I’ve released a new version of tilemaker, the command-line utility that takes OpenStreetMap data in .osm.pbf format and makes vector tiles out of it.

It’s now between 45% and 85% faster - you’ll notice the difference particularly in places with complex multipolygon geometries. Memory usage is reduced, particularly in the polar regions. Plus it’s compatible with Geofabrik’s new CC0 “Shortbread” schema for vector tiles.

https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker

Yes, I am..i love Geography and Locations.. I churned whole Globe and used GPS from Day1

The GNIS matching project I’ve been working on uses a lot of Overpass queries to find things in OSM. At some point during the project, I needed a faster, more reliable Overpass server than the public servers. So I built a local Overpass server as cheaply as I could. It’s working well. This is how you can build one for yourself.

Why Would I Build My Own Overpass Server?

If you’re using the Overpass API for software development, you’re going to be running a lot of queries. You could use a public Overpass instance, but it’s more polite and a lot more efficient to run one locally. Also, public overpass servers have query limits that you may not like. And sometimes they go down or flake out, and then there’s nothing you can do but wait until the operators fix them. If you run your own server, your fate is in your own hands!

For most use cases, a cheap local Overpass server can be significantly faster than using one of the public Overpass servers. The setup described here is a lot smaller with a lot less computing power than those big public servers. But it doesn’t have the entire world hammering on it constantly. Also, Overpass queries can return huge amounts of data. The network latency and throughput is a lot better on your own local network segment than if you’re downloading results from halfway across the world.

I’d like to give a special thanks to Kumi Systems for hosting the public Overpass server that I abused until I set up my own server. They’re providing a great service for the OSM community!

Do I Really Want to Do This?

Running an Overpass server is not for the faint of heart. The software is really finicky and not easy to maintain. You need to have some good experience with Linux system administration and the will and patience to deal with things that don’t work the way they’re supposed to.

What’s in this guide?

There are four useful guides to setting up an Overpass server, and you should read all of them:

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Projetos disponiveis no maproulette.

https://maproulette.org/

DESAFIOS Procurar

Correção de CEP na Região Nordeste do Brasil para o Padrão Brasileiro = XXXXX-XXX / Correction of CEP in the Northeast Region of Brazil for the Brazilian Standard = XXXXX-XXX umbraosmbr’s Project

Correção de Nomes de Rua que foi mapeado de forma errada em todo Brasil. / Correction of Street Names that were mapped wrongly throughout Brazil. Raphaelkaart’s Project

Correção de CEP para o Formato usado no Brasil - Estado de Pernambuco. / Correction of ZIP Code for the Format used in Brazil - State of Pernambuco. Raphaelkaart’s Project

Correção de CEP para o Formato usado no Brasil - Estado da Paraiba. / Correction of ZIP Code for the Format used in Brazil - State of Paraiba. Raphaelkaart’s Project

Correção de CEP para o Formato usado no Brasil - Estado da Bahia. / Correction of ZIP Code for the Format used in Brazil - State of Bahia. Raphaelkaart’s Project

Inclusão de Nomes de Rua em Vilarejo Ponte Branca no estado de Goías - Brasil / Inclusion of Street Names in Vilarejo Ponte Branca in the state of Goias - Brazil. Raphaelkaart’s Project

Correção de Nomes de Rua em todo Brasil / Correction of Street Names throughout Brazil Brasil - Projetos da UMBRAOSM - União dos Mapeadores Brasileiros do Openstreetmap

Correção de Nomes de Rua em todo Brasil - Part1. / Correction of Street Names throughout Brazil - Part.1 Brasil - Projetos da UMBRAOSM - União dos Mapeadores Brasileiros do Openstreetmap

Correção de Nomes de Rua em todo Brasil - Part2. / Correction of Street Names throughout Brazil - Part.2 Brasil - Projetos da UMBRAOSM - União dos Mapeadores Brasileiros do Openstreetmap

This article is also available in Taiwanese Hokkien / Taigi (台文)

Taiwan is quite a hot topic in the news and geo-political discussion. Recently I read an thead discussing defense plans in the southern part of Pingtong by Taiwan Infantry Command officers on Taiwan BBS PTT military board.

