Before I went to visit Carroll County in North Central Ohio for a weekend in July, its state in OSM was really poor. It consisted mostly of TIGER-imported ways that hadn’t been whose geometry hadn’t been changed since the original TIGER Import in 2008. In many cases, the roads’ geometry didn’t make up with reality. Some roads were 30 meters off of where they really are; small townships of 10-20 streets on the map were like jigsaw puzzle pieces that needed to be rotated; random roads were in the middle of grassy fields. One exception to it was Carrollton, the largest city in the county, which was improved very well by OSM user Evan Edwards.

After that weekend, I corrected some road geometries and added a dozen or so POIs. and wondered how long it will take me to fix all of the roads in the county and what would it reveal about editing TIGER data.

Answer: a lot longer than I thought! (~30 hours over a couple months). Near the end, it honestly became a chore. But I want to see how it would like visually, I didn’t want to do that work for nothing…

How I did it (very briefly): I was able to more quickly improve the ways by using where I’d copy the geometry from a TIGER2013 file; verify that the TIGER13 matches the aerial imagery better than the existing way.

This a great strategy and I’d advise anyone who is interested in improving TIGER-imported ways in the future.

Watch a quick example of this workflow in the GIF.

… See full entry

There’s been quite a few updates to the HDM-JOSM style, a map style for JOSM developed by HOT focused JOSM users who are mapping in developing countries and areas that have experienced humanitarian or natural crises. Find more about the HDM-JOSM Style at this June blog post

Since the initial version that was released in June, we’ve made several improvements to it, mostly bug fixes
and improving the color scheme so that it is easier to see and trace objects for all kinds of satellite imagery (wetlands, desert, and urban areas)

To use:

If you’re using JOSM that is newer than version 6152, Just Select HOT/HDM in JOSM’s Available Map Styles List (Located in JOSM Preferences

Those that are using a version older than 6152 will have to manually add the map style and use this different link http://ubuntuone.com/252trPHQ7upvvFXtcAXLF5 due to a bug in older versions of JOSM

Your version of JOSM appears at startup launch screen if you don’t know your version.

We encourage your contributions and feedback on our github page

Earlier this week, I was talking with a friend who just moved from Massachusetts to Cleveland, they were a bit surprised about the use of middle school and junior high were both used to describe schools consisting of Grades 6-8.

I was curious about this myself and wondered which was used more often in Ohio and this general outline that I use for counting the use of middle school and junior high in Ohio can be applied if you want to see which tag is used more often in a specific state, country, or other place.

Since I was just looking for a state wide comparision, I couldn’t use the USA implementation of taginfo which uses the entire USA.

So, for my state of ohio, I figured this answer out by: 1. downloading an extract of my state from geofabrik.

1. Create the postgis database for it (I have ubuntu 12.04, postgis 2.0, postgresql 9.1, assume you already have this installed; commands may be slightly different - I should spell this step out more clearly in a different post since I never found good documentation for this when I first starting learning this back in ‘11.): createdb nameofyourdatabase

psql -d nameofyourdatabase -c “CREATE EXTENSION postgis;” 3. Creating an osm2pgsql databse with it. osm2pgsql -s -d nameofyourdb ~/path/to/data.osm.pbf

1. Using pgadmin, with the gui, I connected to my database and I clicked on magnifying glass with SQL within it and entered the following SQL. input the following SQL:

SELECT name from planet_osm_polygon WHERE lower(name) ~ ‘junior high’ UNION ALL select name from planet_osm_point WHERE lower(name) ~ ‘junior high’ ORDER BY name

(thanks to Paul Norman to assist me with the proper SQL query syntax).

If you are interested in generated statistics of tags or creating maps using postgresql in OSM data, most of your interaction with postgresql will be creating queries and using SELECT statements.

… See full entry

Open Geo Cleveland, Cleveland’s informal user group that discusses all things mappy (especially OSM) and geospatial in the open world, held its 3rd meeting on Tuesday night with 15-20 passionate people in attendence.

Our theme was parks and it was really appropriate with the activity going on with NPMAP and OSM, and the use of open source GIS software and web mapping libraries being used by the Cleveland Metroparks, a parks system in Northeast Ohio, and the activity with Code for America, and the offshoot Code For Summit County, their activity to produce a mapping application for Summit County’s Parks and Trails (prototype available here).

One of Cleveland’s OSM editors, Ray H., oobleck, mostly maps trails and park amenities in OSM, shared his experiences and what’s he learned. I also gave a quite demonstration of editing park amenities within OSM using iD as well.

Steve Mather gave a presentation on Cartodb 2.1. It has matured in recent months and lets you design your maps in CartoCSS, the same language that’s used in Tilemill.

