Ruben Martin and I discuss recent highlights and what’s coming up in the humanitarian open mapping community.

What’s covered this week in brief?

Syria / Turkey earthquake response // Community Working Group mentorship programme // OSM Ethiopia community-led activation // Community research on barriers to women’s participation in OSM // International Women’s Day // Month activites and events // Mappy quote of the week

What’s happened this week?

Syria / Turkey earthquake response: The response to the Turkey Syria earthquake has continued, with more than 8,500 mappers contributing to the data.

The validation of the data is still a heavy task, and the validation team is working so hard to keep up with the volume of mapping. Please be careful with your mapping and make sure the data that you create and they review is as good as it can be! This video from Becky Candy should help you if you are new to mapping.

Also want to congratulate Said for receiving UN Mapper of the Month for his role in coordinating the data response in the days following the earthquake.

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MapComplete user census

As you noticed, MapComplete ran a user survey during january. What did it tell us?

The use survey had a few goals, namely:

• discovering what demographies are using MapComplete (and which are missing)
• and discovering what needs and wants are still there

Basic demography

The first question is of course: who did fill out the survey? If we look to the numbers, a clear pattern emerges.

The age distribution looks pretty normal - there is a clear peak around the bucket 30-40, which falls down left and right.

The gender is not as balanced. Unsurprisingly, the majority of respondents is male:

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Realization:

UMBRAOSM - Union of Brazilian Openstreetmap Mappers www.umbraosm.com.br https://t.me/grupoumbraosm

BRAZIL - PARINTINS - AMAZONAS - UNMAPPED AREAS IN THE TERRITORY OF THE CITY OF PARINTINS.

link para a task manage da hot: https://tasks.hotosm.org/projects/14395

Paritins is a city in the North of Brazil and is located in the state of Amazonas - Brazil, according to 2020 information, the municipality of parintins (AM) has 115,363 inhabitants and needs mapping throughout its municipal boundary.

Mapping in the city of Parintins/AM - Brazil will be done by beginner and advanced mappers and aims to include buildings, rural roads, rivers, points of interest (shops in general, schools, health clinics, squares) and green areas in the places of kills, thus improving the OSM data.

Many buildings are very close but not really touching. Try to map them as closely as possible without allowing them to connect with each other or the streets.

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Hello! I would like to present a python package written by me.

What’s the point of this package?

This package was created to provide an easy way to create automated scripts and programs that use diff and/or osm api. The main advantage is the classes (data_classes) that provide data of elements (node, way, relation, OsmChange, etc.) in a readable way and the possibility to use them in diff and api without worrying about missing data or dictionaries. You can easily find nodes in diff, add a tag to them and send the corrected version to osm.

More on github

I would love to see your project written using this package!

I started drafting this after b-unicycling’s report on her trip to Anglesey as it reminded me that when mapping solar power on the island, I’d noticed a lot of old windmills.

In most of Wales there were abundant sources of water power. So water mills were common before steam engines were available. Many were corn mills, but woollen mills were also common. There was even a tidal mill at Carew.

The only one of these Anglesey windmills I knew about beforehand was the one on Parys Mountain. The stump of the tower is visible from afar. It was used for pumping water out of the copper mines (at one point the largest in the world).

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Unique Mappers Team (UMT) organized a meeting for the Keynote speakers, Panelists, Trainers and School Outreach Volunteers on Mar 6, 2023 ,12:30pm to 1:00pm (GMT+01:00) West Africa Standard Time, via the virtual platform -Zoom. The purpose of the meeting was to conclude and finalize on the plans which have being put in place for the International Women’s Day event, which will hold from 8th March - 22nd March, 2023. It was a great avenue to discuss with people of like minds.

Really excited to have joined the meeting where updates were given by the Local Organizing Committee (LOC) as regards the forthcoming 2023 State of The Map Africa Conference, which is designated to hold in Cameroon. I look forward to the successful accomplishment of the plans in motion and how beautifully the conference would turn out.

Well, I finally got around to trying to undelete the bit of trail in Redwood National Park between Tall Trees and Emerald Ridge, which didn’t take long because I’d already done the hard bit of finding which way that was by finding the deletion changeset. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of things in this area that nag at me. For instance, while I was (not) discovering if there was any reason the trail was deleted, I sorted out the nag about getting the seasonal bridges correctly tags for that attribute. Maybe. It could be “seasonal=summer/autumn” (used on the bridges) or “seasonal=dry_season” used on the trail. Does dry season start when the rains end or when the creek starts to get low too? Because that creek stays high into the dry, making summer/autumn possibly more accurate. Dry/wet season also can require some lookup. If I saw something was “wet_season” in the southwest US deserts, a few years ago I’d expect that means winter, but now I know it might actually mean July and August, when the monsoonal moisture comes through, but when the southwest US coast I grew up on has average monthly rainfall of 0.04 inches.

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Dear community,

anyone has an idea where to find shape files from Latam/Peru? Best wishes and hugs, Anne

During the COVID-19 outbreak, online conferences became more popular as that was the only way for conferences to happen, State of the Map Africa 2021 happened online as well, which made the conference more accessible to people than before, a record 597 participants joined through Hopin the conference platform which had features that allowed participants to actively engage and interact.

