All countries are a monopoly of violence within a given land mass. You cheer for your gang others cheer for their gang and they have so much pride because they were pushed out of their mothers kicking and screaming on that given land mass controlled by that given gang. The borders are to show what gang is in control of what territory and in Crimea it is the Russian Gang. Now the other gangs can pout and get all petty and passive aggressive but they don’t have the land. Again I am impartial on this and Crimea as the default standard border should be part of Russia because the Russian gang is controlling the territory. We can play games and play pretend, but facts don’t care about people’s feelings. I can pretend there are no gangs and erase all the borders, that is what I would like in an ideal world but that isn’t the case and I am not going to advocate for what I wish, but for what is. Sanctions are not the same as control and on the ground truth. History is filled with countries fighting back and forth and getting land back or losing land, look at pre-WWI maps compared to after WWII. Bad things happen in war, and some countries lose. Ukraine lost and doesn’t have the manpower to take it back and is resorting to passive aggressive tactics to pretend like it still has the territory. I am American and I can could not care less what the politicians proclaim when it comes to OSM. Ground truth is king, facts over feelings.

Tomas Straupis it is that simple facts over feelings. I doesn’t matter if Russia is an aggressor or not or the morality of their actions, all that matters is ground truth. OSM should not lie to people about what they should expect on the ground because someone’s feelings may be hurt by reality. And all this FUD and fearmongering to pressure OSM to lie because you know ground truth the one major principle OSM abides by is not inline with the international community is tough luck. OSM isn’t about picking sides of wars and determining who the moral victor is and awarding them borders it is about assessing the on the ground facts and creating a map of the entire world based around that. If OSM strays from that it ceases to be a map but just a database of lies and deceit. Ukraine doesn’t control Crimea, they lost and if they want it back they have to fight for it IRL, then when they win It should go back to them on OSM until then it shouldn’t plain and simple. If I worked in Crimea I would be paying Russian taxes, if I committed a crime I would be charges under Russian Law, if I needed a passport I would need to get a Russian Passport. I am impartial to both Russia’s and Ukrain’s claims I just care about the facts, and OSM’s reputation will be hurt if it misrepresents the truth of the matter on the ground. I want a map to tell me what actually is not what someone happens to feel about an issue at any given moment. That is true in Russia, Ukrain, Pakistan, India, Egypt, Sudan, Israel or any country with borders disputes. Ground Truth is objective, filters out bias and is verifiable and that is far better metric than opinions and endless arguing.

Tomas Straupis I am not calling for wars but calling for truth. If Ukraine wants territory it has to be able to control it plain and simple. It isn’t cooperating with Russia to state the fact that they control the area, to claim otherwise would be a lie. OSM is supposed to be above all political disputes, if you give in here and lie to everyone about the ground truth then India and Pakistan will bring in their disputes, and so on and so forth. I was not in favor if ISIS but believed they should have been represented on the map out of ground truth. Once you step outside of ground truth for border you open a floodgate of controversies. This may be personal issue but you have to try to be impartial and objective here.

I think the sensible policy would be to change the areas that Russia controls to show Russia controls them. We can play the game of he said she said when it comes to territory but physical control should be the only determining factor when it comes to borders. If countries want the borders back they simply need to take back control of the area if they don’t then simply they should shut up about the border (put up or shut up policy). When it comes to active military zones where boarders are changing constantly, then having a 6 month snapshot policy or conflict area boarder that shows that the area is an active military zone where borders are in flux. I side with the Russians on this because when it comes to borders it has to be ground truth, who controls it, who is enforcing laws, who is collecting the taxes. If you don’t do that then you simply are misrepresenting the area. If I am traveling or living in an area I don’t care about what some random Bureaucrat says some international law is I care about the ground conditions. If you think otherwise then you are impractical and are opening OSM to various different conflicts that simply cannot be resolved. Ground truth is the fundamental principal that resolves disputes and creates the simplest impartial resolution. What are your thoughts?

I would say ground truth, whoever is physically controlling the landmas gets the border. If Catalonia runs things and Spain only politically disputes it it spins off as it’s own country. If Spain sends in troops / replacement police and occupies Catalonia then it remains as part of Spain’s borders.

How long does it usually take from version release to deployment on OSM.org?

I would love if you did this for New Haven, it has nearly 100% building coverage non import pure community effort.

The problem is that Maps.Me has outdated maps, sometimes being months behind or more. POIs could have been added which all ready exist and the contributors just simply don’t know. The editor is new and being aimed at new contributors it is even harder to design for. There may be a Maps.Me bot that cleans up edits or the editor may be able to check if similar data all ready exists in the area and warn the contributor. Their UI is mostly on track and with a few future fixes these problems should be ironed out. OSM needs a larger POI dataset and Maps.Me wants to make it easier to allow new users to contribute it.

A suggestion would be to add a filter / search and include presets for well know chains like Walmart, McDonalds, Subway. Also having synonyms for example salon and barber point towards hairdresser. For mappers that have recently added POIs, having a recent tag list so you don’t have to re search if you are adding benches or restaurants. The above should make it easier for experienced mappers and experienced alike. You are on the right tack though, the UI is clean and to the point which I like.

There is one problem I do foresee, since the map data you download is out of date(Up to a month), it is possible you could be adding POIs that all ready exist.

This has a nice interface with the relevant info front and center. This should allow for simple editing, mainly quickly adding a POI. It has the address, phone and opening hours front and center which is the information you want if you want to get information on a store / poi. I used Vespucci, but this seems even easier for adding POI’s. Great job, as an editor it does one thing and well and as such it carves out a sorely needed niche in mobile editors.