Persa Zula and Jeff Schuler spoke about the activity with Code For Summit County, a Code for America Brigade who is continuing their work from the National Day of Civic Hacking to building a mapping application for Summit County’s Parks and Hiking Trails.

To our great surprise, we learned that Cuyahoga Valley National Park (CVNP), just 15 miles away from Cleveland and between Cleveland and Akron, was selected as an additional pilot park for Places of Interest, the collaboration between NPS and OSM for sharing data from National Park Service and integrating it into OpenStreetMap.

Anthony Gareau, a GIS Specialist at CVNP, in attendance, announced this to us and we discussed and brainstormed what we’d like to come of this and how we can collaborate with NPS and CVNP in the future.

… See full entry

While in Limonade, Haiti for 6 weeks, April 30 - June 22, I was a part of HOT’s project, in partnership with the Universite d’Etat Haiti and USAID, to help teach mapping and OSM skills to 60 mappers and establish an OSM community in Northern Haiti. Here’s a snapshot of what a typical (although most days were not typical, this was a typical as it was) day consisted of.

Follow along with this umapO

For photos, check out these flickr sets: One and Two

6:45a - Shower with water from the house well, dressed, breakfast. The 15 housemates - 12 Advanced Mappers, two local coordinators, and 3 other HOT coordinators - begin to wake up within the hour. Read and reply to new emails.
Also used this time to learn python, thanks to Zed Shaw’s Learn Python the Hard Way

8:10 All 16 of us - 12 Advanced Mappers, two local coordinators, and 4 HOT coordinators pile into 2 vans to the Universite d’Etat d’Haiti’s Computer lab where we worked out of for the majority of our time there. The 12 advanced mappers and the 2 local coordinators were participants in last year’s St. Marc project and were relatively experienced with editing in OSM.

We established a system with 6 teams consisting of 2 Advanced mappers who supervised 10 novice mappers (participants whom had not edited OSM before they were hired at the beginning of the program in March) whose daily activities would rotate every 3 days. Each day, 2 teams would spend their day in the field surveying, 2 other teams remained at the computer lab, tracing buildings in anticipation of the following day’s field surveying or adding POIs that they recorded via GPS traces during their field surveys, and the remaining 2 teams’ novice mappers were off. The 4 advanced mappers of the team off would assist at the computer lab and continue editing. As necessary, we’d hold workshop days where all 60 mappers were in attendance for workshops and presentations on QGIS, and cartography and GIS concepts.

… See full entry

For the first time, Cleveland participated in the OSM editathon on Saturday, April 20 at the Cleveland Public Library’s Map Collection. We joined a dozen cities across the USA in a coordinated effort to improve OpenStreetMap.

Eleven people of all ages and professions attended the Cleveland editathon, locally organized by Open Geo Cleveland, a Cleveland group that meets bi-monthly to discuss all things mappy and geospatial in the open world.

Our attendees consisted of the emerging OSM community in Cleveland and as well as those new to OSM. One attendee, Dennis, came all the way from the Akron, 40 miles away ! Another one of our attendees was jwolter, one of the first OpenStreetMap editors in the US ! We also had a couple OSM users who were from local public GIS agencies.

… See full entry

Open Geo Cleveland, the user group devoted to all things mappy and GIS in the free world, had our 2nd meeting last night. 22 in attendance.

I started out by doing a quick run-through of OSM’s background for 5-10 minutes for those who may have missed the first meeting.. (our crowd was roughly 60/40 current attendees: new people) and demonstrated some editing in iD, the new OSM editor. It’s very mature given that it’s been in development for just a couple months, doesn’t have any real dealbreakers at the moment for this situation. Great job to the devs including the mapbox team.

To anyone considering on using it at mapping parties; I’d say yes but note that it doesn’t have any conflict detection (for people uploading in the same area) and no support for loading in GPS traces as of now.

I started off with simple examples, with a node,a line, and an area in a local neighborhood, applying tags to them, editing existing features. The GUI in iD is pretty intuitive. Questions came in as I mapped on the large screen as I hoped and attendees gave out some information to add to the POIs that we traced using bing imagery, Resulting in this changeset.

In the meeting announcement, I had strongly encouraged people to bring their laptops in the meeting for editing but less than half did. (As an aside: just curious, other mapping party people, what percentage of people bring laptops ? In retrospect, I could have mentioned aloud for people to partner up and those without laptops to join those who had one).

