OpenStreetMap
Posted by Raquel Dezidério Souto on 7 May 2025 in English.
Diary Entries in English
Recent diary entries
oh well, imgur doesn’t seem to work.
It was a beautiful day for a hike, so I set out early at 8am sharp. I headed back to Ely, trekked some of the trails in Plymouth Great Wood, cut through the park in St Fagans, passed through Western Cemetery, then over to the iron-age hillfort in Caerau. All was going to plan — until, that is, it wasn’t. While taking some snapshots at the hillfort, I fell and sprained my ankle.
I’ve no idea what happened – I was taking my time, walking along, and then I was flat on my face. I remember hearing a squeaking sound, the kind of sound a gym shoe makes on a squash court (so I either slipped on a root or a rock, or I killed something cute and fluffy).
So there I was , stuck in the middle of field with nothing to help me up. Great. And I somehow had to get back down a very steep hill. Brilliant. And then I had to get home. Jolly-well fantastic.
After, looking up at the sky for an hour, I managed to get to my feet. I couldn’t put weight on my over-turned ankle, so the trip back down took an age. With the aid of my trusty hiking pole, I finally got to a bus stop.
At least I got what I wanted to get — a clearer picture of the woodland trails and the layout of the roads in the cemetery (all in the name of improving Open Street Map). I also now have the perfect excuse for buying a new pair of trail boots.
Although the sprain is quite bad, nothing seems to be broken — the swelling is fairly minor, and I’m not in a great deal of pain. I won’t be strolling about for a while, but I’m hoping that the ‘while’ is a short one.
Posted by bijsgohsdacu on 6 May 2025 in English.
Last updated on 13 May 2025.
Hello all, to start with, I’ve always been interested in open software and collaborative projects. I actually made an OSM account way back in 2012, as you can see on the HDYC website. I can’t really remember why I made it to be honest. I may have found it via Wikipedia or something.
But it was three years ago today that I did my first changeset. I had yet to learn about all the mapping resources available to me, especially the GSImaps/pale layer from the Japanese government. This in combination with the JOSM areaselector plugin has been really useful for quickly mapping buildings in Japan. There are a lot of hiking trails on there too, and I can see now that I didn’t really need to use my GPX track to map the trail up to the Kamiyahagi Wind Farm and the observation deck up there way back in that first edit.
I’m grateful to this community for providing me with a useful hobby to do and that I have fun with. It perfectly compliments my outdoorsy walking and hiking lifestyle, my detail-focused mindset, as well as my tendency to hyper-focus (yay ADHD!) and being comfortable with sitting on JOSM and just meditatively mapping. It’s wonderfully calming. I greatly enjoy that I’m making an impact on the world through what I love to do.
I have been making an effort to direct people to OSM resources on r/BuyFromEU as much as I can, as there’s been an increased interest in switching away from US tech companies to services like Mapy and Magic Earth and I see it as a great opportunity for more people to join and improve the map. There are so many services that use OSM, but I think a lot of users aren’t even aware that the map can be edited or that improvements are welcome. I sometimes see references to “the official OSM app,” which is referencing OSMAnd. I think for some, the concept of it just being a database that the various apps get the data from can be hard to understand. But overall, I’m really glad to see more people get on board.
I want to talk about how to name the trails in Catoctin Mountain Park, a US national park in Maryland. The available information about trail names is a bit inconsistent. This post serves as a way for me to organize my thoughts and document the conclusions I’ve reached.
Background
Catoctin Mountain Park, as I mentioned, is part of the US National Park system. It’s located in Maryland, at the northern end of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the outer perimeter of the Appalachian Mountains. It has a number of hiking trails. The trails are split between the east and west sides of the park; each side’s trails are interconnected, but the two sides don’t connect directly to each other.
I recently hiked most of the east side trails. It’s those trails I’m primarily focused on. I haven’t (yet) been to the west side, so I don’t personally know the ground truth there.
Ground Truth
On the ground, trails are designated by colored blazes on trees. The blazes use a number of different colors and several different shapes. Some distinct trails use the same colors as each other, but use different blaze shapes. There are sections where two trails overlap; those sections uses blazes that are half the color of one trail and half the color of the other trail.
There are no trail names posted, with one exception. A trail between the visitor center and the Lewis Property part of the park is both blazed with white rectangles and has regularly-placed signs saying “Gateway Trail”.
The park generally uses rectangular blazes for longer trails that form the core of the east side’s trail network. Triangular and circular blazes are used for shorter trails that either form shorter connections or have a specific purpose. For example, there’s a short nature trail with signs pointing out local plant species. That trail is blazed with triangles.
