When writing this I am on the airport waiting to board my flight to Buenos Aires where I will take the Boquebus to Uruguay, where a job awaits me in Nueva Palmira. The town of Nueva Palmira have no POIs mapped as far as I could see, so there will for sure be added a hotel and maybe some restaurants, banks, and whatever I manages during my off hours. I still do not know for how long I will stay there.

I have during the last couple of weeks been testing routing integrity in OSM, mainly in Brazil, with both short distance routing and long distance routing.

I download the maps from Garmin.Openstreetmap.Nl, and install them into my BaseCamp for Mac.

Except for a few cities that are notoriously difficult to route, short distance routing goes easily, while long distance routings was somewhat trickier. After moving around with the routing modes I created 4 different modes I use. Shortest and Fastest for short distance routing, and No Toll and OSM Test for long distance.

After testing with versions 01-10-2014 and 30-10-2014 I had serious problems getting out of Belo Horizonte/MG in directions east and northeast, all routing from BH to state capitals between (and including) Vitoria and Fortaleza went via Rio de Janeiro (actually Magé/RJ). Just now got the latest map downloaded (03-12-2014) and it seems like BH have been fixed, though I am getting a few other errors. It is too early to say yet if that is based on bad data or something else.

After staying on various vessels moored alongside Caix de Paul, Peiú Terminal, Vila Velha, I discovered that there is some form of unregulated ferry service from a point near Caix de Paul over to Vitória. This service is unofficial, unregulated, and most likely illegal.

The service is operated with two or three wooden row boats, bringing up to 6 passengers for each passage. From the side of Vila Velha there is some form of passageway or footway leading to the boarding point, while I believe that on Vitória side the access is with a vertical stepladder leading from a public sidewalk/walkway down to the water. It have just been works on extending a public pier in that area, and I am unsure of where the actual boarding point is, and how to get access to the boats.

I am onboard FPSO Brasil. What does this have to do with mapping? Actually not much, really. I have internet access, but various services is blocked, so I cannot do any mapping or chat with mappers, so I am kind of stuck here. But if we are going to be “mappy” about this, than actually I can turn this into something of a geospatial font. The project I am working on is to remove FPSO Brasil from its moorings (hopefully without dropping the mooring lines ontop of the wrack of P36. What do I gain in terms of mapping from this?

… See full entry

With the descent addition of IBGE layers in JOSM, and the improvement in Bing imagery, as well as improved quality of MapBox Satellite imagery, the speed of tracing have increased.

By using the layer “IBGE Mapa de Setores Urbanos” I quickly can fill in street names as I trace. The layer is somewhat misaligned, and limited only to urban areas, but recognising the shape of streets close is a good way of combining the names onto the right street. A few places additional information, such as schools, churches, health stations, etc are noted on the map. I increase this information as much as possible.

By using the layer “IBGE Mapa de Setores Rurais” I get information such as main road nomination (ref-tag) on rural roads, names on rivers, streams, and other waterbodies, important industries, names of villages and fazendas (ranches), and some other landscape features. Many peaks are named and heights noted. This layer is almost perfectly aligned, but tracings should still be done from Bing or similar. Areas where three-cover makes it difficult to identify the trace of roads and rivers I switch back between this layer and the satellite layer in use.

MapBox Satellite have improved their coverage worldwide, and in some places their images are of newer date and better resolution than Bing. There are still large areas missing Bing (some small parts of it have MapBox coverage), but these areas are slowly shrinking, and hopefully we get to trace all of Brazil soon.

I still have the file with IBGE addresses, though with the addition of the two IBGE layers, this archive is almost not needed. I still have it at hand in order to add street names in rural areas, where I don’t get satisfactory information from the other sources.

… See full entry

There have been a lot of changes to my life since last post. I have changed job, my new job will give me quite some traveling around, mostly in Brazil, but might also be some travels abroad. Much of this travel will be with hired drivers (taxi, VIP service, etc), mainly between communication hubs and ports. Since I had my new GPS last July I have brought it with me, partly to test the data quality where I travel (I have OSM maps installed, latest update from garmin.openstreetmap.nl ), partly to gather tracks, along with recording POIs with Go Map!!

Further I played around with Java/Eclipse, and got some basic Java into my fingers, I hope I can get something useful out of this soon (might or might not be OSM related)

By getting myself a Macbook Pro computer I extended this to Xcode (the platform for iOS (iPad/iPhone) apps), and will try to make some useful/interesting apps for these platforms - might be a mapping tool, might be a navigation tool, might be a game

If anybody have some GIT/SVN repositories for any Java/ObjC/Xcode OSM related projects, let me know, so I can be connected with it, so much interesting to learn within these fields.