… See full entry

Over 25 people attended our 2013 kick-off of the OpenStreetMap/FOSSGIS/OpenGeo/Geospatial group in Cleveland Thursday. GIS Techs, a professor, retired schoolteacher, web developers, and others of all ages. All had the shared interest of learning more about OpenStreetMap and Open-source geospatial software. This being our first meeting, we began doing brief introductions and sought to solicit what sort of topics that we to focus on in the coming months.

We did 3 presentations aimed to give a brief, broad overview of these tools and technologies and hoped to inspire attendees of some possible things that they’d like to learn more about and continue the discussion.

• I made an introductory presentation on OSM (pdf) including simple facts on the project, places well-mapped in Cleveland, some beautiful maps made using OSM data, and showing them how to make an edit. egads ! The internet wasn’t working for me during my presentation, so I had to improvise a bit and couldn’t do any live editing for them. an

• Stephen Mather presented on postGIS and spatial databases pdf.

• Jeff Schuler on slippy maps and integration into Drupal (pdf) used at http://criticalmaps.com and http://gardenwalkcleveland.org

After our presentations, we chatted for a bit about different projects that people were brainstorming (map of publically accessible toilets, a la that one Seinfeld episode ? map of public parking and real-time prices ?), what subjects they’d like to learn about more here, and what they’d like the group to look like (in organization, logistics, our name - still haven’t decided on one yet). Interest was expressed in all of the topics mentioned: desktop uses like GRASS and QGIS, and postgis, and more web-oriented things like cartodb, web mapping APIs, although the largest interest was for OpenStreetMap. Overall, our meeting went 2 hours, longer than we anticipated and people stayed throughout it !

… See full entry

Do not comment on this diary entry.

this is just a test for https://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/4686

(Note: I also updated this entry to include some American usage, etc. When I wrote this diary entry, I was referring to this version of the wiki article.

While tagging some local amenities in Cleveland, I was wondering how to tag funeral homes (places to mourn and remember those deceased before burial and cremation. In the USA, these places also embalm the body - prepare it for burial or cremation, and have a small office where the undertaker takes care of paperwork). I haven’t been to any funeral homes that also bury people on their grounds and such places may exist.

So, quick search of the wiki for funeral brought up one ‘official’ tag for these places, shop=funeral_directors. I never heard it called as a ‘funeral director’ before and conjures up in American minds, perhaps the name of the person who runs, or directs the operations. I chalk this up to just another British English usage in OSM (I never heard of High Street either, also referenced in that wiki article).

Taginfo returned 1000+ uses of shop=funeral_directors compared to the ~100 uses of other tags that use ‘funeral’ in the value.

To consider it as a ‘shop’ seems a bit cold in an American and likely possibly other cultural perspectives as well. Humbly, classifying it under amenity would be a bit more appropriate although that discussion gets to the more abstract point of what makes a shop and what makes an amenity and whether they are mutually exclusive, distinctions which vary from culture to culture.

So, I was doing some quick mappinmg in downtown cleveland and saw that I hadn’t added Cleveland’s greyhound station yet.

I was wondering:

would this station fall public_transport=station or amenity=bus_station ? For now, I’m guessing public_transport=station

Although the bus_station tag is used far more often around the world.

Plus, with semantics: Greyhound is a private company, whose trips are longer than 60km, typically they’re hundreds of km apart. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyhound_Lines

I just noticed that Portland, Oregon, has a pretty sophisticated city page on the osm wiki ! osm.wiki/Portland,_Oregon

• Any other people use their city’s wiki page to manage things that need to be mapped, highlight what has been, and other projects underway ? Show it off !

• How effective has your city’s page been to coordinate features needed to be mapped in the area ?

Comparatively, Cleveland’s page is relatively sparse but has ways to go.

While going through the rest of my GPS traces from the HOT exploratory mission in Senegal more on that in a series of blog posts, I had found one GPS trace that has 2 problems that I’ve occasionally experienced while collecting gps traces for OpenStreetMapL

• The GPS signal is temporarily lost and the distance between 2 points of your trace is abnormally lengthy, and cuts across roads and features.

An example: Did I time-travel across that area ? Nope.

… See full entry

Getting ready for the OSM Cleveland Mapping Party this Saturday.

Like any mapping party, one of the things we’ll be doing is going out and mapping the Ohio City neighborhood.

For android users, there’s osmtracker or osmdroid which allows you to record a GPS tracks, make a voice recording note (which is my preferred way of recording information), make geo-encoded photos, and see where you’re at using an OSM map.

One of my friends who’ll be in attendance was wondering about recommended iPhone apps and I was clueless.

There’s numerous apps on Iphone/ipad that use OSM apps according to the wiki, but it can be a bit overwhelming (And outdated…) to figure out what ones are most popular and robust with features.

