apm-wa's Comments
Post | When | Comment |
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Not to Blow My Own Horn, But... | Yangy Kala is indeed gorgeous, especially with the sun setting and creating those shadows. |
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Southern Balkan Province | Mateusz Konieczny and saintam1, thank you for your encouragement. Where mapping is concerned, I continue to see as my highest calling the collection of ground truth and otherwise unobtainable data here, which I feed into both OSM and the wiki. |
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Paper Maps, Paper Maps! | Imagico and SK53, Thank you for these insights–they are very helpful. I suspect copyright issues that affect UK maps (since the Soviet maps of the UK may well have merely been illegal copies of Ordnance Survey maps) would not pertain to former republics of the USSR, where the Soviet cartographers would have done their own mapping. I’ll see if I cannot research this a bit more, just to be on the safe side. You are correct that these maps are fascinating. One of the maps my friend obtained is of the area of western Washington state where I was born and grew up. The unincorporated community where I went to grade school is on the map. It is not even shown on many U.S. road atlases, since it is so small. These maps are very, very detailed. |
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Southern Balkan Province | Verdy_p, I suggest you watch the YouTube video of my keynote speech at SOTM 2016 to learn inter alia about my efforts to recruit local mappers, which is part of my embassy’s outreach efforts. Recruiting mappers is difficult, in part because the cost of the Internet here is the highest in the world, internet penetration is only about 14%, computer literacy is low, and Turkmenistan is in an economic recession. Some other points:
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Southern Balkan Province | Will, Thank you for your kind words. The figure of a million population is a fantasy. We estimate the population to be no more than 560,000 at the absolute most. The government had to claim a million in order to host an Olympic-affiliated event but has not released the results of the 2012 national census. From my observations this is a city of about a half million or so. After the density of New Delhi, it is quite a relief to be in a non-dense city! In addition, Ashgabat is officially fairly extensive geographically, about 25 or 30 kilometers wide and 25 or 30 kilometers tall. There is plenty of room for grazing camels, sheep, and cows in the empty space between former villages, now neighborhoods of the municipality. The 2013 and 2015 annexations of outlying villages added a lot of real estate, and I had to redraw the city limits to reflect those annexations. apm-wa |
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Not to Blow My Own Horn, But... | Not really. I was the interviewee, not the interviewer. |
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Not to Blow My Own Horn, But... | Not sure what you mean by that… |
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My quest to map the fairgrounds. | It seems “show grounds” was proposed in 2010 but never adopted. Perhaps it is time either to revive it or to propose “amenity=fairgrounds”. Such venues tend to be permanent (and in the case of my home county, to host other events throughout the year, not just the annual county fair). Fairgrounds in my home state of Washington state seem to be tagged either as tourism=attraction or as parks (but they are not really parks). |
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Eureka! An Authoritative List of Districts! | No, I have not attempted to define any relations for the districts. At this point my ambitions are much more modest: to see if somebody else can draw the boundaries of the districts (most of them have not been drawn yet) and then spell their names correctly, hence my posting of data that would help others in that effort. I don’t have the time on my hands to undertake the drawing of all the districts in Turkmenistan. I have drawn the boundaries of the boroughs and small etraps of Ashgabat city but that is all. The road system is in need of serious updating and my editing has tended to focus on it and the municipalities rather than the districts because roads and cities/towns/villages are more relevant to navigation than are districts, and maps are primarily navigational aids. Yes, they do tile the country, so far as I know. None overlap, since they are administrative units, each with its own hakim and budget (see the Turkmenistan entry in the OSM wiki for a description of the administrative structure of the country). I am still in the process of translating the various headers in the document, and just added them for the main header. No, Turkmen is not covered by Google Translate. My embassy has had conversations with both Google and the Turkmenistan Academy of Sciences but so far with no result. |
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Cyber Fan? | The DWG has been very good about stopping vandals after I tried communicating with them. Here is how you do it. When the ID editor is open, select the road that has been vandalized, then click on “view on openstreetmap.org” down on the bottom of the left-hand column. A new window will open. Click on “View History” at the bottom of the left-hand column and find the changeset of your vandal. Click on the blue changeset number and a little box will appear in the left-hand column under the word “Discussion”. Type in your objection to the vandalism and send it. It will be sent both to the DWG and to the author of that changeset (the vandal) by e-mail. Be sure to include reference to the particular OSM guideline that is being violated. If the vandal does not respond, or responds with some sort of negative attitude, forward the link to that changeset to the DWG with a request that the DWG intervene. Yes, the procedure is a bit cumbersome, but it works. I have had numerous vandals mess with my work in Turkmenistan and the DWG has always helped with blocking them when they refused to follow OSM guidelines. |
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A Quarter of a Million Images of Turkmenistan | Philippe, I don’t know when I will next visit Belgium, but please save some chocolate, cheese, and red wine for me. |
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The Southern Cross of the Russian Empire, and A Neat Trick with Mapillary GPX FIles | Dear Philippe, It looks interesting, but I am already using Pocket Earth on my iPhone to collect GPS traces when I am not using another device, and it works pretty well. Pocket Earth traces can be exported as GPX and e-mailed to myself for upload to OSM. apm-wa |
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The Southern Cross of the Russian Empire, and A Neat Trick with Mapillary GPX FIles | Looks like there are a few in Ashgabat, at least: |
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The Southern Cross of the Russian Empire, and A Neat Trick with Mapillary GPX FIles | I don’t run or cycle so would not know. |
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The Southern Cross of the Russian Empire, and A Neat Trick with Mapillary GPX FIles | Yes, correct, and the easy way to get at them (if you have a Windows-based computer) is to use Windows to search for all *.gpx files on the SD card, move them to a single folder on your computer, pull them into EasyGPS, and save the result as a single file. Here is the one I was talking about: osm.org/user/apm-wa/traces/2730630 |
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200,000 Mapillary Uploads, and Vandalism in Awaza | Yes, but the wiki also advises, “Revert scripts are available to undo entire changesets, but should only be used ‘'’if you know what you are doing.”’’’ I must confess that I am not confident that I would know what I’m doing with the revert script. |
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Wiki Articles on Major Cities in Turkmenistan | Good thought–the sidebar is a template, so I need to learn how to add it to the template. |
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Updates to Dashoguz and the Road North from Ashgabat | Philippe, it looks like the images I’ve posted so far have not yet been processed. I don’t see them yet. When Mapillary processes them, they will appear on the map in an almost straight line going north from Ashgabat in the direction of Konye Urgench, visible using the coordinates above. |
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Updates to New Turkmenbashy International Seaport and New Turkmenbashy Wiki Page | Actually, the entire coastline in and around Turkmenbashy appears to be a mess, with water on land in several places. Fixing it is beyond my meager capbilities–one of the Jedi masters of JOSM needs to take on that task, I fear. |
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Updates to Lebap Welayat in Turkmenistan | Hi, Marych! Layer determines the hierarchy by which objects that overlap are displayed. A lower layer number (e.g., layer=-1) will be shown beneath a higher layer number (e.g., layer=0). Since the default for buildings and streets is 0, if I make the grounds of a school or hospital layer=-1, the grounds will be shown under the building, rather than covering up the building, in the standard layer of OSM. You can also then use the layer tag in applications, like Maperitive, for determining how to render objects (buildings above the ground, not underground, as one example). |