We have just changed our car, the new vehicle is a Chevrolet Cruze, which is the new family car, that will bring us around when visiting people, going on holidays etc. The car came with a multimedia/navigation system, which I can use to compare maps when traveling (against my GPS unit)

We have plans of getting another car, maybe a Chevrolet Montana, a pickup that will be used mostly for work related activities (and some outdoor activities as well)

My wife have recently been on a holiday in Europe, and one of the things she brought back was a Garmin Nüvi 50 Car Navigation System (with preinstalled maps of western Europe with speed camera information). Western Europe map is close to useless for me, so I quickly dived into the fountain of wisdom called the OpenStreetMap wiki, as well with other GPS and Garmin sources

After trying a bit different sources, copying maps in different formats to different places on my GPS I found the following to work:

• Go to Garmin Dashboard WebResource
• Install the plugin they suggest
• Go to garmin.openstreetmap.nl
• Select the map regions of your interest, along with stylesheet, etc, and generate
• Download the gmapsupp.img file, zipped
• Unpack it to Garmin Device root.System\ folder
• Replace your gmapsupp.img over the existing gmapprom.img

I liked the interface of garmin.openstreetmap.nl, the only thing that wasn’t completely clear to me was source age (are they generated from minutely updates? daily updates? weekly updates?

I am now just looking for an opertunity to take my GPS for a spin to see how good the maps are. AND: When I see something wrong on the GPS, I can take up my iPhone or iPad and correct it on the fly with Go Map!!, that way next time I download a map, it’s already corrected.

Next step will be to find out how I get POI displayed in a zane way on my Garmin Nüvi 50 device

I am running out of motivation of doing any organized mapping. Partly because things I have wanted to do is coming to an end (I have reached the bottom of the stack of available data from the Brazilian hydrographic, and have traced most of the area surrounding Guarapari, and added most street names according to IBGE in the vicinity of Guarapari, etc.) Also it slows down my work with the INT-1 tags, as I am getting to a point where high technical knowledge of Inkscape and defining how much additional data should be availlable in the tagging preset, etc. Also while I am onboard it is limited how much I can test features with Go Map!! as the wireless data connection have limited bandwidth, divided by too many users,

The result have been that the last few weeks I have done random tracings, both Bing, and IBGE addresses, around Espírito Santo, mostly in the area of Grande Vitoria, but also some random edits further out. Closer to Grande Vitoria I have also worked my way around some landuse and natural landcover, getting woods and agricultural land as well as a little industry on the map. I hope that the increase in colours on the map can help recruiting more people to the project, and getting even more colour on.

Further, the more street names that get onto the map, the better routing works.

Also the more complete the map is with seamarks, the more value it gets as an alternative to commercial navigational maps for the hobby navigator. I know OpenSeaMap is actively working improving their interfaces and additional data layers such as harbour and marina guides, depth sounding database, etc. Looking forward to seeing the new base layer with more maritime friendly colours.

Yeah, and my possition is a little approximate, I am currently on vessel waiting in line to take fuel at a tanker moored in the southern Campos Basin, at Petrobras Tanker Mooring no 6 (bla bla bla yeah I know safety bla bla bla accident waiting to happen bla bla bla)

I am back at work, that means I will be able to do some more focused work.

The beta testing of an iOS editor (working name was OSMiOS, final name became Go Map!!) have allowed me to do random editing on lazy hours. As Go Map!! Is getting closer to official release (currently awaiting pre-release review by AppStore), and significant improvements done in the usavility of the app, I believe I can in near future have close to daily contribution to the project.

For the upcoming weeks I plan to continue my seamark importation, will complete coastal seamarks, and hopefully do a good impact on inland seamarks. Parallel with this I will improve my INT-1 tagging preset, mappaint style, and icon library, as well as some other preparations for other imports (still lot of work with IBGE Census addresses of Espírito Santo)

I will also if time permits, look at some documentation, such as continuing translation of Key/Tag wikipages to Portuguese, updating status on wikipages for areas I work, add more Brazilian information to SkipperGuide.com

There are preparations under way at OpenSeaMap.org to get a more nautical base map rolling, I am taking part in that process (this far mainly via mailing list, but also have submitted a MapCSS file for test purposes), I will continue on that process, either purely as a professional advisor, or more actively with edits to the style sheet.