Post COVID-19, there is now interest in organizing hybrid events instead of going back to completely offline conferences, to take advantage of the benefits that come with an online event that makes a conference more accessible. During the State of the Map Tanzania 2023 conference we tried out the hybrid set up, with a view that it would also help us prepare for State of the Map Africa 2023, in Yaounde Cameroon, which is going to be a hybrid event. Below I share lessons learned that may be helpful for other conference organizers in setting up a hybrid event

To set up a hybrid conference, you need at least five basic things

1. A conference platform for online and offline participants to engage and interact. The conference platform should have an option for embedding livestreams from YouTube or directly from a streaming software. The platform should also have chat, Q&A, polls, reply and comment features. Options for speed networking, booths for sponsors, etc. There are hundreds of conference platforms out there, below are some that have been used at State of the Map and related Conferences;

• Venueless - used at State of the Map 2021 and State of the Map 2022
• Hopin - used at the HOT Summit 2021 and State of the Map Africa 2021
• Livefi - used at State of the Map Tanzania 2023
• Airmeet - used at Wiki Indaba 2021

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The idea

This entry will describe one application of our GNIS matching program using a very narrow slice of the dataset.

While looking through the Populated Place feature class, I noticed a rather substantial number of names for mobile home parks. I was immediately reminded of the MapSwipe effort in coordination with YouthMappers and the ASU Knowledge Exchange for Resilience.

The full GNIS file has ~7000 entries that look like they will very likely be the location and name of a mobile home park. Running the GNIS Matcher against the ones in Arizona gives 516 places to check the map for either tagging improvement or new geometry.

You can check out the project here.

How to map

There is an amazing guide produced by ASU that has a huge amount of detail about mapping mobile homes. Definitely look it over.

Tagging

An area drawn to represent a mobile home park should have tagging like:

landuse=residential
residential=trailer_park
name=Estrella Villa Mobile Home Park

There is occasionally some confusion between this and a similar tag tourism=caravan_site. This tagging may also show up in places with trailers/RVs but the intent is for that to mark temporary stopping locations, similar to tourism=camp_site.

The matcher would also like a GNIS ID included. The appropriate tagging looks like:

gnis:feature_id=2669824

Drawing areas

In general, try to draw a boundary that encompasses all of the residences. There are often clues in aerial imagery that help delineate the specific park from other areas (guide). Look for fences, pavement differences, and road connectedness to guide your judgement. If there is high ambiguity, it may be helpful to leave a Note for local mappers.

Street side imagery from Mapillary or Bing Streetview is often helpful and has the appropriate license for OSM use.

Examples

No area found, needs mapping

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Hello community. While I was mapping, I noticed there are not many electrical charging stations yet on OSM. Since the world is fighting to lower the carbon emissions, and electrical vehicles are bought in high demand.

We should not forget to add public electric charging stations on the maps. It can help a lot to be the first all in one service that you not need to install another centralized app for finding your nearest charging station.

I am a developer at an energy research institute, and so the topic of electric vehicles and charging stations is one that comes up often in my discussions with colleagues. One colleague mentioned that they were struggling to do a study in a specific city but was lamenting how hard it was to find data for them. Naturally, I suggested using OSM.

While not outright shot down, the idea was politely dismissed, citing that the OSM data is simply too unreliable and not detailed enough to perform the kind of analysis that they wanted. My initial reaction was to jump to the defense of OSM, but I realized that I don’t really know the data quality of this specific corner of the database.

I was already planning to attend the Karlsruhe OSM hackacthon at Geofabrik on February 26th and 27th, and so I decided I would make it my mission to analyze the quality of the charging station data as deeply as I could in those two days (and some time thereafter). Obviously, as with any analysis of OSM quality, seemingly simple questions balloon into exponentially difficult answers, fraught with tedious subtleties.

Despite this, I have come to a few conclusions that I thought I should share that are specifically targeted at assessing the quality of OSM charging station data for use in electrical engineering research. First, here are some definitions I will use so as not to repeat tedious, specific technical definitions:

• Charging station: An OSM feature tagged with “amentiy=charging_station”
• Charging station point: Such a feature with a “node” geometry type
• Charging station polygon: Such a feature with a “way” geometry type

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There are numerous standards and tagging practices being used to map subdivisions in the Philippines. Here I listed some of the current practices, and my own standard that aims to be more fitting for subdivisions.

Note that I am referring to gated subdivision communities (that have the block lot scheme) and not barangays that happen to be named with a “subdivision”.

Current practices

Below are some that I have seen and the problems with it.

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Back in July 2022, I started mapping schools in Chandigarh. Now that I’m thinking, it wasn’t mapping schools (Oberaffe had already marked areas and added amenity=school tags a decade earlier) but adding names and a bunch of other information tags to those. It was a fun little activity which lead, in my estimate, touching of all schools (and a bunch of colleges as well), which numbered ~200 in Chandigarh and periphery. Areas where I had issues adding data have been populated with fixme tags for in area mappers to help out. Most of the data has flowed to downstream applications like OSMand and Organic maps, which look nice and full now, just like all the yellow areas on standard map.

