(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

For the past several months, OSM Philippine data is getting noticed by a good number of people and organizations. This is in part because of our crisis mapping in response to Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan but, I also think the data is now in a usable state in many areas thanks to the dedication of local mappers.

As I look around the map, there is obviously a lot of inconsistency in data coverage. Some are mapped up to the individual buildings while others just a place=town node and nothing else.

Two things I consider to be a factor of this situation:

• Most mapping are based on satellite imagery. In the case of my country, while imagery is available over large areas, many areas still don’t have hi-res imagery. This makes mapping “stop” at the edges of the imagery. The image below shows roads digitized during Yolanda mapping (map).

… See full entry

Recently, I’ve been trying to move tags on island nodes to its way (natural=coastline) following the best practice of One feature, one OSM element. The original place=island nodes were from an GNS import. Most of these islands now have a digitized coastline so it makes sense to add the place=island and all its tags to the ways.

To do this, I ran an overpass query to get all place=island nodes within a given boundingbox. Code is below:

<osm-script output="xml" timeout="25"><!-- fixed by auto repair -->
  <union>
    <!-- query part for: “place=island” -->
<query type="node">
  <has-kv k="place" v="island"/>
  <bbox-query s="4.061535597066106" w="111.57714843749999" n="21.166483858206583" e="127.11181640625"/>
</query>
</union>
<!-- print results -->
<print mode="meta"/><!-- fixed by auto repair -->
<recurse type="down"/>
<print mode="meta" order="quadtile"/><!-- fixed by auto repair -->
</osm-script>

The result will show on the map like this:

… See full entry

My wishlist for the changeset/history view, ala GitHub map diffs.

… See full entry

Catching up on the slides and tweets of the successful SOTM 2013 in Birmingham, I found this very interesting talk by Alyssa Wright (@alyssapwright). The slides discussed the general trend of a male-gender-biased-tagging of features in OSM (see slides #72 to #79).

This reminded me of a resource mapping and assessment we did for an Indigenous Peoples in the Philippines. The research covers a protected area where several IPs communities (Batak and Tagbanua) are living. Part of the research is to conduct participatory mapping workshops with several IPs villages. We used a physical 3D model (very similar to this approach) to allow community members to identify key resources and other geographic features.

During the series of mapping workshops, I insisted that as an initial mapping activity, we divide the group into men and women. Both groups will have its own 3D model and they were instructed to identify important geographic features within their community. The final map will be an integration of both workshop output.

The map showed very interesting results.

The men group covered a larger extent of the area, common features they identified are:

• names of all major rivers and streams;
• location of hunting grounds including accurate position of where they hunted the largest wild pig, snake, or eel;
• important trees for gathering resins and wild honey;
• approximate boundary of forest cover types.

The women group on the other hand covered a smaller area mostly within the established settlements of the tribe, common features they identified were:

• location of community structures such as schools, place of worship, community halls for gatherings;
• sources of clean water (wells and springs);
• a stream that regularly overflows limiting access to children going to school;
• patches in the forest to gather medicinal plants and other wild vegetables;
• patches of swidden farmlots.

… See full entry

OSM-Philippines have a new logo. Eugene (seav) designed this logo using the original OSM logo as its inspiration. He added the basic outline of the country’s archipelago and the three stars and a sun elements of the Philippine flag.

The community love it! Thanks to Eugene for designing our new logo!

Available here as svg and png: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:OSMPH_Logo.svg

SteveC recently started a Kickstarter campaign for a GPS Art Poster. Since my country is not included, I decided to check the tracks around my OSM patch.

The image below shows all the publicly available traces in OSM (not all of them are mine but most are) and also some I didn’t uploaded over Marikina City. I probably have more lying around SDcards and in my GPS internal memory.

The image does gives you a personal story of your mapping expeditions.

… See full entry

Testing the rendering of landuse and natural multipolygons using JOSM’s Mapnik Style. Of course, it’s not in the main OSM db!. :-)

Will @MapBox allow imagery tracing for OSM with their new satellite tiles? http://mapbox.com/blog/digital-globe-partnership/

I’ve been passing along doing housenumbers for years, partly because I find it too micro and partly because I am scared getting addicted :-).

I tried it before using my usual workflow, bike and a GPSr. It usually takes half an hour to collect some numbers, another hour to download the trace, edit in JOSM and, finally upload. Months of work got me this result.

After that month, my drive to do it died.

Recently, I stumbled upon KeypadMapper. The wiki promised a “rapid data collection” approach to address mapping. So, I tried it, and it delivered its promise!

Again, with a bike and this time a ‘droid phone, I was able to collect housenumbers in a fraction of time than with my old workflow. I like the simple interface (you can collect a housenumber in less than 3 phone taps). It creates a .osm file and with just a few adjustments, you can upload them via JOSM. The map below took me less than a week to finish.

