A few months back in the OSM India community, we were curious to know how much of the trunk network of National Highways has been mapped compared to the official statistics released by the government.

We started off by aggregating all the statistics we could find from various official sources on the road lengths for different types of roads into a common spreadsheet.

Next was to calculate the corresponding length of roads in each state mapped on OSM. To do this, I used the osm-coverage tile reduce processor with added support for Admin-1 regions from natural earth vectors.

All it takes to run this for the Indian subcontinent is:

npm install

node download.js --all

node index.js --area=[56,-12,116,42] > output.json

To generate per highway tag road length in kms for each state in the bbox. The processing should not take more than 5 minutes.

These numbers were used to compare with the official figures and generate a list of states where the national highway coverage needs to be improved.

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As news of the Shenzen mudslide hit, I was curious to look at the map of the area to understand the geography and the potential damage. Not a single news source had a map or a reference to help locate the spot.

It occurred to me a little late that I just had to peek into the OSM history for clues.

The location seems unverified but matches the coordinates mentioned in this piece. For now I have traced more buildings in the industrial park hoping it may be of use to someone helping in the relief work.

Hopefully we’ll have some more sources to help verify the location by tomorrow.

Experimented with a style highlighting footways tagged with footway=sidewalk and footway=crossing

Play with the Pedestrian QA style

The mapping of sidewalks as separate ways seems to be more of an issue in US than in other places. This style of mapping increases visual noise on the map especially if the sidewalk or crossing tags are missing.

Had a lot of fun visiting my friends in the Japanese countryside while on vacation a month ago. Introduced them to OSM and its no surprise what happens next.

Overpass Turbo is one of my favorite OSM data tools - a simple man’s GIS.

Using the wizard, its relatively trivial to make simple queries like river to query for all the rivers from the map view.

Hidden in the cryptic query code editor is support for simple MapCSS based styling of the data.

The subway network in New Delhi (blue) and under construction (red) - View

Also try adding this piece to the query style block to display popups of all the station names

node[railway=station]{ text : name; }

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Picked this up from a talk-ja post by user:Nyampire

Curious to know what happens to issues that users report on the map.

Tweeted: https://twitter.com/planemad/status/665061033283706880

While contributing fixes worldwide to OpenStreetMap 24 hours a day, the data team at Mapbox gets to see beautiful views of our planet on a large scale. We usually spot curiosities of human life and nature that we love to share with others in the team, but given that our earth deserves a wider audience, we’re going to start sharing these on our diaries too on a regular basis.

Feel free to guess what/where on earth:

Shower head

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Japanese version by user:nyampire

The default Bing imagery for Japan is poorly orthorectified throughout the country. Here we see some sections of the Shin-Tomei Expressway where the distortions are very clear.

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Stumbled on the beautiful Multilingual Map Test tool following a comment on pratikyadav’s Hindi map post.

Not sure how Jochen works his magic, but all you give it is a language code and the tool renders a transparent overlay of name labels on the fly.

Seeing a world map in my native language Tamil for the first time in my life

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A Japanese translation of this post is available on osm.org/user/MAPconcierge/diary/36106

Over the last few weeks, the data team at Mapbox have been investigating the unusually large number of unconnected highways in Japan which otherwise looked comprehensively mapped.

Broken highways in Japan. Bigger circles indicate highways of higher classification

Looking into the data threw up quite a few interesting findings:

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While inspecting routing errors using the OSM Inspector unconnected issues, stumbled on this town called Nukus which seemed to have some duplicated data.

JOSM Validator report for the area:

• Errors 6432
• Duplicated ways 1355
• Duplicated nodes 5059
• Duplicated relations 14
• Warnings 10299
• Crossing ways 5748
• Way end near highway 524
• Overlapping highways 265
• Duplicated nodes 192

The changeset which caused this seems to be the case of a large upload gone wrong. Wondering if JOSM should have never allowed such a massive upload without splitting it into chunks.

What a disaster.

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While looking for missing paths to trace using the Strava Routing Errors tool, noticed the heatmap picking up a lot of activity going into one particular office.

On a closer look, turned out to be a tech company by the name Linear Technology (roof logo!).

Here’s a thank you map for all those awesome bikers from there contributing to the open map. Keep biking!

