I was having a conversation with another mapper about the resolution of notes where the resolution of the note requires some local knowledge. These notes that require local knowledge may remain stale for a long period of time. You can read the full conversation here.

However, it is not uncommon that notes are resolved by people that are mainly interested in resolving notes. Anecdotally, based on the fact that I put in a lot of notes, there seems to be just a select few people that are going around resolving notes as their primary OpenStreetMap contribution, or at least a major part of it. I have all the respect in the world for these people. And to Danmer’s point, they don’t have enough help to get all their notes resolved, so leaving them unresolved, because notes only have two resolution options—they’re either open or they’re closed—can be challenging.

If the primary note resolution engine is people that most likely have no local knowledge, it is counterproductive to rely on that corps of people to address these notes that require local knowledge.

I think that we could probably classify notes into three categories:

1. Those that anyone can resolve with just aerial photography and potentially some street-level photography.
2. Notes that require some information that is not available with strictly what is presented to a remote editor, such as local knowledge, or something in the person who wrote the note’s mind.
3. Spam.

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Baltimore City, like many cities of its era, was built long before environmental regulations required the preservation of wetlands and streams. Baltimore is built along the banks of a navigable waterway, in a valley that drains a large watershed that extends into the surrounding environs. However, when examining a map of the city, there is a notable lack of streams in the built up areas that usually give some definition to the topography shown on a map. That’s because the streams that used to dot the banks of the Patapsco River and Jones Falls have been placed underground by man in an attempt to tame nature and move surface water out of sight. Public Works engineers of the early 1900s tried to put streams into pipes wherever possible because they were seen as open sewers, rife with disease and industrial filth. These decisions have had dire consequences on the health of the water bodies downstream and have turned the built up city into an area devoid of natural water where there should be plenty.

Recently I’ve started finding and adding these buried streams to OpenStreetMap in an attempt to surface their existence to the world. Referencing public storm drain plans and old news articles I’ve found at the library, I’ve started adding some streams that are now completely underground. The process is interesting in part due to the massive scale of the underground pipes and tunnels that we rely on any time it rains, yet have little knowledge of their existence. There are several tunnels in excess of 4 meters in diameter.

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The Mayor and City Council of Baltimore acted swiftly after violence at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. led to a national conversation on the removal of Confederate monuments. The protests centered around the removal of prominent Confederate generals’ monuments in that city. In Baltimore, the City Council passed a bill that permitting the removal of four Baltimore monuments to the Confederacy. The mayor executed the order by contacting local firms to remove the four Confederate monuments in Baltimore during the night of August 15, 2017, into the following morning.

OpenStreetMap is a database of physical features. Since the four monuments are no longer physically present, I have removed them from OpenStreetMap. The removed statues include the Roger B. Taney Monument, the Lee-Jackson Monument, the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument, and the Confederate Women’s Monument.

There is an interest in modeling 3D buildings on OpenStreetMap and in the community. Updates from map providers like Mapbox and Mapzen now support complex 3D building rendering. This diary gives an overview of the process used to add 3D buildings in Baltimore.

Background

I am always looking for ways to improve the map of my hometown. I looked to Baltimore for some buildings to add in 3D. I found two to start.

The buildings, the Hyatt Regency Inner Harbor and One East Pratt Street, are prominent on Baltimore’s Skyline. Their representative shapes in OSM were blocky and missing parts. Having never understood the “simple” 3D mapping technique, I set out to learn how to improve them.

Learning Simple 3D Buildings

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A relative of mine recently moved to the Rose Hill neighborhood of New York City, NY. As any mapper would, I was looking around the neighborhood on OpenStreetMap and found a missing street!

Broadway Alley_0575 by Lindsey Anderson on Flickr

Broadway Alley piqued my interested because it is notably the only unpaved road left in New York City, and because it is an alley in a city with very few alleys.

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Last year I began importing Maryland Department of Natural Resources lands but my progress slowed as I reached the populated areas of Central Maryland. Today I have restarted the process a bit with a custom translation for Paul Norman’s ogr2osm tool.

Here are some beautiful new parks on the map:

• Patapsco Valley State Park, Howard County side (partially incomplete)
• Gambrill State Park, the state owned part
• Patuxent River State Park

Adding the parks is fairly manual but produces great looking map data. Let me know if you want to help out!

This week I had an off day and decided to get some exercise. It is hard for me to even think about working out anymore without also considering mapping. Ever since Strava started using OSM for its routing engine and for exercise maps, I’ve been motivated to use it because a) Strava is a lot of fun, and b) I like contributing back to OSM with it.

Enter Mapillary

A new player in the OSM space that I am enthusiastic about is Mapillary. Mapillary is a service / app that allows users to shoot their own street-view imagery, and use it for OSM without fear of licensing issues. The typical use would be to attach a camera to a personal automobile and shoot street-view, but it works on a bicycle as well.

Bike Mount

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I made a relation for the former right of way of the Maryland & Pennsylvania railroad. Check it out here: osm.org/browse/relation/3058279

Abandoned rail rights of way are one of OSM’s strong suits. These old paths are often used for trails or roads in modern times, thus they are beneficial.

Making this relation was pretty easy because all the ways were already there. I just connected them. There are some spurs that I could still add, and as I was scanning along the route, I was suprised by how many populated areas are not mapped well. I’ll add them as map notes!

Enjoy.

I attended State of the Map US in San Francisco from June 6 to June 10, 2013. Here is a summary of my thoughts on the events and the speakers. Firstly I want to thank OpenStreetMap US for the scholarship to attend this conference.

My first day at the conference consisted mostly of giving an hour long workshop on adding bus relations to OSM, one of my pet projects. Click the following links for the slides and the data. Please note that the data is no longer up to date. I have since added all the MTA 64 routes.

The workshop was an attempt to introduce folks to the basics of bus routes and their relations in OpenStreetMap. In effect, I was teaching the new public transport schema.

I think it went pretty well, though I have a few lessons learned. If I were to do this again, in the course of an hour, I’d do much less of a presentation at the beginning. Since people were paying to come to the talk, I thought I had to cram more info into the workshop. Instead, a lightning talk to start would have been good.

Some of the participants had never used JOSM, which is a pretty complex software at first glance. This meant that during my talk at SOTMUS, the whole group was slowed down by a few users that had trouble getting JOSM running. If I do this again, I’ll get there early and do at least 30 minutes of JOSM familiarization for folks. For instance, the right click and drag to scroll functionality isn’t intuitive to most.

The heart of the workshop was to make a bus route relation, but with the time setbacks, we didn’t end up accomplishing much. Still, I heard from folks afterwards and they said it helped them so they could know where to get started. My favorite feedback was this tweet from Ian V over at MapBox.

The next two days were jam packed with lots of interesting sessions and talks. I learned about two new ways to contribute to OSM, iD and Pushpin. I saw a radical new look to OSM, and much more.

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