Are there any great apps for iPhone and iPad users that utilize OSM and have features including:

• GPX recording

Recommended, but not required would be: - Geotagging Photos - geotagging recordings - easy POI recording

• There is the table on that wiki, but as I mentioned, it appears to be woefully outdated, incomplete, although I’m trying to update where I can (although I don’t have an iPhone to verify whether such features exist in the applications and their websites don’t include that information). For example, GPS Kit is listed in this table, but the app’s website shows screenshots which include google maps loaded … Unfortunately, I found a couple apps listed which dropped OSM support (endomondo, sports-tracker). =(

On a related note, I know a few fellow cyclists in cleveland who use apps (like endomondo - Gmaps only) to share their routes with friends, gives stats (miles rode), set workout goals, acts as a speedometer, etc) for their workouts…

It would be great to see an iphone app that uses OSM and acts like endomondo.. Does such an app exist ? If it does, it would be a great selling point for those cyclists to start editing on OSM.

Well, the redaction is over. woohoo.

So, in other news, I was trying to figure out what objects (only a few in my area) were edited by the redaction bot, which has the user name OSMF Redaction Account.

After spending a few minutes in josm, searching bug reports, I found the answer.

Typically in josm, you could find a user’s edits by going to search and then entering user:usersname in the box. However, If the user name has a space in it, then it doesn’t work.

Instead, you must put the user name in quotes.

So, to find the objects that were last edited by the Redaction bot, enter in:

user:”OSMF Redaction Account”

Note this only search for the person who LAST edited the object. If someone else had already edited the object after the ‘OSMF Redaction Account’ then the object will not be returned in your search.

Hopefully this is helpful to others as well =)

Last Friday, I attended my first NEO (Northeast Ohio) GIS users meetup (which featured a great presentation by Jen Ziemke, CrisisMappers Co-Founder). There, I met Steve Mather, a local GIS analyst, who’s interested in OSM, wanted to learn more about it, and knew of a couple others in the area who were also interested, including a member of the Baldwin-Wallace College ACM.

Tuesday Night, I gave a presentation to 5 at the BW ACM meeting on Openstreetmap, editing conventions and standards, sources of data to add, the contrasts of and benefits of using OSM in addition to or instead of Google Mapmaker (Several of our attendees were GoogleMapMaker contributors) and we tossed around some ideas of what we’d like to see mapped in Cleveland and the Cleveland area. As the only currently active contributor in Cleveland for over a year, it was exciting to see growing interest !

We’re scheduling a brief mapping party [likely a weekday evenings during the week of May 21] at Baldwin-Wallace College (since the campus is very poorly mapped) and I’ll walk users through how to add data. As soon as the date, time, and specific location are confirmed, I’ll add it to the Event Calendar. It will be the first OSM mapping party in Cleveland since 2009 (although I’m not sure if that event ever had taken place] !

Just a couple days ago, I noticed the Cuyahoga County GIS dept. had signed up for an OSM account and made a couple edits ! I’ve contacted them and I’m excited to hear about their plans with OSM =)

The question has probably been asked before although I couldn’t find it in the help centre….

Using GPS_Scripts (awesome set of scripts by Alexander Avtanski), I’ve made a cool image of my gpx files from March 2011 to November 2011 which is below:

Click here for a larger image

Unfortunately, I forgot to back up my gps traces from march 2011 and earlier. and they’re only still on the OSM server.

Is there any automated way to download them ? They’re still here on the OSM server, I’d rather not click save as dozens of times :p

In other news, curious: why does the secondary_link appear to be underneath residential ways on the mapnik layer here on OSM ?

That way in question has highway=secondary_link as its only tag and the intersecting residential ways have highway=residential and oneway=no tags...

Check it out on:
osm.org/?lat=14.757354&lon=-17.391758&zoom=18&layers=M

(For those interested in obdl re-mapping, there's a few ways near Dakar, western Senegal, and the Gambia because of a certain decliner.....As a bonus, there's very new bing imagery here, [imagery is from 2011, and just added a few weeks ago].

I was just browsing the map earlier and noticed the Hudson Bay is missing a significant chunk of itself.

I did a quick search, sounds like there's problems with the coastline.
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2011-November/060662.html

Anyone else have new info on it ?

If I have time, I'll try to take a look at it...

A map of Automobile related fatalities in the USA made by ITO World was included in this blog post by the Guardian.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2011/nov/22/us-road-accident-casualties

ITO World used OSM data as the underlining base map. =)

Great to always see another example of how OSM can be used to create great informative maps.

(On the other hand, the map would be more informative if ITO world could reformat the data to also include population density or total automobiles used).