I found this interesting article (in French) from a famous online newspaper (lemonde.fr) about a high mountains range, called “Tumuc-Humac”, which was supposed to be found between south of the French Guiana and north of Brazil. The article explains that the high mountains do not exist. It’s a myth, beginning in 1758 when a Spanish expedition mentionned a mountain called “Tumunucuraque” for the first time… in the today’s Venezuela ! But any way, many other expedition went to this region, between French Guiana and Brazil, searching the high mountains, unknown by the local tribes, but possibly to find the famous Eldorado city. This region was a blank map for a long time, being difficult to access (no navigable rivers). At the end of the 19th c., two French explorers separatly validated the mountains range but we know today that their reports were over-exaggerating the high mountains which are in reality only small hills or “inselbergs” (or “monadnock”) (btw, one of the explorer was killed by a local tribe, so the mapping party wasn’t easy anyway). But the myth of the “Tumuc-Humac” mountains has continued and the name of the mountains range can be found in many maps. And today, Brazil has named a national park “Tumucumaque”. But in the last half century, historians and geographers shattered the myth of a high mountains range and their discovery story.
And what about OSM ? When we search the name “Tumuc-Humac”, we find one street in the French Guiana capital. No mountains between French Guiana and Brazil in OSM. Not a surprise since the area is almost blank, the region is still very wild and difficult to access, a funny location for a mapping party.
But OSM “search” returns also geonames with one “Tumuc-Humac Mountains” ! Surprisingly, wikipedia provides an article about the Tumuk Humak Mountains but doesn’t say anything about the story and the myth about the high mountains range :

… Zobrazit celý záznam

After reading this blog post: https://blog.amigocloud.com/sub-meter-data-collection-with-an-iphone-into-openstreetmap/

I checked one of the created ways done after a survey with centimeter accuracy: osm.org/way/329799637

Unsurprisingly, all surveyed nodes have been imported in OSM. But OSM doesn’t need a node every 30 centimeters, even not every meter if the angle is null.

Someone to contact Ragi Burhum, AmigoCloud CEO, to explain that JOSM is also providing a “simplify way” function ?

Very funny this conversation on twitter:

https://twitter.com/reizkultur/status/565147019023753216

OrdnanceSurvey, like the IGN in France, despises OSM amateur cartographs but is calling for amateur (and free) photographers to illustrate their new printed maps … “Do what we say, not what we do”

Here an interesting blog post from Jordi Inglada/CESBIO about the incoming imagery from the ESA/EU-Copernicus satellites Sentinel-2 (or here) which will be published with an open license compatible for OSM tracing. The program is designated for global land-cover mapping (4 bands at 10 m resolution).
Our challenge will be to retrieve this data in a usable form for us (e.g. georeferenced, rectified and cloudless, TMS served). Also Jordi Inglada says one word about open source softwares from CNES which could be used to convert pixels into landuse polygons.
As quoted from his blog: “This means that we have free data and free tools. Therefore, the complete pipeline is available for projects like OSM. OSM contributors could start right now getting familiar with these data and these tools.”

(from Sébastien Dinot talk-fr ML post)

Express your opinion about the relation “type=person” here: osm.wiki/Proposed_features/Relation:person#Voting
This is also questioning the limits of the project (what has to go into OSM and what not)

Je viens de tomber sur un article du journaldunet.com qui mentionne OSM (et même wikipedia) dans une liste de projets de type crowd-sourcing (collaboratifs de masse) suivi d’une dénonciation des supposées dérives qu’ils engendrent.

Il y aurait “un vent de révolte” parmi les contributeurs qui se plaignent de voir leur travail bénévol récupéré par des entreprises commerciales. Les exemples cités comme imdb ou Oculus tapent juste et justifient l’article (il aurait pu aussi mentionner CDDB comme ancêtre de ce genre d’arnaque).

Mais il ne faut pas mettre tous les projets collaboratifs dans le même sac ! Lorsque cette personne écrit “Même de manière indirecte, les contributions sont systématiquement récupérées puis monétisées au seul profit des plate-formes.”, ça n’est pas possible avec OSM pour une raison très simple : la license OdBL ne permet pas sa transformation en license fermée (avec appropriation des données), les contributions appartiennent toujours à leurs auteurs et la clause “SA” ou “Share Alike” (“partage à l’identique” en bon français) empêche qu’une entreprise privée s’empare des données OSM et les améliore pour son seul profit (pour être plus exact, ils ne sont pas obligés de verser leurs améliorations dans OSM directement mais de mettre ces améliorations à disposition du public sous la même license - à charge ensuite à quiconque de les reverser dans OSM s’il le souhaite). C’est aussi grâce à cette clause que les usages commerciaux d’OSM ne sont jamais une menace pour les contributeurs puisque n’importe qui peut refaire la même chose avec un modèle ouvert et gratuit.

… Zobrazit celý záznam

It seems the Germans like duplicate tags since the country address is easy to deduce from the country polygon. It could be justified on edge cases like “near the borders” or outside the polygon but not generalized, I don’t know how this community has reached such senseless decision- Probably from some data consumers too lazy to use some complex queries in a spatial db…. Sad that the majority of contributors have now to assume this bad idea. I like how this community is sometimes pushing for more standardisation/consistency like for postcode polygons or speed limits but here I cannot follow. By chance, in my country, we have a general consensus to avoid unnecessary duplicates.

