OpenStreetMap
The pandemic changed the OSM-PH community plans for the year in 2020. In person meetups became online and we had to adjust our big plans for this new approach. I collected the publication materials we posted in our social media account to get a broad sense of what we did last year.
The montage above is a small collection of them. Some highlights.
At OpenStreetMap related conferences, I always look forward to the technical talks so that I can learn and improve my mapping skills. Equally important are the community building talks, this gives me great perspective on how mapping communities are nurtured around the world especially for countries whom I share the local context and culture.
For a crowdsourcing online community like us, however, community stories are often relegated as side tracks or lightning talks in a smaller room. If we truly believe that the strength of OSM is the community, these stories should be front and center in our interactions especially during conferences.
This is what we tried to do within our own community events. Here are two events I helped co-organized that is aimed at increasing the audience listening to our community stories.
State of the [country] talks are plenary sessions in the State of the Map Asia in 2016.
We decided that all country status reports at SoTM-Asia in 2016 will be reported to the plenary. This ensures that everyone hear and learn how each country are building their own community.
This is OSM way/445712235. It was edited twice and has 9 nodes and 2 tags.
way/445712235 was created together with fisherfolks, its local government unit, a social action arm of a university, researchers and diving enthusiasts in Lian, Batangas. It was a culmination of years of grassroots organizing, research and community-based participatory mapping I was part of as a volunteer.
COSCA as the social action arm of the De La Salle University is working with the local fishing community in Kay Reyna (Lian, Batangas) through its community-based resource management program. Part of the community’s aspiration is to establish a community managed marine protected area (MPA) to protect and rehabilitate their marine ecosystem. During the summer of 2012, I was asked by friends to help in mapping Kay Reyna’s community-managed MPA.
My task is “simple”, grab a GPS and mark the location on the boundaries of the proposed MPA.
Update: I was not elected in the previous election. HOT is doing another round this year, to fill-in for the remainder of the term of one borad member who resigned. I’m putting myself forward again. This diary will again serve as my statement.
👋🏾 This is Maning from the Philippines and I’m running for the HOT board election this year. I am a long time OpenStreetMap contributor focusing mostly in building the open mapping community in my country and in Asia.
Over the years, I have been working and living with marginalized sectors such as indigenous peoples, fishefolks, upland farmers and, urban poor communities. In most of these communities, the common struggle is always tied to a place or resource. The understanding of place is a powerful platform that enables conversation between those in the margins and those in power to negotiate and work together. This is the reason I focused my work to using geospatial technology for social justice and conservation. I believe OpenStreetMap and to an extent, HOT as an intermediary is powerful and can effect social change.
I believe my experience with working with marginalized sectors, open data/technology and building online communities in the Philippines can provide a unique perspective to the new challenges of HOT as an organization. However, I recognize that I lack the depth and experience, because I’ve never been a board member of an international organization.
To understand how HOT board operates, I talked to a number of people directly involved in HOT in the last few days. The conversations were insightful and gave me a good perspective on what I should care as a board member. Below is a distillation of these conversations and my personal opinion of what the organization should care about.
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.
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.
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 …
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.
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.
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! 😊
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
