I have to say that I keep a critical distance from the GAFAMs, but Microsoft’s involvement in making its imagery available is a precious source for the OSM community. Thank you for allowing us to use it! And this initiative you’re taking improves your image in my eyes. Thank you for the direct contact with the community that you enable!

I think that the most relevant efforts should be put into JOSM and iD, the most massive editors of the OSM database. And since it’s Christmas, here’s my list :D : 1/ Creation of a JOSM plugin to visualize the 3D aspect of buildings live, which would enable 3D tags to be added and the result of this contribution to be checked more easily before being sent to the OSM database. 2/ Creation of a tutorial for getting to grips with JOSM (integrated into the JOSM interface, in much the same way as iD currently offers). 3/ Creation of an iD tutorial for adding AI buildings (a thematic tutorial directly in iD to understand how to enrich OSM but with tools that use AI, for example: how to import buildings cleanly from Global ML Building Footprints, how to do it, what specific quality control is needed/is it possible to do etc.). 4/ Improved JOSM interface (UI/UX designer to make JOSM easier to use/faster to learn). 5/ Addition of Bing imagery shooting date. This may not seem like a very important idea, but it’s important for data freshness! To avoid mapping buildings that no longer exist, for example. 6/ Implementing JOSM modularity (well, it’s not very concrete on the OSM base, but why not, it’s Christmas isn’t it :D?) cf. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:JOSM-SotmWorld2019-VincentPrivat.pdf

Waouh, super travail, c’est trop bien ! En plus, j’adore les GIF avant/après, on y voit une bonne part des ajouts !

Par ailleurs, est-ce que vous avez pensé – pour certaines des photos prises, surtout celles du patrimoine local – à les mettre sur Wikimedia Commons ? (la catégorie sur ville est assez pauvre en photo…)

Félicitation encore pour le travail abattu !

@epicspongee In many ways, it’s the most detailed map of Pyongyang!

@Fnordson At the moment I use Bing because it’s the most pleasant imagery to use in South Hwanghae, but for Pyongyang it’s the Esri map that’s most up to date, so depending on the area I use one or the other. But we miss Maxar!

@CharliePlett How did you do it? I mean technically to create a grid overlay that divides the region into 9 km² grids?

@kucai I didn’t add any borders but it’s on Wikimedia Commons !

@快乐的老鼠宝宝 As I explain a little in the diary, I work by district. I go zone by zone, I adjust all the existing objects on Maxar with no offset (or on the imagery I intend to use) and then I map all buildings and roads of the area.

But there are places where I try to make something coherent even if it doesn’t match the imagery perfectly, by avoiding overlapping buildings and roads. I try to understand the relative positioning of these objects by changing imagery (Maxar, Esri, Esri Beta, Bing) to do my best !

@pedrito1414 No I was just taking about the mapping.

Of course it’s difficult to map buildings in dense areas, but in Pyongyang the architecture is fairly regular, so it can be done, and the available imagery is of good quality.

I don’t think it would be possible to do the same thing with Hanoi for example, because the shape of the buildings is very complicated to understand. If I mapped Hanoi from armchair too many approximations would be made for the quality I’m aiming for.

It’s incredible! What a great effort you’ve made! I too am planning to do all the roads/buildings/POI/landcover of South Hwanghae, and your project is a huge inspiration to me!

Super news ! A UI/UX design, a skill unfortunately too rarely deployed within OSM projects, I’m very happy to see it happen !

Well done, congratulations !

I also wanted to share « France miniature » osm.org/#map=18/48.77640/1.96215 but InsertUser do it before me ^^

As an OSM contributor, I have my doubts about your sincerity,

“Admittedly, my initial approach was less than tactful, potentially causing offence.” → “A constructive dialogue relies on evidence-based arguments”

“OSM’s priorities seem to have changed” → They haven’t changed

26,000 euros for the technical infrastructure of a project like OSM on a global scale for AWS, that seems okay to me.

We’re concerned about our independence and the people who are spending money on AWS in the first place.

On the question of transparency, I think we can do better, in fact I think it’s more a question of communication.

Nice after :’)

Thanks for your diary !

It’s very interesting this notion of discouragement,
I understand your desire to do things perfectly, I have it too, but we need to find the right balance, because when I saw what “mapping perfectly” meant… I understood that it was a professional skill in my opinion very very complicated to obtain. I’m talking about this level of perfection: osm.org/#map=16/38.7709/125.5247 which is unreachable for me, so my level is more like osm.org/#map=16/42.9543/130.0124 and I’m in peace with that.

What we can do is map well, and that’s hard enough to achieve, but it’s a good job!

On the mental side, I think it’s important to do cartography for fun (as a non-professional cartographer), because the moment it becomes a self-imposed “obligation”, there’s a good chance it will become counter-productive. Knowing how to stop and do something else is an important skill if you don’t want to lose interest in cartography. Sometimes it’s important not to be too demanding on yourself.

Mapping work in poorly mapped areas is too big to be done alone, and we have to accept that.

In my opinion, it’s important to be satisfied with one’s work and also to know how to congratulate oneself on what one has done!

Thanks for this diary!

Waouh very impressive work, the method is very beautiful, and as a bonus I learned several keyboard shortcut, thanks !

Thanks for your diary, it’s a really interessing way to connect free project like OSM, Commons, Wikidata and Wikipedia !

Thank you very much for this very informative and enlightening post on the situation. OSMF must react and enforce its pact with the contributors: the license and attribution

Hi @steveman2123,

I find your remarks very valuable, I also do a lot of armchair mapping for North Korea and especially Pyongyang. By the way, I tried to compile most of the things that can be detected from satellite imagery on a wiki page osm.wiki/North_Korea_Mapping_Guide, did you do something similar in your area? If so, I’d be interested to see it!

I notice that I use the same methods for street lights, but the relative poor quality of the imagery for this country prevents me from accessing certain objects like stop signs.

Thanks a lot for sharing your experience in a diary post !

« The bankers hate it, discover the method that this internaut has found » 😆

Hi Ukundji,

It’s good to see contributors who invest time in areas where the volume of map information is low… like NK !

I made a guide about contributing in North Korea (here: osm.wiki/North_Korea_Mapping_Guide) but it doesn’t talk about the toponyms issue at all.

I know that there is GeoNames (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoNames) which for North Korea compiles a lot of toponymic information mainly from the “nga” https://www.nga.mil/ (“National Geospatial-intelligence Agency” who is a US agency), see also https://web.archive.org/web/20220130070840/geonames.nga.mil/gns/html/index.html). But I don’t find GeoNames very convenient, I can’t use it easily even if I feel it could give us a lot of information!

I join you to have more discussion between contributors about North Korea! To this aim, I recently created a discord server that aims to gather all the people who are interested in contributing to free projects on this subject, whether it is OSM or Wikipedia (and other projects like Commons, or Wikidata).If some are interested here is the link to join this Discord server: https://discord.gg/sT96xGyffM If some are interested here is the link to join this Discord server: https://discord.gg/sT96xGyffM

Indeed, I also met many structures of which I do not know what they are used for !