After leaving a comment in another diary entry here, I was contacted by the developer of OSMiOS, a new, and after a quick examination of features, probably the most complete OSM editor for iPhone and iPad.

I was invited as beta tester and promptly installed the necessary gadgets and the app. A first glance on it shows me that it is as close to a JOSM replacement on any mobile device I have used. The features I have missed in Mapzen POI collector and PushPin is included, at least as far as the developer have been able to date, and it also allows for bulk upload of changes (rather than in place of uploading each change on the fly, this editor actually work offline, just like the more complete editors we all are familiar with)

Another feature that looks promessing is that it allows for downloading Bing aerials for offline editing. That will be of good help when preparing for edits on trips where I know mobile coverage will be limited (see previous post). The only obstacle it doesn’t overcome yet is where it is lack of Bing coverage.

Also, the tag presets is probably the most complete with regards of predefined presets, and if the tag you are looking for is still missing, there is an “all tags” tab that allows you to manually edit, add, and remove any tag, even those unknown to presets.

After less than one day testing, I am very much satisfied with the program, I have sent one feedback with minor topics to the developer, and as it looks now, this will soon be the closest to JOSM you’ll get on any mobile device

I have known for about a week that my main employer wanted to change my work schedule, but because of contract of the vessel I worked on I didn’t expect to get home at all until February.

That suddenly changed, my vessel went alongside in Rio de Janeiro late Friday night, but this close to christmas air fares was impossible to get, resulting in VIP transport, 9 hour drive along BR-101, from Rio de Janeiro to Guarapari.

I used the opertunity to do a stress test of my new iPad/PushPin.

Upon departure from Triunfo terminal, near Pier Maua, and the access to the bridge Rio-Niteroi, my iPad was close to fully charged. I had forgotten the car charging plug at home, or rather left it with my wife as we have only one, I had no chance to charge my iPad during the trip.

I added features along the highway as I observed them, using the download feature to ensure I did not create duplicates.

I probably got half of the gas station along the stretch Niteroi - Casimiro de Abreu (shortly after there phone coverage is lacking, and when phone returns quickly bing coverage for support is missing)

I also got a few features on entry to Campos, but there also the battery died.

Conclision is that with current situation I can manage the stretch Rio-Macae or home-Macae without recharging. Getting another car charging plug will allow me a longer stretch.

For those not very up with Brazilian geography, Rio - Campos (the life of my battery) is about 600km, Rio - Macae and home-Macae is both roughly 400km (one slightly more than the other, difference less than 100km)

During the last months I have been spoiling myself a little. I have upgraded my old iPad (first generation) wi-fi 16GB to a new iPad (fourth generation) wi-fi celular 32GB. That means I can access net on travels without the need of activating my cell phone as access point, so it opened some more opertunities to gather data.

I therefor did a heavy sort out of the programs I had on my old iPad, installing the ones I used a lot, the ones I would need for my job, and a few ones for fun.

When I tried to reinstall Mapzen POI collector, which I use on my android phone, and used a little from my old pad I could not get it installed (didn’t find it in App Store), and looking for the other I had (OpenPOI), couldn’t find that one neither, I ended up finding PushPin. I was happy to see that it used Bing! Images instead of Google (openPOI used google), and could swap to OSM Mapnik, also that it allowed to fetch existing POIs just like Mapzen POI collector, and with the latest update also allowed to edit POI areas (not limited to nodes) The only drawback with PushPin is that every edit comes as a separate changeset. I would love to see it keeping edits in same changeset as long as the changeset still is open, and allow me to customize comment field in the changesets.

The way PushPin get my GPS possition allows for me to quickly add POI’s as we are driving (of course as long as I am the passenger) makes it possible for me to collect along the route, and not only where I stop.

What is missing now is a tool to pick up roads to add names and ref (could be included in next update of PushPin?) How I do this now is to edit the address in a POI along that road and than try to remember it so I can go back to the same place next time I open JOSM and correct the road data. This makes for delays, forgetting to correct all roads, missing important data, etc.

… See full entry

I am glad to announce that I have been accepted as a team member in OpenSeaMap’s attempt in making a more nautical friendly base map. We are still just starting the process, but at least it is a start.

The team at the moment is myself, Dominik, who does the testing with mod_tile, and Yohan, who for some time have been developing a houseboating site.

The three of us have the common goal of making a base map where typical land features are toned down, or maybe even completely neglected, in favour of enhancing the viewability of features that have an importance on nautical navigation.

