The OpenStreetMap UK community has come together for a 3-month “quarterly project” to find all the solar panels in the UK. And the results so far… wow!

-> We’ve just reached over 100,000 standalone solar PV installations mapped in the UK!

-> Plus we also have almost 600 solar farms mapped, representing almost 5 gigawatts!

To give you an idea of completeness: the UK government believes there are about 1 million solar panels in the UK, and official solar farm listings have about 8 GW. What we’ve mapped so far is way more than I thought we’d manage, so I really deeply want to thank every person who contributed, large or small. We can use these data to pilot CO2-saving initatives - and so can anyone else. Open data for the win!

Here are a couple of simple plots from me, to show where the items are in the UK. (The data I’ve used are from yesterday, which is why my plot says not-quite-100,000 items.) I’ve plotted two different types of item: (1) “standalone” solar panels (i.e. ones that are not inside solar farms); (2) solar farms. You’ll notice the distributions are really different:

(The images aren’t showing up…. you’ll have to view them on my blog where I originally posted this)

Some of the darkest blobs on the map are evidence of focussed effort. I know that Jerry (SK53) has been mapping around Nottingham, Cornwall and other areas, so may be the source of some of these blobs. We’ve shown that with some local effort, and a bit of scanning through imagery, a lot of this can be done.

You’ll notice that many of the solar farms are in the southern part of the UK, at least according to our data. That’s not unexpected!

For more detailed data breakdowns, you can peruse Gregory Williams’ solar mapping analysis site.

We have more time to go until the end of the quarter… and we’ll be able to use the data for sustainable energy projects whenever you contribute - so please do join in!

I’ve had a look at mapping solar farms in England. By “solar farms” I mean the large field-scale things.

A few years ago someone put this very useful List of under construction and operational UK Ground Mounted Solar Farms on the wiki, sourced from the “REPD”.

I’ve been through and checked for every item in that table which is rated as >= 30 MW. About two thirds of them were already there. The rest were easy to map because very visible in DigitalGlobe imagery - most of them were not visible in Bing imagery because the latter is a few years old, and many solar farms are new.

(One of my changesets.)

In some cases I’ve used a single power=generator way, but in most cases they’re a power=plant relation. The tagging is generally like this:

generator:output:electricity 	31.6 MW
name 	Broxted Solar Farm
power 	plant
repd:id 	1592
source:generator:output:electricity 	repd
type 	site

This is in ADDITION to the tagging of solar panel areas using the PV tagging described here

I’m broadly following the approach in the wiki page with the big REPD list. The repd:id is useful to be able to join the dots later.

Jack had this great idea to find the locations of solar panels and add them to OpenStreetMap. (Why’s that useful? He can explain: Solar PV is the single biggest source of uncertainty in the National Grid’s forecasts.)

I think we can do this :) The OpenStreetMap community have done lots of similar things, such as the humanitarian mapping work we do, collaboratively adding buildings and roads for unmapped developing countries. Also, some people in France seem to have done a great job of mapping their power network (info here in French). But how easy or fast would it be for us to manually search the globe for solar panels?

(You might be thinking “automate it!” Yes, sure - I work with machine learning in my day job - but it’s a difficult task even for machine learning to get to the high accuracy needed. 99% accurate is not accurate enough, because that equates to a massive number of errors at global scale, and no-one’s even claiming 99% accuracy yet for tasks like this. For the time being we definitely need manual mapping or at least manual verification.)

(Oh, or you might be thinking “surely someone officially has this data already?” Well you’d be surprised - some of it is held privately in one database or other, but not with substantial coverage, and certainly almost none of it has good geolocation coordinates, which you need if you’re going to predict which hours the sun shines on each panel. Even official planning application data can be out by kilometres, sometimes.)

Jerry (also known as “SK53” on OSM) has had a look into it in Nottingham - he mapped a few hundred (!) solar panels already. He’s written a great blog article about it.

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I designed a T-shirt! It’s to celebrate OpenStreetMap:

Buy online here, if you like: https://digitalcommoner.teemill.com/

Cross posted from mcld.co.uk

On Wednesday we had a “flagship seminar” from Prof Andy Hopper on Computing for the future of the planet. How can computing help in the quest for sustainability of the planet and humanity?

Lots of food for thought in the talk. I was surprised to come out with a completely different take-home message than I’d expected - and a different take-home message than I think the speaker had in mind too. I’ll come back to that in a second.

Some of the themes he discussed:

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OpenStreetMap has a wikidata tag which lets us connect OSM objects to their corresponding Wikidata items.

(Technical note: it’s a “same as” relationship - i.e. the tag asserts that the two items in different systems refer to the same entity. However, sometimes things in OSM are split into multiple objects; and sometimes one object in OSM actually refers to multiple items in Wikidata. So it’s actually a “many-to-many” matching, not “one-to-one”: a single OSM object sometimes has multiple semicolon-separated Wikidata identifiers, and multiple OSM objects sometimes have the same Wikidata identifier.)