… See full entry

I just did a test on using the exif information from geotagged photos for mapping. This time, I set my phone (Samsung GT-S5300) to add the location in the exif data. Using the same phone, I also logged my tracks as a background process with GPSLogger.

The image below shows the image location in JOSM using the exif’s lat/lon data. The GPS trace is also shown. Notice that the photos are arranged in a grid-like manner and does not entirely correspond to my tracks.

Using the traditional photo to gps position correlation in JOSM, the photo location is way more accurate.

… See full entry

Just happy to report that last week I was in a university down south
helping several university faculty with their research activities. My
role is simple, make their research output map aware. After 4 days of
informal workshops we were able to collect data, transform them into
maps and relate these information into their respective research which
range from the natural science, social science and engineering domain.

One of the great dataset we were able to utilize is the tremendous
detail of OSM data in their research areas. While road data is not
the main dataset they are interested in. The availability of this
data allowed us to focus on the other data needed and use OSM as
complement in various forms. Either as baselayer for a webmap, a
reference for geocoding raster images, a timeshot for understanding
urban expansion and landcover changes. I will give more details once
these projects gets into public release (you know how the academe
works :) ).

Another important note is that prior to being a user of the data these
faculties are first and foremost contributors and supporters of OSM
[0] so they are aware of the spirit and motivations of OSM.

My personal advise to anyone interested in using OSM in their own
projects (either for fun or profit), be a contributor first. ;)

[0] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-ph/2011-May/003211.html

My mapping patch is getting a little bit cold[1] these days. I added a few buildings and corrected some roads and park tags to keep it warm and cuddly. ;)

[1] http://oegeo.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/taking-the-temperature-of-local-openstreetmap-communities/

[I sent this message to the talk-ph list. Posting here just in case other osm-ph mappers not subscribed have other ides. ]

I am know collating my mental notes in preparation for the "State of
the PH" lightning talk for SOTM2011. And since this is a community
presentation, I might as well ask you on what we should be presenting.

The primary source materials of my talk is the wiki [0,1,2] and of
course, this list [3]. For sure the OSM-PH data has grown tremendously
in the the past 2 years. There a number of factors that may have
contributed to this growth. I would like to focus the presentation on
on 4 main points. Perhaps you can help me develop the discussion.

1. The osm-ph community. Who is the "community"? What characterize a
PH OSMer? How do we map? What are the innovative ways we do to
improve the map? Are the data users part of this community? Is the
talk-ph list and discussions here a representative sample of the osm-ph
community?

2. How do we use the data? Some sample of data useage we can
illustrate. Maybe a ph brewed mapping application? Or other ways you
have used the data? If there are any,
please provide a link or description and a screenshot.

3. Issues and concerns. Why are we growing in some areas but not
in others? How do you guage our relationship with other crowdsource
mapping initiative in the country (google mapmaker, roadguide.ph, wikimapia)?

4. The future. How do you see the state of PH data in a year or two?
What should be done to further improve and expand data coverage?

If you any thoughts, just send them here or as a PM. Thanks!

[0] osm.wiki/Philippines
[1] osm.wiki/Philippines/Timeline
[2] osm.wiki/WikiProject_Philippines/Featured_images
[3] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ph

Just a thank you note to Cambodian OSMers for doing a splendid job mapping the country.

My colleague have just returned from a 2-week trip in Cambodia and she was very impressed with the existing map data.

She used a Garmin device loaded with OSM from http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/

Inspired by: http://whatosm.textual.ru/files/panorama2.jpg

I have been editing rivers and stream within the Marikina-Pasig river basin for the past few weeks. Typhoon Ondoy/Ketsana which caused the most catastrophic floods in the country [1] have dramatically altered many river channels.

My personal goal for updating river data is to support research initiatives on flood monitoring [2] and effective basin management.

Thanks again to Bing, new imagery is available in the whole basin/watershed. Icing in the cake are the imagery dates which are between October 2009 to Feb 2010. All of which are post-Ondoy/Ketsana.

Over the course of my edits, I have observed general geographic phenomena that is happening in this area:

1. The floods have dramatically altered many river channels. Previous courses where diverted due to landslides and other obstructions.

2. Many river and stream channels are now gone. This is not primarily due to the floods but of the rapid urbanization in the area. Most of rice paddies are now converted to subdivisions. As a result many of the natural irrigation channels, intermittent creeks and streams are either completely filled up, diverted or the stream banks are constricted thereby limiting natural flow. [3]

3. Within the headwaters of one major river (Boso-boso River) is a big industrial pig farm. I noticed that some canals coming from their waste ponds drains towards the river. [4] I'm interested to know whether they have a pig s*%t processing before dumping water to the river.

[1]
osm.wiki/Humanitarian_OSM_Team/philippines_ondoy
[2]
http://epsg4253.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/free-our-data-rainfall-and-water-level-monitoring/
[3] osm.org/go/4zhcDayW--
[4] osm.org/go/4zhavWmD