4. Average Changeset/Day - 3,7

To Do List

1. Improve the river system near Суор
2. Fix the mediocre nature tags in the area
3. Specify building tags around Суор and the industrial area below Тенкели
4. Find addresses and street names (If anyone has any information on that, contact me)

Before (General)

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Picked another town nearby. Patterson NY. Added most of the buildings in the area. Now need to work on the lots and land cover.

Patterson NY

Before:

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I must be mad as I have started two proposals in a day.

1. Deprecate socket:tesla supercharger and socket:tesla destination
2. Rules for marking some Mailing Lists as archived

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.

The tools;

• Forward looking 8.3MP/4K dashcam 2FPS.
• Left facing (270 degrees) old Samsung 8MP phone 1FPS. (Out passenger window)
• Left rear facing (225 degs) old Samsung 3.6MP phone 0.6FPS. (Out passenger window)
• The dashcam records audio (my voice) in one minute chunks.
• All photos and audio are geo-referenced to their current location.
• The Garmin navigation GPS has a current OSM based (mkgmap) map, a POI set of OSM FixMe’s.
• I am a permanent road dweller, retired and wandering Australia. For 10 years now.

The methods - Start of day;

• Start a GPS/NMEA (USB via laptop) UBLOX recording function that also flags movement >3kph and <40kph.
• Start an APRS beacon for those that like to track me. (msg me for details)
• Mount/power up the side facing phones and launch their (laptop) 3>40kph recording scripts.
• Power up the dashcam and let its own GPS settle for 2-3 mins. This is also the voice notes recording device.

The methods - Basic drive;

• Open high speed road 70*100kph. Just let it capture doing voice as below.
• Can’t really play music as it can trigger voice events.

The methods - Voiced items;

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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

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Picked another small town name in Vermont. There wasnt too much to map here. Dont have details on the ground.

Before:

and After:

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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.

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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.

 

Scattered Data in OSM Files: The Viktorstraße in Wuppertal

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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

Fieldwork for mapping trees with OpenStreetMap and special lectures

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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

🌳🌳🌳🌳🌳

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