Minh Nguyen's Comments
Artikel | When | Comment |
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Transliteration Midterm Update! | (To clarify, OpenCC is for converting between traditional and simplified Chinese, not for pinyin.) |
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Transliteration Midterm Update! | Wonderful to see this progress so far! Since you mentioned unidecode, have you given any thought to how Nominatim could eventually support alternative libraries for certain languages? The Any–Latin transform has very broad coverage, but for example OpenCC is designed specifically for Chinese text (assuming you can distinguish it from Japanese kanji). Some languages have multiple transliteration standards, and users might prefer one or another. |
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New York minor civil subdivisions - status and progress | Thanks for your patience. We’ve all been there. Arbitrary is a good word for it. We can’t quite get rid of the The proposal I linked above would attempt to repurpose |
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New York minor civil subdivisions - status and progress | Please don’t get too caught up in the literal word And yes, to some extent, any vaguely nationally or internationally harmonized classification system is going to be “imperialistic and uninformative”, to use your words. This particular set of keywords started in the UK, like the rest of OSM. You have no idea how problematic it is for OpenHistoricalMap, which has to shoehorn precolonial societies and more into OSM’s tagging system! Hence |
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New York minor civil subdivisions - status and progress | If you’re looking at a If we are interested in refining the population-based heuristics to account for density and business activity, first we need to choose a geographic extent independent of official municipal boundaries. This proposal calls for a more rigorous basis for place classification that generalizes nationally without as many fudge factors. It is a result of many difficult debates on the forum and elsewhere. But you don’t need to wait for this to happen to start using |
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OSMgo.org roof:type=gabled | Sorry, that was cryptic of me. F4Map apparently uses |
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OSMgo.org roof:type=gabled |
All I have to say about that is: 🌴 |
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What do you need from a preprocessed MapLibre style editor? |
Yes, in general, you’d want to minimize the number of layers in the stylesheet for performance reasons. For example, if you can draw roads using only one layer, then the style’s size and power usage decrease dramatically and rendering becomes noticeably smoother. The two obstacles are some properties’ lack of support for data-driven styling and some tilesets being overstratified into too many layers. |
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What do you need from a preprocessed MapLibre style editor? |
The Americana project has certainly run with this idea, but it started with some very specific pain points, which code generation or preprocessing helps to mitigate but doesn’t solve completely:
The more we can streamline these steps in static style JSON, the more portable Americana would be, especially to other platforms.
For what it’s worth, this MapLibre proposal would introduce the notion of global state, which effectively also allows for design-time consolidation as a side effect. If it goes in, it could simplify your preprocessor somewhat. It could also reduce the need for maintaining (or generating) separate styles based on color scheme. |
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Tagging For The Renderer | Lately I’ve been taking to calling it “fudging the data”. 😋 A bit less accusatory, but still gets the point across that one is playing games with the data out of expediency. |
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Tagging For The Renderer | The page was briefly renamed to “Lying to the renderer” in order to more clearly limit the admonition to data hacks. But it soon got renamed back to the original title because “lying” sounded too accusatory and most people had gotten used to saying “tagging”. Imagine commenting on a new mapper’s changeset, saying they’re “lying” – not a particularly welcoming message. That said, “Tagging for the renderer” remains a widely misunderstood phrase. The gist of the article is that we need to balance the needs of all kinds of data consumers, current and future. Essentially that means preferring semantically accurate mapping over something more presentational and shortsighted. |
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Please stop guessing about highway/waterway crossings | Good idea. “Ignore this issue” is an accurate description of what happens, but some users may perceive ignoring to be an act of laziness or even malice, whereas it can actually be more neutral than that. “I don’t know” would be similar to the options available in StreetComplete and MapRoulette, two alternative editing environments that prioritize human factors in their workflow designs. “Can’t be determined at this time” isn’t terribly verbose. There’s already a “Not the same x” option on the warning about missing brand tags, where x is an arbitrarily long brand name. If it gets long enough, it simply wraps to the next line. Please open an issue in the iD issue tracker so it can be triaged and given further consideration. Thanks! |
