The republic of Molossia is a real nation that is not on the map,

No it isn’t.

can we add it?

It’s already there, added as what it is - a tourist attraction.

It’s great that you’re experimenting with creating your own local, region-specific, map to show local, region-specific, map features!

The “challenge” with the various vector tile approaches is that (a) there are lots of them and (b) none of them are in the same state of maturity as the software stack that is behind the tiles that you see on OSM’s “standard” style. People are doing lots of excellent work here (in no particular order see e.g. here, here and here) but none of the open ones are as feature-rich, flexible, supported and well-documented yet as e.g. osm2pgsql / mapnik / renderd / mod_tile / apache yet. If you’re not worried about vendor lock-in then you have lots of other options too, limited only by your wallet.

If you’re happy to create the same sort of map that you see as the “standard” style at osm.org what you need to do is well documented. If you’d like to change that style to show other things there’s help showing how to do that as well.

In terms of the cost of running a server, one (in Europe) for Britain and Ireland currently costs me around €20 a month. Indonesia in OSM is a bit smaller than that, so you might get away with €16 a month or so. What I don’t know is if a server in Europe is too far away to be useful, or if there are equivalent providers at a similar cost more local to you.

I’ve tidied that up in osm.org/changeset/125631688 .

Thanks - that does need sorting out (see for example https://nrenner.github.io/achavi/?changeset=105705155 ). I’ll raise a DWG ticket for it and have a look.

Alas, no review will be possible without a bit more information. The area is somewhere around here, but looking around there for “large buildings where there should be only forest” is much harder without an actual link.

Sometimes new mappers working on HOT projects aren’t as supervised as they should be, and sometimes they add complete rubbish (perhaps “bored georgraphy students” forced to add something to OSM for a school project).

In situations like that I’d suggest commenting on the changesets explaining that OSM is a real map of real places, not somewhere to draw pretend buildings. If that has no effect (and it might not, if they’ve moved on from that geography class) then everything they’ve added will need to be reviewed (and perhaps what their friends on the same class have added too).

If you want help with this please email OSM’s Data Working Group at data@openstreetmap.org .

Best Regards, Andy (from the DWG)

Thanks for tidying these up!

I had a look at these in UK and Ireland a while ago (using values from https://taginfo.geofabrik.de/europe/britain-and-ireland/keys/stile#values )

These (at least) are definitely valid distinct values:

stepover	17,877	73.78%	
squeezer	4,489	18.53%	
ladder		1,060	4.37%	
ramblers_gate	13	0.05%

Other names for those 4 seem to be:

wall		554	2.29%	Peak District and North Yorkshire Moors, probably stepover
fence		42	0.17%	Spread out in England, including 9278377616 near Leeds
gate		37	0.15%	lots west of Bradford by one mapper, probably gate
hipster		34	0.14%	lots west of Bradford, probably squeezer
steps		24	0.10%	lots west of Bradford, probably stepover
stone␣steps	8	0.03%	west of Bradford, probably stepover (with material=stone)
pinchpoint	7	0.03%	Southern England, probably squeezer

Typos and others:

g		9	0.04%	typo for gate by one mapper?  Grassington, Hathersage, Leyburn.
yes		9	0.04%	Southern England, sometimes on gate/stile combinations.
rail		4	0.02%	Cheshire, by one mapper

Personally I think I’ve mapped osm.wiki/Talk:Tag:barrier%3Dstile#stile=insulated_section/_hose_etc as gates rather than stiles - and I’ve tended to not map them if they’re obviously temporary / movable (often the case for cattle, less so for horses).

I’m not sure I understand “it is painful for other mappers to connect their own adjacent ways to these nodes”? I thought that in most editors it was possible to easily add something following another way?

Also, I don’t think that [the one example that I looked at] was particularly overnoded - Had I been tracing something around osm.org/node/8114873377 , I might have used more, rather than fewer, nodes.