Cross-posted from https://odeco-research.eu/?p=4999
On Thursday, the 10th of April 2025, we celebrated the event “OpenStreetMap: Mapping & Hiking” at the University of Camerino, Italy. After two months of preparation, the event was well-received and had a diverse and satisfied crowd.
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative geographical database of the world. Millions of people use its data, and also millions contribute to it in various ways. However, there are still places where there is no strong local community, where its villages and rural areas are heavily undermapped. Camerino, while the town itself is well mapped, has some incredible nature and cultural spots nearby, which needed an update. As well, being a university town with students coming from all corners of Italy and the world, makes it a prime location for engaging in outreach activities and kickstarting a community.
How complete are addresses in OpenStreetMap in Belgium? After several status these previous years (see September 2022, in May 2023, and in May 2024, November 24), I finally adapt the process to analyse addresses completeness for all Belgium!
The aim of this small article is to assess the completeness of addresses in Belgium for OSM, compared to official data. Basically we count the address points in OSM and in official data by municipalities. We don’t check the address quality here, we know there can be errors in OSM data, and even in official data.
How I proceeded
Using QGIS, I gathered OSM addresses and official ones. OSM data is imported in a PostgreSQL database using osm2pgsql based on a pbf file for Belgium from the 24th of April. Official data is coming from BEST address csv files, that gathers Belgian addresses for the 3 regions of the country.
Addresses in OSM can be mapped on buildings (most of the cases), hence on a way, or on a node. I consider only objects with the “addr:housenumber” tag. First, I made a single layer of addresses points from OSM data by merging the centroids of buildings with this tag and the points with these tags, by excluding the places where these two layers overlaps (typically points with an address inside a building where there is already an address). The method is far from perfect: I don’t consider relations, I miss some way objects with addresses but without the building tag (typically some schools), and probably a lot of other edge cases due to the “joyeux bordel” of the OSM data model.
Official data considers several address points for each building unit, or box number. It means that there are often several points at the same place, especially in cities, accounting for each box number. Since the mapping of box number is often not so used in OSM, I merged all points at the same place (given a buffer of 1 meter) as a first step. This reduces the number of official address from 7,004,321 to 4,454,017.
Posted by SeverinGeo on 27 April 2025 in English.
EN version below
Ce post a été initialement publié ici.
Le 14 décembre 2024, Mayotte était frappée par le cyclone Chido, le plus violent qu’elle ait connu depuis plus de 50 ans. Rapidement, l’IGN a diffusé des imageries Pléiades prises les 17, 18, 20, 21 et 24 décembre et a confirmé le 25 décembre que la communauté OSM pouvaient les utiliser comme source dans ses éditions. De suite, j’ai eu l’envie de les utiliser pour évaluer les dommages du bâti. Pourquoi le bâti ? Du point de vue cartographique, parce que les dommages sont plus visibles sur des infrastructures polygonales que ponctuelles ou linéaires. Du point de vue de la réponse de crise, parce que les dégâts étaient particulièrement importants, ayant fait disparaître ou rendu impraticables les foyers de beaucoup d’habitants.
Trois mois après, ce billet revient sur les grandes étapes de cette cartographie toujours en cours, organisée bénévolement sur du temps libre.
Revue et choix méthodologique
La cartographie des dommages du bâti à l’aide d’imagerie post-désastre n’a évidemment pas été inventée dans OpenStreetMap et des expériences similaires ont déjà été menées par le passé dans OSM.
Après le passage du cyclone Haiyan sur les Philippines en novembre 2013, une cartographie des dommages du bâti avait été réalisée sur la région autour de Tacloban. Par ailleurs, des chercheurs du Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) avaient publié en mars 2016 un article détaillant une méthodologie qui avait été de suite adaptée à OSM sous la forme de modèles de préréglages et d’un style cartographique pour JOSM, et appliqués notamment à Haïti après le passage du cyclone Mathieu en octobre 2016.
OpenStreetMap Indonesia, in partnership with TomTom, organised a Community Mapping Party at GoWork Plaza Indonesia in Jakarta on Saturday, 26 April 2025.
Planning
January 23, 2025 – 17:05 WIB
“For those living in the Jabotabek area, how about we hold our first offline monthly talk next time and align it with the TomTom Mapping Party event?”
Initial discussions about hosting an offline gathering began among members in the Greater Jakarta area. A suggestion was made to align the monthly community meeting (usually held online, but in this proposal, it will be held offline for the first time) with an upcoming Mapping Party event organized by TomTom. The idea was presented in an open-ended way, inviting members to consider the possibility when time allowed.
January 30, 2025 – 08:34 WIB
“It might be better to hold it before Ramadan.”
The conversation picked up pace, with another participant suggesting that it would be preferable to hold the event before the fasting month (Ramadan) began. The comment hinted at the logistical advantages of scheduling it earlier.