I will use my place on the team to get the base layer as much influenced on INT-1 symbols as possible, though we might do some priorities on the side of INT-1.

Since we are just about to start off, it is still too early to say anything about actual results yet. Also, it has to be noted that there are a faction within OpenSeaMap that want a combined nautical and land map. My message to them is to continue to use the Mapnik base map, but as mentioned, we are too early in the process to know what will be the outcome of this yet.

As a result of my reversed engineering of OpenSeaMap data model, I have gotten a lot further on both my tagging preset and my INT 1 documentation. I might need to do a cleanup in the tagging preset shortly, but at the moment, I’ll focus on adding all the correct keys and values to the preset.

Next step on the preset will be to clean up the preset, getting the keys in logical order, with the values of combo and multiselect sorted in a logical manner (most used on top, the rest in alphabetical order?)

Some might have noticed that I create documentation pages for various keys and values as I continue on the documentation. That is because there are already usages of most of these, some times several thousands, and they are part of complicated schematics. I will try to make this as documented as possible. I hope that the team behind OpenSeaMap can go in and document some as well, that can help me go in the right direction both on the tagging preset and on the wiki documentation.

It sounds strange, and should not have been necessary, but since the people behind OpenSeaMap havn’t been much of a help of documenting their data model (a few scattered wiki pages with not much readable structure is not documenting). The result have been that I have looked through the tools they have provided (Harbor tagging preset for JOSM and OpenSeaMap Editor plugin also for JOSM), which have given me something more useful to work with, and than started to search for common values with taginfo. The result have been that I have managed to structure their data much better. Things I tag with my reverse engineered data model actually start showing up on OpenSeaMap, something that proves that I am getting closer to the data model.

There are still a lot of things that I cannot get around, though it might be missing from their data model altogether as well. Taginfo doesn’t return to me commonly used combination to these tags, as they still havn’t enough occurances in the database. That means it is hard to know how to distinguish different types of restricted areas from each other, for example.

Another thing I am wondering about is how to get notes on objects that can show up in separate information boxes depending on map presentation. At the moment I am using note=

My JOSM preset and MapCSS for INT-1 will be updated when I get a chance, probably in a months time (they have been heavily edited compared with the ones on my web page).

Catchy title?

User wille have made a poster [1] which gives an introduction into how to contribute to OpenStreetMap in a few easy steps. The one finished (actually he is still polishing on it on inputs from the Brazilian mailing list) product is in Portuguese, but he have an .svg source where the text easilly can be translated to other languages. I think this is a good idea, and such posters can be set up on collages where “tech-savy” people might study.

The project of cleaning up IBGE imported highways are proceeding with great speed. Many from the Brazilian community as well as other people intersted in helping are daily doing improvements, not only to the roads in question, but also to the surrounding areas. See my previous post if you are interested in that project.

Today I also added some port details near Rio Grande, where I might need to visit a ship yard in the near future. The details I focused on was to put enough information on the map that I might be able to route to it with OsmAnd. I hope it is included in the map befire I actually need to go there, OsmAnd doesn’t update their maps too often.

Looking around the map today I noticed brownish yellow spots around several places in Espírito Santo. Did I really add that many farmland patches? I think I might have had some help. Are people starting to map landuse? I see that at least one of the foreigners helping tagging are adding landuse=residential so we are starting to add color to the map. I wonder if IBGE might have some sources that can speed this process? Europe have come a long way with Corine landuse data, and the US with some (TIGER?) data, why not look into doing some imports in Brazil as well?

I am starting to realize the ironic in the offshore industry. A ship equiped with an expensive remotely operated vehicle (ROV) install a two dollar toilet brush in one of its arms to clean a petrolium well hub at almost 2000 meter water depth.

… See full entry

Some years ago, I think it was in early 2009, user Claudomiro imported IBGE highway data under PD license. At that time the Brazilian map was mostly blank, and except for a few, relatively small geographical areas, no high resolution imagry available. The import was welcome by the Brazilian community as it helped connect the dots (the areas with highres and/or active mappers) into one grid.

Now, in 2012, a large portion of Brazil is covered by high res images from Bing, more detailed imports have been done, the community have grown, data quallity in general is getting better.

With this improved data it has been noted that the IBGE imported data is of very low resolution, and some places deviates from the actual path by quite a large distance, users have at random basis corrected these paths until resently, when another user, Vitor Sessak (vitor1234) took the initiative to create an extract with the unaltered nodes of Claudomiro’s import [1], and by an idea spurred by me we have started a (Re)Mapaton in order to get these last roads aligned as best we can.