Andy (not in any way connected to Apple’s Data Team)

If you mean “when I browse the map somewhere such as osm.org/#map=6/30.126/110.149 I can’t read the placenames, because I don’t understand Chines script”, may I suggest that you try one of the 2 map styles of the 6 (such as osm.org/#map=6/30.126/110.149&layers=C ) which also include English names?

If you mean something else, you’ll need to explain in a bit more detail…

get-external-data.py does offer the user feedback on what it’s doing.

No - it really doesn’t. I’ve just sat watching it for 10 minutes between “INFO:root:Checking table water_polygons” and “INFO:root: Download complete (810110834 bytes)”. There were no on-screen updates, no progress bar. The previous version of the script made curl’s progress bar visible on-screen.

One other question - what operating systems are supported (expecially with regard to the fonts change) and which have explicitly been tested?

Does the script provide reasonable feedback to the user about how far through the process it is, and in the event of an error does it provide reasonable feedback to the user about what has gone wrong and how to fix it?

The reason that I’m asking is that I (or someone) will need to update Manually building a tile server (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS) et al and it’d be good to know whether the same caveats are needs as are around get-external-data.py, which offers no user feedback and does not “fail safe”, hence the warnings such as “not much will appear on the screen…” on the switch2osm pages.

“get-external-data.py” caught another user out yesterday (you may have seen the IRC discussion).

I’d have expected that the “flatpak” option above is the easiest route, but If it’s an older one that doesn’t support Crostini then “Crouton” should be an option: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton . That project is now maintenance-only since Crostini has essentially superseded it, but it’s still a useful option for older, cheap but still capable devices.

If you want something self-contained on a Chromebook, I don’t think it has anything like the resources to run even just a rendering website. You can run something like JOSM on it (via Linux, via Crostini / Crouton). This stackoverflow question suggests that QGIS might be an option?

Can you explain in a bit more detail why this is a problem?

I’m a fairly regular user of taginfo (I’ve even updated project files so tag consumption information will appear there) but I’ve never been bothered by what is displayed in the description field on e.g https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/naptan%3ANotes#wiki - you’re going to need to click on the link anyway to see the page.

I’m mentioning this because someone’s suggested that this diary entry be included in the next WeeklyOSM issue, and the editors there (including me) are scratching their heads about what to say about it.

Below we have an unpaved footpath joining onto a paved footpath.

For completeness, the paved one is here and the unpaved one is here. There’s actually no difference in the style between paved or unpaved footpaths and paths - if one of them had a lower trail_visibility, or had informal=yes then they would appear like the “informal” example above.

Roads are slightly different - unpaved ones such as this do appear as tracks that everyone can access.

This is just a quick update to address all the CCI who believe it is essential to have comprehensive and descriptive comments.

You were asked to use descriptive comments on future changes at osm.org/changeset/120723949 because your earlier lack of descriptive comments caused a lot of confusion.

It’s not some personal vendetta against you - OpenStreetMap is something that we create together, and we all work together better if there’s effective communication and we can all understand what each other is doing.

Anything that is a barrier to that means that together we’re less effective than we could be (and I’d argue that comments like “Anyone possessing even a minimal IQ…” don’t help, either).

Best Regards,

Andy

@matheusgomesms

So what’s the point to having the repository open anyway? It is time to OSMF run things more professionally, having them more controlled for core stuff, just like the main render on OSM. I don’t know, hire some people exclusive for that, get more money to fund that, whatever it takes.

I can pretty much guarantee that there will be at least one candidate standing for the board at the next elections with that as a platform. If you’re not an OSMF member already I’d definitely join so that you can influence the direction the foundation takes.

landuse=education or highway=busway, proposals that were discussed heavily for YEARS through the community, and then finally got accepted, but never made to Carto because God only knows

Why do you think that a “professional OSMF standard style” would accept all changes that have been “discussed heavily for years … and then finally got accepted”? Is it not possible that these professionals might say “actually, we have a perfectly good way of tagging that already, so we don’t want to support another way of tagging the same thing”?