There are over 600,000 OSM objects with the “wikidata” tag. OK great, job done? I mean, nothing’s ever “complete” in these big open-ended crowdsource projects, but if we have more than half a million crosslinks between the systems, that’s really good going.

BUT THERE’S A PROBLEM!

Using the tag to jump from OSM to Wikidata works fine. But from Wikidata to OSM? Well, there’s no persistent way to link from wkd->osm, simply because OSM’s identifiers are impermanent - they’re not guaranteed to continue existing, or to continue referring to the same thing. So it’s not particularly sensible to store OSM identifiers in Wikidata. Instead, an Overpass lookup is required.

For example, on the OSM Wikidata page I found this friendly Wikidata interface called “Reasonator” - all very nice, but instead of cross-linking immediately to the OSM object, it offers a little “Overpass” link which you can click to do a dynamic lookup.

The effect is that it makes Wikidata->OSM connections indirect, obscured, only-for-those-who-know-they-want-it. If a Wikidata coder says “OK great how do I jump to the item in OSM?” you first have to teach them what Overpass is and how it relates to OSM, then how to use its query language, how many queries a day you’re allowed to do on Overpass… bleh.

PROPOSED SOLUTION

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It gives me great pleasure to announce that the OpenStreetMap website now has a context menu! Also known as a right-click menu:

You might not think this is big news, but I do. A few people asked for this feature in the past, and eventually I proposed some code for it. It took 18 months for the proposal to be merged into the website codebase - why? Primarily because OSM is built and run by volunteers with limited time, but also because my Javascript skills weren’t quite up to adding the important polish and tests that are needed for production-ready code. A million thanks to Tom Hughes for improving my not-quite-finished proposal, and for all the feedback that helped me understand how to do things right.

I’ve just written to the UK and London mailing lists, suggesting a bulk edit to fix the outdated “network=Barclays Cycle Hire” in London. Harry proposed this 1 year ago.

Happy Cow is a website listing food places that vegetarians and vegans can use. The site has been going since 1999 and seems pretty well-established. I’ve proposed a tag for cross-referencing against Happy Cow.

When we run mapping parties as part of the HOT work, we see lots and lots of newcomers mapping for the first time. Increasingly we’re getting them using iD which is very easy for them to get started with.

One little issue I noticed in sessions is that for HOT we ask people to use very specific changeset comments - essentially to “tag” the changesets as belonging to a particular labelled task. It was very easy for people to spend half an hour mapping and after half an hour have no memory of what we said about copying-and-pasting a specific comment. Workflow problem!

Now, the team who create the iD editor kindly added my feature request which means that the HOT Tasking Manager can now “pre-fill” the changeset comment in the iD editor. So no need to copy and paste, it should be there when you click through from the Tasking Manager.

What does this mean? It means that in future, HOT mappers using iD will not need any reminding about what to put in the comment box! Easier mapping, easier training, more consistent changeset comments.

Thanks everyone who helped put this through.

(P.S. There is one little technical niggle to resolve - if the comment contains an equals sign then the pre-fill doesn’t work on firefox. Hopefully sorted soon.)

In East London, there’s a part of Bethnal Green called “Globe Town”. It’s not very well known, but it’s actually indicated by some globe artworks sprinkled around the area - see the photo in this nice article, for example: http://hidden-london.com/gazetteer/globe-town/

I decided to go and do some Bethnal Green mapping today, at least in part because Globe Town wasn’t really in OSM yet and also because I’m not even aware of an official definition of the bounds of Globe Town. So I went looking.

I’ve placed a marker to name the Globe Town locality, and I chose to place it in the Globe Town market square. Is that the centre of Globe Town? I have no idea. But it’s at least a prominent place associated with that name.

I also mapped one of the Globe Town globe artworks. I’ve seen a few of them around but I can’t remember where - I’ll just have to add them as I find them.

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Well it finally happened… last night I went to a pub, and I printed out an OSM map to find the way. However, 8 days earlier, someone had moved the pub to the wrong location! That’s the kind of risk we run in an open crowdsourced system.

Luckily my beer hunting skills outweighed my trust in open data and I found the pub eventually. Pint drunk, map fixed, crisis averted.

It’s always nice to find a park that hasn’t been mapped in detail, so you can wander around getting the paths and all the bits and bobs done…

Ladybarn Park, Manchester: osm.org/#map=17/53.43240/-2.21224

I’m at the OpenStreetMap Hack Weekend March 2014. Things done:

1. One of the things I’m really happy about is that Richard Fairhurst’s addition of routing to the OpenStreetMap main website is really close to being ready - just a couple of tiny bugs and UI bits to iron out, and who knows, maybe it’ll go live soon. I helped with a couple of little improvements and fixes.

2. The other thing is a conversation with new mapper Micky Allen, who is interested in mapping blue badge parking spaces. It turns out that in OSM we have a handy tag capacity:disabled=*, which is already used quite well in London, but we just need a bit more community effort to map these “blue badge” parking bays whenever we see them. Micky now has some ideas about how to extract these data from OSM, and he also has some ideas about encouraging the community to join in mapping them. I’ll certainly try and remember to map them when I see them.