On to the next adventure, to mark schools (and colleges) in Panchkula; Chandigarh’s next door neighbor.

So, I went to visit a friend in Westport, Ireland for a few days, stopping in Dublin on the way. I tracked all the bus routes and painstakingly added them to OSM during my stay and when I got home. There were five bus routes in total:

• bus 760 from Dublin Airport to Galway
• bus 456 from Galway to Westport
• bus 450 from Westport to Murrisk and back
• bus 450 from Westport to Dooagh on Achill Island and back
• bus 440 from Westport to Athlone
• bus 73 from Athlone to Kilkenny

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This is a cross-post from my blog.

This post is a follow-up on my series on GoPro Max panoramic imagery capture for Mapillary. Find part 1 here and part 2 here.

To capture true 360 degree images with a camera that has just two lenses, compromises are unavoidable. Optics dictate that a lens that captures a 180 degree field of view will have some image sharpness falloff at the edges of the field of view. I hadn’t considered this when I first started capturing with the GoPro MAX. I just mounted it the way I would a regular GoPro and didn’t give it another thought:

Until I started looking at the result more closely. Here’s a detail of a recent capture:

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This diary entry contains a wrap-up of discussions on the osm forum, (dutch section and general section). I’ve tried to capture all that has been said into a logical narrative and solution proposal.

Improved mapping of embankments

Objective

Establish improved mapping of embankments. This includes small embankments and large embankments; one-sided, two-sided and irregular embankments; embankments to contain and to protect against water, embankments to support roads and railways, and embankments serving as a traffic barrier, visual barrier or sound barrier. The aim is mainly to enable fuller rendering on maps, including at least the extent of the slopes. It is NOT the intention to establish full mapping of all aspects of embankments. However, it also should not exclude richer mapping of embankments in the future.

Starting point

Embankments can currently be mapped as:

embankment=yes on a way on the crest of the embankment.
This is especially useful if there is a road, track or path on top of the embankment. Some renderers also handle a single way tagged only with embankment=yes, without a main tag. The tag can modify the rendering of the way, to suggest it is supported by an embankment. Comparable to how a way can be altered by the tag bridge=yes. Other non-approved values are sometimes used, e.g. embankment=dyke for a way on a dyke/dike/levee. There is no established way to indicate further details of the embankment itself, e.g. left/right differences, landcover or surface, steepness, width. Theoretically one could add details like embankment=right and embankment:right:width=5 but this currently is not done. We don’t propose or oppose that.

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Some background

If you’re new to this wonderful dataset I encourage you to read the OSM GNIS wiki entry or play around with the public GNIS web portal. Try feature ID 1629903!

The most important bits from a summary record are the feature Name, Class, and Coordinates.

Last fall, a group of mappers coordinated to address the name updates for Department of Interior Secretarial Order 3404. We cobbled together a collection of data scrapers and spreadsheets and declared victory a few weeks later. Since then, Kai and I have been thinking “there has to be a better way”.

What can the matcher do?

For any entry in the GNIS National File we can ask the matcher to search OSM. It does this using a private Overpass instance and a set of heuristics about likely tag combination and feature types. With reasonably high fidelity we can:

• Find GNIS entries that are very likely not yet added to OSM
• Find OSM objects that look incomplete or incorrect
  • Missing GNIS tag
  • Missing/different name from GNIS
  • Have a geographic bounds that does not agree with GNIS
• Generate MapRoulette challenges for subsets of the full GNIS dataset

What does it look like in practice?

We’ve generated a handful of MapRoulette challenges to check the functionality and see how it improves mapping. Here’s some examples that show off different feature types:

Sq___ Rename Validation - Final cleanup of rivers and other natural features listed in Department of Interior Secretarial Order 3404. It’s very good at noticing if a named waterway is mapped up the wrong tributary.

King County WA Place Update and San Diego County CA Place Update - Urban neighborhood names for the most part. This kind of task really does require local knowledge as the geo information for this class isn’t super precise.

Add and update Mobile Home Parks in AZ - Also from the “place” feature class but for an under-mapped feature type in OSM. This one ties nicely into a project run by MapSwipe and YouthMappers.

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Note: il y a une version française ici

From 2019, the cartographic style OpenArdenneMap is updated every 6 months. OpenArdenneMap is a cartographic style for topographic maps based on OSM data. Here are some notes for the last version.

OpenArdenneMap goes on QGIS

OpenArdenneMap was originally developed as a cartographic style with the imposm importer and a cartoCSS style derived from OSMBright. Later the osm2pgsqlimporter was used instead of the imposm. From 2023, the OpenArdenneMap is also available in QGIS, using the same osm2pgsqlimporter for building the map layers.

The tools used for making maps have some influence on the cartographic style itself. The aim of this QGIS support is to reproduce the same feeling than the maps produced with the Mapnik/cartoCSS style, even though the 2 solutions are not 100% equivalent.

Although it still requires a postGIS database, the QGIS style is much simpler to use for composing maps at various scales than the Mapnik/cartoCSS one. It was also much simpler to set up.

Here’s an extract with Mapnik

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