I experimented with extracting the heights values from the drone imagery and add them to the building polygons traced in OpenStreetMap. Read along if you want to understand the process or just go here to see it in action here!

3D buildings around Foundation University, Dumaguete

Day 3 of Pista ng Mapa last Aug 3, 2019 was a series of field mapping activities. A couple of people did on the ground survey with field papers and mapillary. Our resident drone Mapher Leigh deployed her DJI Phantom 4 to survey the event venue and its surrounding community. Leigh uploaded all the drone derived data into OpenAerialMap including the elevation models! Using QGIS 3.6, I decided to explore ways to extract the heights from the derived DSM/DTM and use it for visualizing building polygons from OpenSteetMap.

For this exploration I used QGIS 3.6 with the GRASS GIS, Profile tool and QGIS2threejs plugin.

Downloading the drone derived layers from OpenAerialMap

… See full entry

Last weekend, a couple of OSM volunteers and drone enthusiasts visited Lupang Arenda in Taytay, Rizal. The visit was part of the ongoing collaboration with Barangay Santa Ana in Taytay to use OpenStreetMap as one of their tools for managing community initiatives. The origins of this collaboration has an interesting back story but I won’t talk about it on this post. ;)

The main goal of the visit is to capture images using drones to create an updated aerial imagery of the community to identify individual building/houses. For a densely populated community like Lupang Arenda, it is difficult to get this level of detail using satellite imagery.

The crew. Photo by Erwin Olario.

… See full entry

A couple of weeks back, I was aimlessly panning around the Philippines in the OSM.org website and saw Banton island right at the center of the archipelago north of the Sibuyan Sea. I loaded the data in JOSM to check what was actually mapped in the island. It looks like it has decent coverage for roads and very few buildings. So I started adding a few buildings here and there and then it struck me, what would it take to systematically map the whole island remotely?

Banton Island in Romblon as viewed from a pump boat arriving from Marinduque. Photo credit: Lawrence Ruiz, Wikimedia Commons

This quest has begun …

Choosing the imagery

First, I checked if there are good imagery available other than Bing, I found that DigitalGlobe (DG) Premium and Standard looks more recent compared to Bing. Some areas are cloudy in Premium while clear in Standard and vice versa. I figured I can interchange these two depending on where I am mapping.

… See full entry

I’ve been collecting geo-referenced photos since I started contributing to OpenStreetMap. When I discovered Mapillary a few years ago, I decided to upload these photos so that other people can use them in their own mapping.

Street art in Marikina’s freedom wall

Here’s a few sequence I found interesting to revisit whenever I go to the Mapillary website (links to each sequence are included for viewing the high-res photos). They are categorized according to the mode of travel.

☑️ 🚶

… See full entry

It’s been a while since I joined a mapping party. Today, it was right around my turf.

Happy to see old and new mappers! 😊

… See full entry

Building detection at Villa Imelda, MacArthur.

For the last couple of weekends I’ve been tinkering with Robosat to detect features from aerial imagery. At its core RoboSat is using state of the art fully convolutional neural network architectures for semantic segmentation.

Daniel posted an excellent walk-through to run the RoboSat pipeline on openly available drone imagery in Tanzania.

This post follows Daniel’s guide for detecting buildings in drone imagery in the Philippines. The goal of this exercise is for me to understand the basics of the pipeline and find ways to use the tool in identifying remote settlements from high resolution imagery (i.e drones). I’m not aiming for pixel-perfect detection (i.e precise geometry of the building). My main question is whether it can help direct a human mapper focus on specific areas in the imagery to map in OpenStreetMap.

… See full entry

Intrigued by Alan McConchie’s presentation on OpenStreetMap past(s), OpenStreetMap future(s), I took a stab at looking at several cities in Asia using a similar approach at charting nodes creation and modification. In his talk, Alan gave a portrayed an ideal scenario where the data is constantly-maintained reaching a state of singularity. Are we seeing any of this trend in Asia?

The only non-Asian city I included is Berlin, Germany (in thick grey). This will be my benchmark as it is widely known that the German community is one of the most active in our community. I intentionally won’t draw specific conclusion to any of the city listed here. Each community is unique and deserves an in-depth look on its own but, I am posting questions that interest me by looking at the charts. Of course, everyone is welcome to share their own insight in the comments!

