It’s a long weekend this weekend in Ireland so I found some time today to catch up on some OpenStreetMap tasks.

Primary objective: Send welcome messages to new contributors in Ireland.

Objective status: Completed. \o/

Other observations:

• new contributors add lots of good information. some mistakes but we also did that at the start.
• lots of buildings still to add in Ireland.
• impressed by the amount of organisations trying to contribute updates. Saw new contributions from libraries, public transport organisations, business improvement organisations.
• A new contributor with a username that may signify they work in the waste industry has been adding information for new estates. Love it!
• Terracing tool rocks! Added a whole estate in Blarney, Co. Cork in about an hour using it today.
• Map Roulette (see maproulette.org ) is cool.

Map of recent edits for dónal

Quick recap from this month’s OSM Ireland Map&Chat.

Attendance: 4-5 contributors

Topics

• Sledding hills in Toronto
• Poor law boundaries in Munster (see http://www.dublinhistoricmaps.ie/boundaries/munster/)
• New building projects open on https://tasks.openstreetmap.ie/
• Heritage trees in Ireland

Heritage trees in Ireland

Interesting to learn that the Tree Council of Ireland have a registry of trees and a number of trees have been classified as Heritage Trees. See https://data.gov.ie/dataset/heritage-trees-of-ireland

Brian H. wanted to know how to map these and it turns out there were no entries for heritage= so we fixed that by adding an entry for the Tree Council of Ireland. \o/

New building projects open on https://tasks.openstreetmap.ie/

The existing set of projects were mostly complete so Heikki mentioned that some new projects had been opened up. I started working on Leitrim since I know parts of the county quite well (lived in the neighbouring county of Sligo for a few years). Managed to get some easy tasks completed equating to 2% of the work. :)

Sledding hills in Toronto

Rob had a query about how to map a mound in Toronto he had seen. We concluded that man_made=mound was probably acceptable (some existing usage) but it turned out to be a sledding hill!! While there is no definitive tagging for these, we concluded that the tagging documented for Piste Maps is probably the best fit.

At the OSM Ireland Map&Chat in May 2022, a query arose about how to create maps for specific topics (one of the Irish contributors wanted to callout some memorial benches in their local area).

As a result of the discussion, I created a umap project to demonstrate some of the possibilities:
https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/kerry-pike-gaa-memorial-benches_765585#18/51.91009/-8.56102

The overpass api query that is plugged into the “Remote Data” url field is:

https://overpass-api.de/api/interpreter?data=[out:json][timeout:25];(node[%22amenity%22=%22bench%22](51.909338348825024,-8.562796711921692,51.9115654863502,-8.5586017370224);%20way[%22amenity%22=%22bench%22](51.909338348825024,-8.562796711921692,51.9115654863502,-8.5586017370224););out%20body;%3E;out%20skel%20qt;

Note: can actually be simplified since we know all the results will be nodes (above has nodes and ways. An exercise for the reader…

Overpass Turbo also has the ability to do something similar (limited control over display format though):

Overpass Query (with MapCSS): https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1iBL
Interactive Overpass Turbo map: click here

For those looking to understand MapCSS a bit more, see osm.wiki/Overpass_turbo/MapCSS#Color_Coding

Changset ID # 107053042

Cork County Council in conjunction with TII (Ireland’s authority for major roads) are in the process of building a bypass past Macroom and Ballyvourney in Co. Cork, Ireland.

Recently, I was travelling back from Killarney and noted that the road had been re-aligned. I quickly captured some GPD traces and have now updated OpenStreetMap with the new roundabout and re-aligned N22 (the bypass will assume the N22 name I presume when it opens).

This was a relatively nice edit to undertake. While I only had one trace to work with, it was good enough to get a rough idea of what needed to change. I also had to amend the N22 route relation(s) - there were two; one in each direction. I didn’t have a whole lot of experience editing these types of relations but the josm interface was intuitive.

As always, I wanted to validate my work (especially as I was editing a primary national route in Ireland). ra.osmsurround.org is a great tool for that so I checked both relations for issues (see relations 3147725 and 558006).

I expect more changes in the coming months as work progresses on this road.

Finally, I checked to see if other map providers had picked up on the change. Funnily enough it appears that Google have picked up on it (possibly using data from Google Maps’ users) but in much lower detail. I guess their algorithms detect something is up but don’t know how to deal with it properly yet. 1-0 to OpenStreetMap!

p.s. Driving round the roundabout 3-4 times was quite fun and a great way to get a good trace for it.

Images

… See full entry

I have a few passions in life. Two of them overlap in an interesting fashion…

A number of years ago, I decided to look at how engineering (and specifically full-lifecycle analysis) could support improvements in road safety. While many road safety issues are primarily behavioural (speeding, awareness, road rage, etc), I strongly believe that infrastructure should guide road users to making better decisions over time through feedback, reinforcement of good behaviours, etc. Anyway… I decided to buy a dashcam and figure out if there was a way to collect data in a way that would provide strong arguments for change at both a local and national / international level. Due to other commitments and a lack of interest from the general public I haven’t made much progress. :(

My other rationale for getting a dashcam was to allow imagery capture to support mine and others’ OpenStreetMap activities. I drive quite a bit on my way to climb mountains and explore the south coast of Ireland (sometimes to play MMORPG Ingress). Capturing imagery and contributing it to the global community seemed like a good way to get additional “mileage” out of my travels!

But dashcams aren’t setup for sending data to Mapillary I here you say… True… but I never give up!

The OpenStreetMap Ireland community recently decided to capture imagery and authoritatively map the #WildAtlanticWay, a 2500+ km route along the west coast of Ireland. While there is some existing imagery of the route, there are some notable gaps and we wanted to fix that.

Being one of the primary contributors in Cork (Ireland’s largest county by land area), I was motivated to try and contribute more imagery in Co. Cork and Co. Kerry. So I started digging into the tools available for processing and uploading data again (to see what improvements had been made since I last tried).

Processing dashcam videos so they are usable my mapillary

… See full entry

Just a quick note to mark my 1000th openstreetmap changeset.

Changeset #95516937 marked the occasion.

… See full entry

As businesses start re-opening, local authorities in Ireland are supporting businesses to adhere to government health advice and specifically social distancing techniques which have been shown to slow the spread of the disease.

One of the most visual supports is the pedestrianisation of streets for specific hours of the day / week so cafés and restaurants can make use of the outdoor space (risk of infection is lower if people are eating outside). Unlike continental Europe and parts of the USA, pavilions and street dining is not common here.

OpenStreetMap contributors are keeping up with the local authority efforts by updating map data as changes are made.

Most of these updates make use of the conditional access key/values outlined in osm.wiki/Conditional_restrictions

Here’s an example change in Cork, Ireland that I did earlier today: https://osmcha.org/changesets/87507009/

Note: the logic is that motor vehicles can’t access the street UNLESS it’s between 17:30 and 11:00 (i.e. the inverse of the pedestrianisation period).

Spent a bunch of time cleaning up the OSM data for Blarney, Co. Cork. Few other OSM participants joined in too which was fun.

More soon…