Even though maps are blurred due to the detailed map might have some sensitive military information, it can easily be recognized by the green forest area, that the based maps they use are actually OpenStreetMap. Thanks to the hard-working OpenStreetMap mappers that keep drawing forests in Taiwan.

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I asked ChatGPT to create an OpenStreetMap Community Building Playbook, this is what it came up with

Introduction

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is an open-source project that relies on the contributions of volunteers to create and maintain a free and editable map of the world. To build a strong OSM community, it is important to create a framework that promotes engagement, inclusivity, and collaboration. This playbook outlines key strategies for community building that can help OSM communities thrive.

Define your community’s vision:

The first step to building a strong OSM community is to define your community’s vision. What is your community’s mission? What are your goals and objectives? What values do you want to promote? Clarifying these key elements of your community’s identity will help you attract like-minded individuals and organizations.

Identify your community’s strengths and weaknesses:

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As a first timer in Albay, I didn’t know what to expect from the Pista ng Mapa and State of the Map Asia 2022. However, as an OpenStreetMap (OSM) enthusiast, attending this event in person was something that I had always looked forward to. The opportunity to network with fellow OSM enthusiasts not just locally but internationally, connect with fellow youth mappers leaders around the Philippines, and travel with my students made this event a great experience.

The opportunity for networking was one of the highlights of the gathering. I had the opportunity to interact and get to know OSM followers from around the globe. Finding out about their exploits and how they used OSM in the various nations they hailed from. It was beneficial for me to be able to discuss ideas and pick up new skills from them.

The opportunity for student attendees to network with other youthmappers from different areas of the Philippines was another important aspect of the event. Meeting other young people who shared enthusiasm for mapping and were in charge of their own mapping initiatives in their various towns was wonderful. We were able to share our challenges, successes, and life lessons in addition to learning from one another.

It was a great bonus that I could go to the event with my students. They had a wonderful experience learning about OSM’s advantages and possible uses for their research and enhancing their own local communities. They had the opportunity to participate in a variety of lectures, workshops, and other activities that advanced their understanding of OSM and its possible uses.

The event was great overall, and the activities offered fascinating insights into the OSM communities around the globe. I appreciate the chance to participate, and I hope to have more opportunities like this in the future.

The new forum “community.osm.org” has been going for a while now, so maybe it’s useful to have a look at how things are going.

There’s obviously lots that goes into creating that forum as a site where people can share ideas - there’s the forum software itself, and the people looking after the technical administration of the site, the migration of the old forum (which has just happened) and the help site (planned for later), the various implementation decisions that got us to here, and also the people looking after content moderation (which is more actively managed than before). Of all of these, this diary entry is really only about the Discourse software itself.

I’ll not comment here about the future migration of https://help.openstreetmap.org/ to Discourse and the work required within Discourse to support that, since it would be unfair to judge something that has not happened yet.

Full disclosure - I’m one of the moderators of a couple of categories in the forum, but this is very much a personal view.

What’s good:

The software is actively maintained, unlike the old FluxBB forum software, or OSQA, which is used for the help site.

It’s working! Some communities that might have been a bit quiet or spread over private forums are now able to talk together much easier than before.

Searching works, with some caveats around the UI (see below for that). This may sound obvious, but mailing lists search at for example talk-gb can be a bit of a pain to use - a page such as this only shows the subject and the name of the poster, not the date of the message.

You can avoid “me too” answers (but see “reaction icons” below).

There’s a translate button on every post that supports the most common languages. This reduces the “echo chamber” effect that some forums had previously (and some other OSM channels still do now).