Of corse I started out in Northern Espírito Santo where Bing coverage is quite good (some holes still missing though), and some alignment already done by GPS and other sources. Litoral South Espírito Santo is already fully aligned. The Caparaó region of Espírito Santo will be tricky to align as highres imagry is almost completely missing, and few gps tracks available.

For other states I havn’t turned my attention yet, but seeing on the archive [1] I see that Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and Goias among other have a lot of non-aligned data.

If there is anybody else out there wanting to take part in our IBGE (Re)Mapaton, download the mentioned file, open it as a background layer in your favourite editor (I use JOSM for this), browse to an area with non-edited points and compare it with Bing, readjust the road if nobody else already have done it and upload your changes.

… See full entry

Its getting towards the end of my “offline” period, where I focus my attention on familly, and less on OpenStreetMap. I have during these few weeks witnessed the redaction bot (not many changes in my area), as well as been able to add a few objects through Mapzen POI collector (from my cell phone) and OpenPOI (from my iPad). The objects added is in Macae, Rio de Janeiro and Guarapari.

I also got a chance to try out routing with OsmAnd, and start to get results. Pedestrian routing worked fine in Rio de Janeiro, except that it didn’t route me diagonally through squares, but along their edges. Don’t know if this is a tagging or routing issue.

I will also familiarize myself with the access to some ship yards and other maritime structures, I was at Camorim yard and base on Sunday and Monday, and will in a few hours go to UTC yard, which will be introduced to the map during the following weeks.

Note: every time I sleep at a new hotel, or ieat at a new restaurant I try to add it to the map, though some might slip. Sometimes I add hotels and restaurants close to where I am, such as when I ate at Makoto restaurant, close to Praç XV, Rio de Janeiro, I also added two other restaurants next to it.

My work period comes to an end, that means no more edit frenzies for some weeks as I have to spend time with my family.

For people reading here, and as a reminder for me for August/September:

1. License Change Status around Vitória, ES, Brazil - Need to look into replacing a few nodes and roads. Roughly 20 objects need to be created.

2. License Change Status around Cachoeira de Itapemirim, ES, Brazil One object affected, only the addition of one node in a road, I think we can survive if that node is deleted.

3. Loads of Bing! coverage. Only the western most part of the south of Espírito Santo that really is in lack of coverage, though there are some holes and gaps around. Quite some cloud cover a few places, but anyway, some is better than none.

4. Continue aligning my collection of Brazilian Hydrographic Maps, and maybe prepare for starting to trace this data.

5. For the last few days my work have been focused on new Bing coverage, even though I have the source file for the Brazilian 2010 Census address data still laying around. More fun in tracing new roads than looking through the census data for street names. Though I can always fall back to that from time to time. Would probably be easier if I could arrange a paint style displaying street name and house number in each point.

6. My INT-1 project are slowly progressing.

Since I knew I would have problems accessing internet for a few days I downloaded all boundaries in Minas Gerais and did a little tidying on the border relations (created micro and meso region borders mainly), I discovered that there is a gap in the border between Ouro Preto and Mariana. Downloading the area with the gap, and there is certainly a gap, nothing connects or almost connects the two sides of the gaping boundary.

Somebody with access to the source data that can help fill in the gap?

The bad thing about editing on the map before going to work is that I forget the time. I have to exit JOSM and unplug my hard drive as I use a public computer. If I have edited a too large area or starts the upload too late I risk that I have to either come too late to work or leave my hard drive connected to the public computer. Thankfully we are limited to only 20 people accessing those public computers, but still, I have some private stuff on that drive….

After the stunt with border relations in Rio de Janeiro state, I am now back on IBGE Census data for Espirito Santo, hoping to complete those parts of Presidente Kennedy that is not covered by clouds. I think I have one or two more days to do that. The question will than be if I continue with Itapemirim or Mimisa do Sul, but I’ll probably decide on that first edit session after completing Presidente Kennedy. Municipalities of Marataizes and Vitoria had no valuable census data to import, and there are some municipalities not covered by Bing, I need to correlate the census data to Bing, or other background data to get it on the map, a slow process.

I filtered some garbage from the census data set today, removed all addresses consisting of only “RUA PRINCIPAL”, “AVENIDA PRINCIPAL” or “ESTRADA PRINCIPAL” (main road). Keeping only data that have a streetname that make sense reduces the time editing alot.