Cumulative nodes created and edited in the last 10 years

… See full entry

This week, I just realized it’s been 10 years since I signed up for an OSM account! I never realized I continue to contribute and learn from this community. Some personal anecdotes of the past 10 years below.

My earliest fieldmapping in OSM. CC-BY-SA

The signup

… See full entry

The idea of using passive data into OpenStreetMap is not new. Even during the early days of OSM, this concept was already discussed. What I mean by passive here are data sources that is not originally intended for use in OSM. This usually comes from third party services which gave permission to use their data into OSM. We are getting more of this recently and has helped me in improving my own mapping patch.

Animation below shows data from OSM public traces[0], Strava and Mapillary[1].

However, I don’t think the idea of purely using passive data (where automatic data correction and update is done) will be possible in OSM. User input will always be needed.

[0] OSM public traces does not really qualify as passive data since many of them were uploaded for the purpose of mapping. However, I’ve seen many tracks in the Philippines that were uploaded and was not edited by the original user who uploaded the it.

… See full entry

Disclaimer: This is specific to the Philippines, not a general OSM issue.

One of the most difficult data to collect in OSM are administrative boundaries (admin_level=*). It defies the on-the-ground rule. One cannot just go out and start surveying admin boundaries with a GPS. On the other hand, we see the importance of having admin boundaries in our database. We can define town/city limits. It improves geocoding. The maps looks nice. Humanitarians need them because they can plan and allocate resources according to administrative jurisdictions during a crisis. The only logical way to have this in OSM is to get them from various sources and do an import.

The most comprehensive source we found for the Philippines is from the freely available GADM. This website has a comprehensive collection administrative boundary data for free down to the smallest administrative units for many countries including the Philippines. Over the years, I tried to track down the provenance of GADM’s PH data. My geo-forensic skills lead me to people saying that the PH dataset originated from our national mapping agency. So, it seems very authoritative, why don’t we just import them? I say NO and here’s why (again, I am pertaining here to the Ph situation, GADM data maybe good in other countries and I have the utmost respect to the maintainers of the site sharing this to the public).

The license is incompatible. Period. End of discussion. Eugene discussed this years ago in our mailinglist.

Even if the license is compatible, the data quality is REALLY bad. Again, from Eugene’s mail to the list, here’s screenshot comparing OSM and GADM boundaries in Quezon City.

… See full entry

Last July 24-25, we had the third leg of the series of crowdmapping events co-organized by The Asia Foundation (TAF) and its local partners in Butuan City. The first was in lloilo and the second in Tagbilaran. Similar to the previous events, the objective of this mapping party is to increase awareness of the potential of using OpenStreetMap to complement the various mapping initiatives of the TAF’s local partners in the region by inviting mapper volunteers to participate.

Butuan is a special place for me. I have never been to this part of Mindanao, but, this is where the journey of my relatives may have started when my grandfather and his family migrated from Luzon and started a new life to what was then called the “new frontier” of the Philippines 4 decades ago.

… See full entry

Once again, we had another mapping event. This time, in Tagbilaran City, Bohol. This is part of the series of crowdmapping events co-organized by The Asia Foundation and its local partners. The first was in Iloilo City last May 2015.

During the event, Bohol Governor Edgardo Chatto welcomed all the mappers and expressed his support to implement this initiative for the whole province of Bohol.

Bohol’s major income is tourism. However, when the 7.2 earthquake hit the island in 2013, the tourism industry was heavily affected. On the other hand, judging by the number of tourists (local and foreign) who was with me during the flight, I think tourism is now recovering. What a better way to help by providing a good map not only for the tourists but also for the local community!

The local partner of The Asia Foundation is the local chamber of commerce. Naturally, we focused on collecting business and tourism related map data during the field exercise.

… See full entry

Last May 2015, I joined a mapping party in Iloilo co-organized by The Asia Foundation and several bike groups (IPAD Xtr, ICYC, iFOLD, Augustinian Cyclists) in the city. Originally, we designed to have an editing session using iD. But since most of them did not bring laptops, (they went to the meetup venue mostly on bikes of course!), we focused mapping using SmartPhones installed with OSMAnd.

… See full entry

One of the on-going initiatives by the local OSM Philippine volunteers is to go to local communities to assist in training the local population to update and use OSM for disaster risk reduction.