3. Next thing we’ve done this afternoon - some improvements to v2 of the HOT Tasking Manager. I’ve made it auto-unlock locked tasks after time (feature migrated from v1) as well as a couple of smaller tweaks.

Over on my blog I’ve put an article in which I attempt to reconstruct the surface terrain of the UK from OSM “ele” data. The results look like this:

As a contributor to OpenStreetMap, one thing I’ve been wondering recently is what sort of map data should we collect for the UK, now that the coverage has already got good. Since OpenStreetMap generally has great coverage of the UK, when you’re out and about with a printed-out map and a pen, it’s very rare that you can find much significant that isn’t mapped already - sometimes a new street or a missing church. You could pour your time into mapping increasingly obscure things, whatever you’re interested in. But what would be the most useful things to map in the UK, over the coming year? Things that are not just interesting to map but could be practically useful to people? Some thoughts:

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I don’t think I used to map post-boxes. Partly because I’m not that interested in them, partly because I sort of assumed they should have been imported en masse at some point from a Royal Mail open data dump of some sort (naive?).

But when I read SK53’s interesting post about the completeness of post-box mapping in Britain, I was really surprised to learn that OSM had less than 50% of the postboxes in Britain. So I’ve started mapping post boxes when I come across them.

As it turns out, I could have started with the one at the end of my road. It was already there in the map, but it had the wrong reference number, though I only noticed that recently. Even in central London and central Birmingham (two hyper-mapped cities) I’ve found some postboxes that have sat there unmapped for years.

Anyway, a quick search finds that I’ve added or fixed 79 post-boxes in the map so far. Mappers, next time you see a post-box, please map it - post boxes are useful things to have on a map…

One of the great things about editing OpenStreetMap is that it leads me to discover new bits of my local area. I’ve just come back from a lovely walk in North-East London, a walk which I would have never thought of doing if it hadn’t been for OSM. And what’s more, it led me to discover a really lovely seafood place for lunch!

Here’s how I do it:

1. When it’s a nice day and I fancy a walk, I go and look at ITO’s FIXME map, which simply highlights all the objects in the map with “fixme” tags. Most of the time the issues described in the tags are things that can be fixed if someone goes to survey the place (e.g. “check name”, “does this footpath really exist”). I pick a few of these fixmes, not too far from home, as waypoints for my walk.
2. I usually also go to walking-papers and print myself a simple walking map of the area. I note on this map, the things I need to check.
3. Then I go and walk. These days I usually record the GPS trace of my route using my Android phone (I use the “OSMTracker” app) - it’s handy but not necessary; just walking around with the piece of paper is fine. For some purposes I prefer scribbling on paper, while sometimes it’s quite handy to store notes in the phone.
4. When I come back, I upload the GPS trace and use my notes to update the map, fixing things and removing the “fixme” tag wherever I’ve actually fixed something. The aerial photos that OSM offers (via Bing etc) help to jog your memory as you edit, and often prompt me to add features that I didn’t explicitly note down while I was walking.

Really the best thing about this is that while I’m directly fixing things that people want fixing, I’m also discovering bits of my local area that I had no idea about. There was one walk where I discovered an entire park in North-East London that I had never heard of before (and wasn’t properly mapped yet, either).

The highlight of today was that my route led me past a fantastic seafood place, and just in time for lunch as well!

On OpenStreetMap, I find the /browse/ pages really useful for getting a quick summary of an “object” in the map. It shows when it was edited, shows all the tags, etc.

However, I have two issues with it:

• The use of space isn’t ideal. There’s plenty of unused space which I don’t think is entirely deliberate (of course whitespace is good sometimes) - and the interesting information often gets pushed down below the fold as a result.
• The browse pages have enough information that they should be generally useful, not just as a diagnostic tool for mappers, but maybe for people who want to share the details of the pub they’re going to, or whatever. The main impediment to this is that the initial impact of the page is fairly unfriendly and technical.

I believe the layout can be rearranged in a way which doesn’t remove any of the information that mappers need, but which makes the browse pages more accessible and friendly and hopefully generally useful. This would encourage more casual users to see the tags we have, and… fix them :)

So the main objectives are:

• Make the main heading a bit more approachable, making the “name” (where available) a bit more primary than it currently is.
• Make the “Tags” section a little bit more visually primary (more approachable to newcomers than changeset).
• Make the “last edited” info more compact - it doesn’t need to be a four-row tabulation, but can be as a sentence “Last edited [date] by [user], (version [v] in changeset [c])”. It makes sense to put the “View history” link at the end of this too. Also, it’s more approachable to have the last-edited-date converted to something like “2 months ago”, and for full info it’d be good to have the full date tooltippy.
• Try not to do anything that prevents experienced mappers from getting a visual overview of the more technical info, such as history, XML link, edit links etc.

Work so far is in my github branch called “browsepage”.

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On my blog I made some notes about Diversity and OpenStreetMap, inspired by some of the really interesting talks at SOTM.