I have been on a bit of a MapRoulette binge lately. MapRoulette 2 is coming along nicely and we are at the point where we can start working on the front end. This is where a lot of your suggestions come in. If you have more ideas about how MapRoulette should (not) work, please take a moment to go to that PiratePad and add them. Thanks!

MapRoulette 1 is still very much alive however! Let’s look at what has been happening.

Pedestrian Safety challenges

Last week, I posted new Sidewalk Mapping challenges (Tampa, Salt Lake City, your city?) to help OSM become a better map for getting around as a pedestrian safely in cities in the United States. Given that someone on foot on U.S. streets was hit by a car about every 8 minutes in the past decade, we could use better maps to help prevent accidents.

Speaking of pedestrian safety! Dr. Stefan Keller, a long time OSM enthusiast and founder of the Geometalab at the Hochschule für Technik, Rapperswil launched a really cool initiative to detect missing crosswalks based on analysis of both OSM data and aerial imagery. The results are making their way to MapRoulette, too.

A missing sidewalk example identified by Stefan Keller’s work

GeoJSON

While I was researching the sidewalks issue, I figured I needed an easier way to create challenges from an Overpass query. I decided to use existing components as much as possible and came up with geojson2maproulette, a Python script that leverages the MapRoulette Python API wrapper and the GeoJSON export functionality from Overpass Turbo to make this a pretty easy process. I think it is useful, and I hope you do too. Definitely get in touch if you need help with it or have ideas for improvements.

Floating Ways in China

The latest addition to MapRoulette is a bunch of ‘floating ways’ I happened upon when looking at OSM data in China. To see what I mean by ‘floating ways’, here is a simple example:

What appears to happen a lot when folks are mapping in China is that they trace a bit of road roughly from aerial imagery available, but they do not connect the road to the rest of the network. Although I believe that some (correct) data is better than no data at all, I thought it was worth highlighting these ways. I found more than 9000 in my analysis. If you want to do some mapping in China, this is a great way to get started!

Stay tuned to my diary and follow @maproulette on Twitter if you want to stay informed about what is happening in MapRoulette land! We also have a mailing list and a Slack channel, by the way.