One partnership we are nurturing with is the DRR mapping work by the Philippine and Swiss Red Cross in small island communities in Busuanga, Palawan. Last April 2015, mappers GOwin, feyeandal and dichapabe, went to Busuanga to start the mapping community with the local government and Red Cross volunteers. After the training the online mapping community lead by GOwin continues to assist the Busuanga mappers in updating the maps.

This work was featured in an article in Channel News Asia.

By combining local knowledge and OSM tools, we hope to continue building the local mapping capacity and data that will empower communities to respond to any crisis.

In reply to RichardF’s call for stories, I shared a few of my mapping stories. Marking the link here, so I get back to it later: osm.org/user/Richard/diary/35107#comment30756

The first time I saw this in the map, I’ve always thought it was an editing mistake. This is Catarman Airport in Northern Samar, Philippines. What looks to me as a bug is the secondary road intersecting with the airport’s runway! Surely an editing mistake. But since I haven’t been there and the satellite image is too coarse, I cannot verify if this is indeed the case.

Yesterday, I had a chance to talk to locals familiar in the area and they indeed verified that this is correct. The airport services one or two flights a day. Vehicles are allowed to cross the runway in between flights similar to a railway level crossing. Aerial shots from wikipedia and from another website confirms this as well.

… See full entry

(I posted this in the HOT list. Board election is upcoming and voting members were asked to communicate what HOT’s board should focus on in the future. Here’s my appeal)

Dear everyone,

Let me kickstart this. First, no, I’m not running for the board, but here’s what I want HOT to aspire for in the future.

As many have said, we’ve come a long way since we started with the Haiti earthquake response. We have better tools, more capable people, better systems/organization and worldwide recognition. For many areas in the developing world, we are the default map. This is especially true for us in the Philippines where more and more users are utilizing our map across a diverse type of organization (international, national agencies, local government). Having said that, I also see a lot of improvements we can look into within HOT and the larger OSM community. Below are “wishlist” for the HOT community to consider. Note that this is my own perspective having been involved in several humanitarian mapping work(both as a remote mapper and deployments on the ground) in my own country. This is not in the order of priority.

From data consumers to data contributors. Many international organizations are using our data, but, I often wonder, do they contribute back? I know a couple of organizations are doing this (IFRC/ICRC/ARC/BRC, MSF, MapAction to name a few). I think we should consciously encourage these consumers to give back. We are not just a source of free geospatial data, we are a community and they are part of it.

… See full entry

Short post. Testing mapillary around my area.

Crowdsourcing geotagged photos is not a novel idea, but, one thing that attracted me to mapillary is the friendliness to OSM.

Maybe a longer post on my rig and experience later.

(Re-posted from the talk-ph list.)

I discovered OSM around Jan 2006 (user# 1417) while trying to look for PH vector data I need for a research. Free geographic data in the PH back then is very limited. The idea of building it from scratch got me interested. However, I wasn’t able to edit right away because I can’t get the then java-based web editor to run. ~10 months later I stumbled upon JOSM in the wiki and created my first node.

The oldest rendering I was able to save was this. As far as remember, it was Mike Collinson who made those edits. After several borrowed, hacked, broken, lost GPS since, Marikina is still not complete. So, I’m still here mapping.

Sinusubukan ko ngayong isalin sa wikang Filipino/Tagalog ang iD. Bagamat ito ang wikang aking nakagisnan, nakakahiyang sabihin na medyo nahirapan ako sa pagsasalin. Sanay kasi ako sa paggamit ng Ingles sa mga technical na bagay gaya ng computer.

Halos lahat ng nasa “core” ng iD ay naisalin na (maliban sa “Walkthrough”).

Unang pasada pa lang ito. Susubukan ko pang ayusin ang ilang mga translation strings. Sa mga ibig tumulong, madali lang naman magsalin gamit ang transifex. Puntahan mo lang yung section sa Filipino.

Para sa pauna kong tangka, hindi ko sinunod ang tuwiran o literal na pagsasalin. Kung tutuusin, parang “taglish” yung ginawa ko. Sa aking karanasan kasi, mas mahirap unawain ang tuwirang salin gaya ng pagsasalin sa tagalog ng OpenStreetMap website:

require_cookies: 
      cookies_needed: Tila mayroon kang hindi pinagaganang mga otap - mangyaring paganahin ang mga otap sa loob ng pantingin-tingin mo bago magpatuloy.

… See full entry