What exactly does Western mean anyways? Africa is just as Western geographically than Europe. Wouldn’t it make more sense to describe the bias as being Super-Saharan? The Geographic area is Sub-Saharan (below or south of the Saharan desert), Super-Saharan (meaning above or North of the Saharan desert) are all areas North of the Saharan Desert mainly North Africa and Europe. Culturally speaking does it really make sense to split things Western / Eastern / Non Western? Africa alone is culturally diverse, does it really make sense to lump a whole continent together culturally, the same goes with the “Middle East” and “Asia”? Not to mention immigrants, and other populations that don’t even share the same culture as the population in an area in whole. It also seems to only be deployed to divide people, giving an us them, dichotomy. I feel precision in the language would be better served giving better context and articulation of the differences in this case a geographic area.

As for this problem this is probably best dealt in the editor, having local preferences where the roads can be tagged according to whatever tagging convention there is. In this case it may be better to just tag the road as a road(whatever kind of road) and add the surface tags. That way routing can take into context the conditions, and you still can tag roads differently according to their purpose. If editors had shortcut to these tagged roads or ask for the surface tags more predominantly in the editor. The other thing would simply have armchiar mappers just follow a convention in the instructions and have the validation and proper tags added by the on the ground surveyors / locals.

Welcome, where are you from?

How were polygons being taken from OSM? Do they have an input tool or did they manually take the polygons? Who was taking the polygons anyway, were these one off users, companies, educational institutions?

I would like to see more context but from the like the person called up a member’s employer and tried to spread information of their supposed illegal activity. It also said this person in question made offers of assassination funds for the deaths of other mappers. I don’t think we need to explicitly state this just as we don’t need to remind people on the foundation to eat, breath and excrete body waste. If you slander or threaten people it is crossing not only the foundations principles but legal ones. This seems to be in an active police investigation and not much more should be needed.

@woodpeck, Missing Maps isn’t just armchair mapping it is armchair mapping paired with a one the ground local mappers adding more information to the map. Furthermore tools like OpenMapKit have been developed to aid local collection of data and it relies on previous arm chair mapped objects that can have further on the ground information added to it. OSM is open and free for people to make their own tags or add the map features they care about. OSM is an international project and can be molded to the interests of the users. If you like movie thearters add them. if you like water pumps / fountains add them If you like brothels add them. NGO’s can push the map features they care about but that doesn’t come at the expense of map features locals may care about. In many times it is complementary, address data and buildings give geographic references for routing and can be used to add POIs and other information you care about. It serves as a base-map to add the layers you care about to. Like a ratchet it helps push things forward progressing the map forward. In the end locals don’t need maps for their immediate neighborhood, maps are used for and by people outside of where they immediately live to gain the knowledge of that area that locals all ready process.

I mapped a section of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania earlier this summer as part of Missing maps. I added road networks and building footprints to the area. Basic stuff but building footprints can get a bit dense in some residential areas. I checked back to see what happened to the area I mapped and to my surprise it all ready had shop POIs, building addresses, footpaths and other on the ground information added. I have employed similar techniques where I trace buildings and do road fixups then survey an area to add POIs. I call this method the “Double Tap”. The base information added is a nice platform to add the rest of the features people may care about.

Even incomplete data helps, the more information that is added the more use-cases the data can provide. A road network with no road names can allow you to navigate to other known geographic regions. Place names allow you to find where villages, towns and cities are and can aid navigation to those areas. Having a road network mapped allows you to navigate between towns and cities and keep you on the right road even when forks make that ambiguous. Having road names then allows people to navigate to even more specific places in a town / city knowing the closest cross street aids with the navigation to the closest section in that road to the destination. Then addresses allow you to find the exact destination without the need of cross street information. POIs allow you to semantically find places you may want to go to or facilities that satisfy your needs. Where is the closest cinema? Where can I get water? Where can I get Chinese food? These are all questions that can be answered with POIs.

POIs allow people to add the features they care about into the map. In the end POIs are the last thing to fully complete as it is a moving target and constantly changing. It requires the most work and diligence to keep it reliable and in the end provides locals with the most tangible benefits. In the end locals need to know how to edit, and how to make use of the data so that it fits their use cases and contains the information they care about. This last part is the problem that needs to be solved as it is the endgame the problem that if solved keeps the data fresh useful and relevant and impact in the daily lives of people. I don’t have a solution for that yet but at least there is a target.

Some of these edits would be fine if they contributed to the open historic map. I would suggest a script that sends a message to users that add demolished=yes or other historic tags to go to OpenHistoricMap. I wouldn’t ascribe troll behavior to this as it may just be ignorance. These were features people cared about and now they are no longer there and they may have added the tags so they can hold onto the memory of the places while noting it was no longer there. It would be more productive to help channel their knowledge of historic or places to contribute to a project that welcomes such information.

I have been tempted to add bullshit tags to homeopathic and psychic establishments. bullshit=yes . Would it be a troll tag, well I am leaning towards no as if their practices weren’t bullshit they would be part of modern medicine or at least one would have claimed the James Randi $1000000.00 prize.

OSM is for things that are more permanent. This is a useful problem where maps are important for these temporary events. What I would recommend is mapping all that can be mapped in OSM the permanent structures the event location facilities, buildings, permanent gates or fences / parking. Then you can use that as the base map to make the map of the temporary event. The good thing about that is that there is less work you have to do the next year as the base map data is still there and you never have to start from scratch. You can share your custom event .osm file with others and it can be opened in tools that can display it. KDE’s Marble globe can load .OSM files, you also can render your own tiles and serve them up just for the event using the OSM stack and a modified theme.