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Please stop guessing about highway/waterway crossings | Thank you for this important message. Validators work with very little context and even less intelligence. This goes for not only iD’s validator but also JOSM’s, Osmose, etc. “Ignore this issue” is absolutely a valid response. If something is so bad that you shouldn’t ignore it, it would be an error and iD would actively block you from saving your changeset. I’ve been concerned for years about the tendency for these issues to become “gamified” because mappers perceive HDYC as their permanent record, as if editcountitis wasn’t enough of a problem. (At this point, I wear my Osmose issue count as a badge of pride.) Aside from possible UX improvements to iD, we should figure out how to identify any bridges or culverts that were created hastily or carelessly. By default, the “Add a bridge” and “Add a tunnel” suggestions create bridges and tunnels of a certain length based on factors such as the tags on the crossing way and the angle of the crossing. When iD introduced this feature, the developers expected the mapper to manually adjust the bridge to match the real-world length. However, this is unlikely to happen if the mapper can’t see the bridge in imagery. Maybe we can reverse-engineer these heuristics in an Overpass or QLever query. |
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To name or not to name ... | I very belatedly noticed this diary post after you recently mentioned it on a forum thread and someone later pinged me. I’m the one who added the entry for Avalon to NSI. Avalon not only develops and owns apartment complexes but also heavily brands everything about them. The monument sign out front is just the start of it. When I briefly lived at an Avalon apartment complex, their then-ubiquitous fleur-de-lis-like logo really came to aggravate me. The only reason this brand goes with |
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Pathology 101 – A primer into a new science | Back in 2008, when the community simultaneously voted on In part,
Anyways, sorry for digressing. As you were saying: the couple married and rode off into the sunset… on a golf cart path. 🤪 |
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Pathology 101 – A primer into a new science | So much has been written about how to distinguish one kind of path from another, but the truth has been staring us in the face: everything is a footway. A set of steps is just a very bumpy footway on an incline. A cycleway is just a footway along which your feet push pedals. A busway is just a footway along which you stand, feet astride for stability, because all the seats are occupied. A motorway is just a footway along which your lead foot slams the gas pedal and never lets up. The only exception is bridleways: you don’t really do much of anything with your feet, other than sticking them in stirrups. And obviously the horse has hooves, not feet. Yet in my country, all of these ways – even the bridleways – are measured in feet. |
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When AI is (not) needed | Based on the Whether an external building dataset comes from computer vision, machine learning classification, LiDAR, or other automated techniques, data consumers tend to prefer OSM data wherever it’s present because we’ve typically paid more individual attention and performed quality control on it. If you use an automated dataset in your product, you need to filter out low-confidence features or else you wind up with an impressive statistic but lots of junk. It’s not just buildings. Every now and then, a navigation software vendor gets the bright idea to detect one-way streets automatically based on whether they have telemetry of people mostly going in one direction along the street but hardly in the other. Great – finally solved the problem of routing people the wrong way down a street! Invariably, they have to back away from this approach, because it turns out that many one-way streets don’t have the traffic volume needed to make a confident prediction about the traffic direction. Instead, they get complaints about having to circle around the entire city just to turn right. This data still makes for a great QA tool with a human in the loop, but it’s only a matter of time before someone sees that QA tool and gets a bright idea… |
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When AI is (not) needed | I’m guessing this is the Microsoft building dataset, which applies computer vision to aerial imagery. Some data consumers like Mapbox and Overture Maps are using this dataset to backfill areas where OSM building coverage is lacking or nonexistent. From their perspective, the increase in coverage in places with fewer OSM mappers probably outweighs individual bloopers like this, and I guess from our perspective, we’d rather not face a bulk automated import of this dataset due to these bloopers. Another thing that commonly occurs is that a building has been demolished, so we’ve deleted the building from OSM. But a data consumer working off outdated aerial imagery can’t distinguish that from a never-before-mapped building, so it restores the building from the Microsoft dataset. Of course, a human mapper could make the same mistake if they happen to be using the same outdated imagery with no local knowledge. To address both cases, I’ve gotten into the habit of retagging buildings as In theory, we could go around mapping |
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Restructure wiki page key:name? | Yes, this page and the main “Names” page could use a thorough rewrite. There are a lot of intentional nuances in the text that matter but need to be organized better in order for readers to come away with what they need. The article uses “primary name” in order to give an idea of when to use |
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Minutely Shortbread tiles | Excited would be an understatement! I know it’s just a demonstration with no guarantees, but it just came in handy for the epic abandoned railway discussion we’re having. It was super simple to take your demo and extend it to demonstrate a mashup of minutely OpenStreetMap tiles and minutely OpenHistoricalMap tiles. There’s nothing quite like a live-updating, interactive map to convince others that it’s more than just talk. |