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English below

À l’ordre du jour de la prochaine réunion publique du Board de l’OSMF, le jeudi 30 mars 2023, il est prévu de statuer sur la demande d’utilisation du trademark OSM par la « Fédération des Pros d’OSM - FPOSM », une association française qui regroupe des professionnels et des entreprises travaillant autour d’OpenStreetMap. Cette demande est liée au fait que cette structure professionnelle (dont le site web est accessible ici) intègre OpenStreetMap dans son nom.

J’ai eu l’occasion de discuter avec certains membres de cette fédération et exposer également mon point de vue lors d’une réunion du Conseil d’administration de l’association OpenStreetMap France. Les réponses des membres de la Fédération peuvent se résumer à «  Nous pensons que c’est la meilleure manière de faire avancer les choses », mais sans avancer d’argument valable. Je pense que le nom de cette structure (et non ce qu’elle représente ou cherche à faire) constitue une erreur et une source élevée de risque à deux niveaux :

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New mapped area🌍🌲

Last March 4, 2023, the University of Science and Technology of Southern Philippines YouthMappers celebrated the Open Data Day 2023 with the theme “Empowering AI and Mapping with Open Data: A training-workshop on RapID”. We are very proud to have received a $500 grant from the Open Knowledge Foundation this year to organize Open Data Day 2023. With 40 participants, the training workshop was a tremendous success, and it was encouraging to see that more than half of the attendees were female.

Open Data Day is an annual celebration of open data all over the world. Groups from around the world create local events on the day where they will use open data in their communities. This year’s theme is “Open Data to AI”. With the theme “Open Data to AI” we aim to seek how open data is playing a critical role in the field of AI/ML and other emerging technologies.

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Goal:

1. Find a video on the OpenStreetMaps YouTube channel.
2. Download the audio of a talk.
3. Run it through OpenAI’s Whisper.
4. Send the transcript and the source URL to somebody in the OSM Community who has ownership over the OSM YouTube channel.

While you may be able to automate this, I don’t know how to do so.

What you need:

1. GPU (possibly NVIDIA, don’t know). 5gb vram (gpu ram). This might mean RTX 2060 or newer.
2. Strong cooling and noise isolation through building design.

Costs

1. Electricity will create some cost as transcription is hard. Do note that it is still less then the amount needed to power on and train a normal human being on the same task for several years in addition to the quantity of humans needed to get the same throughput.
2. This will result in wear and tare on your drives and other components.
3. This will make your computer and room warm in the summer. You need great cooling or the ability to use the excess heat for something valuable.

Steps:

1. Install Itch.io to assist updating.
2. Install whisper gui frontend by Grisk with Itch.
3. Download audio from a talk (not saying how).
4. Plug it in and get the result.
5. Send the URL of the talk and the transcript to unknownPerson who runs the OSM YouTube Channel in a standard format.

Sample format for an email

Hello noun, This email is to submit a transcript.

talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsaiHhQvNSY model: whisper medium

Disclaimers:

1. I have yet to coordinate with anyone.
2. Human transcript writers are great and needed. They are in short supply. Let us reduce the net demand. They can save their energy for high impact legal and medical environments.
3. Maybe the built in YouTube transcript does the job well enough. This might not be worth the effort. I don’t know.

About a fortnight ago, I went on a walk/ hike starting in the village of Tullahought, Ireland. There were two milk churn stands in the village which caught my eye, because they were restored and used as decorations and to tell the history of dairying in the area, on a small scale anyway. Tullahought milk churn stand, Author: A.-K. D., CC0 Wikicommons

Milk churn stands were used in Ireland (and elsewhere, of course) up to roughly the 1970s. The dairy farmer would leave their full milk churns on them, and someone from the creamery would do their round and pick them all up. They would return the empty churns or churns with skimmed milk in them, sometimes also leaving other purchases from the creamery like flour. It is possible that the milk man left smaller churns on the stands in other countries (judging from photographs of milk churn stands in other countries).

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What’s the problem (Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF))?

See my original post, here: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/lidar-mapping-of-roads/97100/14

Hi, everybody!

Motivated by the state of roads in the UK, I’m wondering if anyone is aware of any Open Source/ crowdsourced efforts to assess the condition of surfaces, and then to map them?