Tomorrow, osm-fr local chapter spokesperson Gael Musquet (aka RatzillaS) is invited to a lunch meeting with François Hollande, president of France to talk about modernising the state (among other participants like entrepreneurs and opendata players)

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-fr/2014-April/067782.html

Misery village in France needs more contributors:

osm.org/relation/3359691#map=14/49.8485/2.8911

It was said in a previous “diary” entry that OSM users are not a major issue “because nobody will actually see a user page for a user that doesn’t do anything unless they actually go hunting for it for some reason” (from here).
But this is an example of spam user : osm.org/user/Voyancegratuiteimmediate

which is referenced multiple times from Facebook or Twitter (e.g. https://twitter.com/DabiaRamani)

The aim is probably to increase G. ranking. The same site is referenced in dozen different sites with the same kind of weakness. If it’s not harming OSM, this miethod is artificially increasing the amount of registred users and will probably increase in the future if we do nothing.

Just found the Mapbox showcase here: https://www.mapbox.com/showcase/

Pretty nice maps.

But in his help pages, Mapbox is explaining that if someone uses one or more of the Streets, Buildings, Areas, Water, and Land layers available through Mapbox.com you are required to attribute OpenStreetMap and its contributors.

Now, I would start a new game : go to the Mapbox showcase, count how many of the “Streets”, “Buildings”, “Areas”, “Water” and “Land” layers are visible without the OSM attribution.

Encore un exemple de site qui ne respecte pas la license OSM:

http://www.mennucci2014.fr/la_carte_du_nouveau_cap

La carte de fond provient de Mapbox. A la décharge du/des webdesigner, l’obligation de mettre OSM dans les “attributions” n’est visiblement pas une priorité chez Mapbox. Exemple de ce qu’on trouve dans la page d’aide:
https://www.mapbox.com/help/attribution/

“Note that if you use one or more of the Streets, Buildings, Areas, Water, and Land layers available through Mapbox.com you are required to attribute OpenStreetMap and its contributors.”

Utiliser des données libres, c’est bien. Le signaler en indiquant la provenance, ce qui nous fait un peu de publicité au passage, c’est encore mieux.
OSM, c’est gratuit et les contraintes exigées en retour sont quand même bien faibles. On veut juste un peu de reconnaissance et faire connaitre le projet pour qu’il continue d’exister dans le futur.

Mid-February, I sent a message to the main OSM mailing list reporting someone mapping the floods in UK 5 weeks ago.

Since few weeks, flood waters have subsided and the media frenzy have moved somewhere else. But the “natural=water” polygon in OSM is still there. Even if it is removed now (and it will probably after this blog post), how long time such transient data remains in OSM copies around the world either on statc maps or GPS devices or data dumps ?

Again, a good reason to reject all transient events in OSM, no ?

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/27/wild-beavers-england-devon-river

… Zobrazit celý záznam

In this article,
http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/2014/01/22/elections-europeennes-allemagne-contrecoups-immigration_n_4637378.html?1390379490
you find at bottom a serie of 19 images illustrating the text, as usual in this online newspaper. But the first one, although coming from the OpenStreetMap GPX dump, is attributed “Flickr:Eric Fischer”.
Only if you click on “Eric Fischer”, you find the original picture where OSM is mentionned: http://www.flickr.com/photos/24431382@N03/8033247558

What is the license of the GPX dump, cc-by-sa2.0 ? Odbl ? Is it legal to create, use and publish pictures without the original attribution ?
Why this wiki page says nothing about the license: osm.wiki/Planet.gpx

Durant mes vérifications sur le 13e arrondissement, je suis tombé sur une rue absente d’OSM, merci le cadastre (un phénomène devenu exceptionnel tant OSM est complet sur Paris) : la “Rue Francis de Miomandre” qui se trouverait entre le stade Charléty et le cimetière de Gentilly. Après une petite recherche, cette rue (sans habitations) est encore utilisée pour localiser une fourrière, la préfourrière Charlety qui se définie elle-même comme “étant à l’angle de la rue Thomire et de la rue Francis de Miomandre” ! Une préfourrière que j’ai taggué en passant avec “amenity=vehicle_impound” (peu usité) au lieu du trompeur “amenity=parking” qu’on trouvait précédemment.

Cette rue existe encore et passe bien entre le cimetière et le stade mais son accès est limité aux piétons et vélos: osm.org/way/256239898

Le stade Charlety manque encore cruellement de détails. Les accès, mais surtout les barrières et murs d’enceintes sont absents. Les voies de service intérieurs sont sans doute à revoir. Amis du foot, bon mapping !

If you hear “20 rue du cirque, Paris” in the news, this adress is of course already in OpenStreetMap :)

osm.org/node/842161520#map=19/48.87113/2.31556

Such user account: osm.org/user/2%20man%20tents

is created for google ranking. I’ve seen similars in the wiki and forum. What is the part of real user accounts in OSM. How can we believe the OSM stats about registered users ?

To avoid such things, one idea could be to disallow user’s profile description until a first edit is done in OSM db (or, at least, forbid external URL’s)

My 2 cents

Seen on this openstreetmap.fr blog, the main open data portal from French administrations collecting all public datasets data.gouv.fr includes now 11 datasets extracted from OSM. These extracts are performed either by the French local chapter team openstreetmap.fr or by various local public administrations.