February 3, 2025 – 11:01 WIB
“If it is held before Ramadan, preparation time would be very tight. It has been proposed to schedule it after Eid, possibly in mid or late April, and a response is still awaited.”
It was mentioned that holding the event before Ramadan might be too rushed given the short preparation time. As a result, a new proposal was introduced: to hold the Mapping Party after the Eid al-Fitr holiday, possibly in mid to late April. Final confirmation was still pending at that point.
March 23, 2025 – 14:28 WIB
“If we hold an offline mapping party and meetup at the end of April 2025 somewhere around Jabodetabek, would participants be able to attend?”
I have added a pin for my house, which is at 38150 N Vista Dr in Livonia! From here, I have encountered tons of wildlife, including fish, and generally been treated pretty well. There are parks nearby, riparian zones, old-growth forests, modern civilization including a hotel with swimming pool, and plenty of transportation opportunities. You can even walk here. There’s water, a lawn, and interesting people here. My basement is the coolest!
This blog post is part of a series of blog posts about the new OSM file format “OMA”. This is the last post. At the end of the article you’ll find links to the other blog entries.
I will end this series of blog posts about the OMA file format with a short summary of all the feedback I have received and a brief outlook. But first I’d like to give you a real-life example that uses OMA files.
A Real-Life Example
Over a year ago I wrote a renderer suitable for displaying micromapped areas. I used it to generate tiles at zoom level 20 for the restricted area of my micromapping project.
Now I have adapted this program to use OMA files and recomputed the tiles for the area of my micromapping project. The program can be found on GitHub; and there’s a slippy map showing the tiles.
For example, this is what the station forecourt of Hilden looks like:
Summary
Hello, I have completed work for the first part of the project. Central Wilson and the length of Fish Creek road have reached a point where roads, driveways, structures, and water features have been thoroughly digitized. Check it out and let me know what you think! :) I am sure there are some things I’ve overlooked and maybe some mistakes in these areas. However, given that they are seeing a fair amount of development, I will likely be returning to them soon to update and double check for possible mistakes. I do have a question for you all out there, more experienced than me. I have come to despise the existing residential-landuse areas in Wilson. They are a mess and seem to be quite outdated. I would be more than willing to fix or make new ones, but I don’t know if there is a specific way to go about that kind of thing. Do they need to be based on any administrative boundaries or are they a more arbitrary area? As for what’s next in the project, I am moving east to the Stilson area to fill in completely missing neighborhoods, improve roads, add water features, etc. I will give the next update once completed.
Posted by diamondarmorsteve on 23 April 2025 in English.
The relationship between municipalities and populated places in the United States is often not obvious, especially in New England due to the naming of their local governments. Naming them towns has blurred the distinction of populated places and municipal governments, when in reality, a clear distinction can be made between the two.
First, let’s look at the things almost everyone should agree with. Nodes tagged with a “place” tag can be referred to as “populated places”, or named concentrations of people. The GNIS definition of a populated place says it best: “Place or area with clustered or scattered buildings and a permanent human population (city, settlement, town, village). A populated place is usually not incorporated and by definition has no legal boundaries. However, a populated place may [correspond with a] “civil” [entity], the legal boundaries of which may or may not coincide with the perceived populated place. Distinct from Census [places] and Civil [entities].” In other words, nodes with a place tag refer to a human settlement, NOT to a municipality. They are the places one might see on a green direction sign while on the road. The exception to this is if the municipal boundary corresponds to the extent of the populated place, which is the norm in most states.
However, in New England, town boundaries are usually formed out of straight lines and rivers, not with the intention of delineating the boundary of a populated place. Therefore, even if a town shares a name with a populated place within its borders, the populated place will not always fill the entire municipality, leaving room for other populated places to fill the rural areas. Some municipalities even lack a populated place with the same name as it. This leads to there being no 1:1 correspondence between municipalities and populated places in New England.
Is there anyone here? Lol
Would be cool to take a state on and edit for the next 10-20 years. This project is cool. I love the idea of a free map for everyone and anyone to edit.
https://legistarweb-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/attachment/pdf/3284751/Staff_Report_FP20200052_-_Eastridge_Phase_4_w_exhibits.pdf https://legistarweb-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/attachment/pdf/3284805/Eastridge_Phase_4_Record_Drawings_20250204.pdf
https://legistarweb-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/attachment/pdf/3284699/Staff_Report_FP20253063_-_Morning_Ridge_Phase_3_w_exhibits.pdf https://legistarweb-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/attachment/pdf/3284710/Morning_Ridge_Phase_3_Sealed_Record_Drawings_2025-01-28.pdf
Going to be in Epworth for a month. Going map this out while on walk.
I will be in epworth for a month so i started to map out stuff. Later i will be down south.