To take a specific example, with a “person who looks after a map style” hat on I looked at the usage of highway=busway, and just treating it as an alias of highway=service made the most sense. I’m sure that that wasn’t what the proponents of the tag had in mind, but it does make most sense in the area I render.

There can’t be any one map style that does everything - it would be impossible to understand. I try to be extremely inclusive of what to render (sort https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/projects by keys and the style I look after is second only to MapComplete) but some of those are “really the same as [some other tag]” or “only rendered from zoom 21” - you can’t assume that any new addition (parcel lockers, busways, whatever) will be treated by renderers as a “new and different thing”, because it probably isn’t.

Responding to a couple of Mateusz’ points:

Basically, anyone who has map style and is willing to obtain/donate rendering can have their own map style and osm.org website.

That’s simply not true - it’s flatly contradicted by the “Global scope and coverage” section of osm.wiki/Featured_tile_layers/Guidelines_for_new_tile_layers posted above. As an example, I maintain a map style that is focused on features present in England and Wales, but is of less and less interest the further you go from there. It would make no sense to suggest that people in Iran use a map style that shows different sorts of “Enlgand and Wales public rights of way” and 300 different combinations of pub features. If I tried to suggest it as a global style on osm.org people would (rightly) object on the grounds that it is not interesting to most people around the world.

It used to be true that “anyone could have their own map style” - before the https enforcers had their way, it was trivial to swap an OSM tile layer for a different one using browser plugins (and the switch2osm guides did actually suggest that).

and is it cost of 50 euro/month or 15 000 euro/month for non-default layer.

That is a good question - elsewhere today a starting price of €150 per month was suggested for a global server. That sounds plausible to me, but clearly it does put this sort of thing out of the reach of many or even most people. For comparison, a map server serving GB and IE only costs me about €20 per month.

There’s another reason why “another global map style” isn’t a good idea - global map styles are just boring, lowest-common-denominator affairs, the McDonalds or Burger Kings of the map world. OpenStreetMap should be “everyone’s local map”, and that should also mean “everyone’s local map style” too. The things that are “interesting” to show on a map in one place are irrelevent elsewhere; for example highway shields are important in the US but almost no-one else understands the problem.

There’s lots wrong with OSM Carto as a map style and as a project, but I think that the far bigger problem is the lack of flexibility of osm.org itself to be able to support other styles.

Hello melo_mo,

The current mapping in this area is the result of a community discussion, which resulted in https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=606038#p606038 back in 2016..

If you think that the current mapping is incorrect or the situation have changed, then please do discuss with the rest of the OSM community - at the moment, the main talk list https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk is probably the best place to do that. Although a few people have have commented on this diary entry, not everyone will see it.

Best Regards,

Andy Townsend, on behalf of OSM’s Data Working Group.

DWG shouldn’t stand by and do nothing with this user’s vandalism! He deserve a ban!

Andy from the DWG here. We’ve had exactly 2 reports about this user over the years, once in 2019 (about something completely different) and one 2 days ago, which didn’t link to any actual data but just said “This user left many strange lines on the map”. It was only by seeing someone reply here immediately after I’d dealt with the other ticket that I was able to make the connection. Earlier I’d already asked the user to reply about the odd circles: osm.org/user_blocks/5984 .

If you want the DWG to deal with something please read “I’ve seen a problem; what should I do?” at https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Data_Working_Group .

(likely inaccurate and possibly hilarious machine translation follows)

(随后可能是不准确且可能很搞笑的机器翻译）

来自 DWG 的 Andy。 这些年来，我们已经收到了 2 份关于该用户的报告，一次是在 2019 年（关于完全不同的事情），一次是 2 天前，该报告没有链接到任何实际数据，只是说“该用户在 地图”。 只有在我处理完另一张票后立即看到有人在这里回复，我才能建立联系。 早些时候我已经要求用户回复奇怪的圈子：osm.org/user_blocks/5984。

如果您希望 DWG 处理某些事情，请阅读“我发现了一个问题；我应该怎么做？” 在 https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Data_Working_Group 。