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Not usually do I look back, but this has been a fun path. Its been over 8 years since I accidentally hit the edit button on this interesting project called OpenStreetMap during my student years creating maps of India on Wikipedia.

There’s been some interesting incidents, people and epiphanies on this rather eventful journey, a spicy cocktail of open source, geography and life in India. My contemporary @geohacker and I were somehow sucked into this crazy world in our own ways in different places, our passion driven by this common conviction that being open is right, and that maps can change lives, and be beautiful and inspiring, just like art.

As it were to happen, both of our paths eventually intersect at this rather inspiring bunch of people who call themselves Mapbox. Both our journeys have been different, but there has probably been something in common. To speak our hearts and fighting this addiction with open source maps, we invite you for an open house at Mapbox Bengaluru.

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I have always wanted a map style that can be printed on a single A4 sheet that I can keep in my wallet anytime I need a quick reference for cycling or using the bus across the city. India lacks any maps in public spaces and I rarely carry a phone, so this would be quite handy.

Tried to skin OSM last night with this in mind and I think i’ve got off to a good start. The roads are styled similar to a traffic map to give me an idea of Bengaluru’s complex oneway system. The labels are prioritized for suburbs, neighborhoods and streets.

High res(600dpi) . Global slippy map

Did a test print and pretty happy with the grayscale result. Need to tweak the colors a bit more though to make it more visually appealing.

We have a pretty impressive house for the president compared to your average head of state - a 340 room palace in a 320 acre estate with some amazing gardens, which I had a chance to visit on a sweaty afternoon a few months ago.

The estate was not looking too impressive on the map.

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At Mapbox, we’re continuously updating OpenStreetMap from user feedback - here’s how we go about the process.

Any user of a Mapbox map can flag wrong or missing information via an “Improve this map” link in the bottom right corner of the map. The link leads to a feedback page that allows a user to very quickly say what’s wrong on the map. Alternatively he/she can chose to edit the underlying data - OpenStreetMap - directly. Since we streamlined the feedback form in January we are receiving a much higher volume of end user feedback and we’ve formalized our process of handling this feedback.

Using “Improve this map” on a DuckDuckGo map.

What feedback we receive

The current break down of feedback we receive is roughly as follows:

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After the first mumbai mapping party and 3 days of obsessive editing, i think i can finally say that openstreetmap for mumbai is no longer crappy :)
The offset AND import 4 years back had quite successfully made editing the map for the city tough and confusing with zillions of broken segments and wayward roads all over the place, enough to scare any new person trying to make an edit close the editor in fear.

It took quite a bit of effort to fix things up, moving and joining ways to make it easier to modify later. A lot of unnamed ways have been trashed, now its a lot faster to trace imagery without the disturbance of rogue objects coming in your way.

Its a huge map makeover for this giant city, i'm proud to have done the dirty work :D

Become sowewhat of an addiction of late. I just cant bear to see huge ares of the map empty without detail. Filling it up with nice green forests is so pleasing to the eyes :)

Doing northeast and central India was on my mind for a long time, i finally managed to do it in a marathon 1 hour tracing session.Tracing the forests themselves is not a big deal, by now my eye can quite easily distinguish the green of forests from agricultural areas in the landsat imagery. The pain is in cutting up the huge areas into smaller polygons so that it loads in pats and not one mega 400km long polygon.

Hopefully i wont have to wait long for my forests to show up in the rerendered low zoom tiles.

after four years of being on osm, ive finally touched the mumbai map, and also gotten around to write my first diary entry, something i should have done lot sooner. Ever since the messed up AND data was imported for Mumbai, i knew that fixing it was going to be a huge pain, and it is.

Although ive been editing whichever city ive been travelling to, ive not gone anywhere near the mumbai osm map for the fear of getting entangled into the huge cleanup process. unfortunately the existing data seemed to have put off anyone else from editing too, and has remained just as it was for the past three years.

Its about time somebody did the dirty work. Been editing the whole day, trying to fix the arterial corridors like the national highways and the wester/eastern express highways, and also add the railway lines. Also got trigger happy with the delete button on unnamed AND roads that crossed my path, ive figured its not of much use and only ends up confusing everyone. hopefully this should serve as a good reference point for others.