I’m aware of lower cost LIDAR equipment, and I believe that some Apple phones have a LIDAR capability.

I’m thinking of something like Mapillary/ Kartaview. Sensor imagery could be gathered, and then scored appropriately, so severity could be seen. I’m thinking that a 100mm pothole on an unclassified and little used road/ lane, would potentially be of less interest/ lower priority than a 50mm pothole on a major motorway/ autobahn/ freeway.

Obviously, potholes are just one example, other immediate possibilities are subsidence, wear and tear, accident damage.

I’d be keen to hear any thoughts/ feedback. Please add to this page, if you can.

Many thanks, Chris chris_debian UK

What can we do about this?

Road damages create comfort-, environmental- and security problems. Existing measurement technologies are very expensive and can only be used rarely. With smartphones you can measure often or in remote areas.

Regarding ‘mapping potholes’, I expect this to be a layer applied to OSM, not data contained within OSM. It will be open source information, for people that can use it. My thinking being that OSM isn’t a repository for other data, but it can help us gather data, and we may be able to give back to OSM.

What has already been done, by whom?

SmartRoadSense info@smartroadsense.it (seems to be broken), github and APK

• “Open Data” under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (OdbL)
• Map= https://smartroadsense.it/data/map/
• Privacy= https://smartroadsense.it/data/privacy/

Roadroid map

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There is a really amazing video (Turkish with English subtitles) from Dr Uçum on the critical role that OpenStreetMap data has played in ensuring high quality public health programming in one of the tent cities for displaced people in Turkey as part of the earthquake response.

The video was originally published by Yer Cizenler.

Have also pasted below the English translation (thanks, once again, to Yer Cizenler) …

Well, hello everyone. I’m Doctor Mehmet Faruk Uçum.

I am the responsible physician in the largest tent city in Kahramanmaraş the KAFUM tent city. It is also known as New Ataturk Park and Kahramanmaraş Fairgrounds.

Here, as the responsible physician, I provide coordination in terms of health, we have set up the family health tent and we continue to vaccinate there. I also do public health work in the field.

During this process, with my friends in the OpenStreetMap community and my friends in Istanbul, we worked together and as a result of this work, we created a map.

I used this map especially during the vaccination process to find out which tent was where, because we really lacked data in this regard. We didn’t know the location of the tents, or which number was where, so we were not able to navigate to the right tents.

Recently again, I have used it to inspect and verify alleged scabies cases within the tents. I have, for example, some tent numbers that are said to have scabies but some of them may be seen wrongly or it is possible that the wrong number is given to us but I found them on the map and took the necessary action.

In public health, we used it again to identify outbreaks… the focus of outbreaks, that is. After marking the tent numbers on the map, we determined which areas had problems, especially for acute gastroenteritis, for example. Again, if there is a problem with viral rash diseases tomorrow, this map will be used for isolation and quarantine activities.

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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 // Activations in Malawi and Ethiopia // International Women’s Day catch up // Bolivia YouthMappers // Mapping journeys to impact // Ruwa project completion // What’s coming up? // Mappy quote of the week

What’s happened this week?

Syria / Turkey earthquake response: The Turkey / Syria earthquake activation continues to progress — tasking manager projects are being finished off and and the validation is catching up. ~ 9,000 mappers have contributed over 2 million buildings and more than 83,000 km of roads so far. We also published this blog to try and provide insight into where the data is going and what it is being used for…

There is also this brilliant testimony from Dr Mehmet on his use of OpenStreetMap data for public health programming in the tent cities where people displaced by the earthquake are housed.

Activations in Malawi and Ethiopia: Additionally, the OSM Malawi community has activated to support the data needs for responders following Cyclone Freddy in Malawi — you can support them with mapping, here. OSM Ethiopia are also still mapping in response to the drought and food crisis in Ethiopia, which is drastically affecting people in the region of Oromia — you can contribute here.

International Women’s Day: There was loads of stuff to catch up from from International Women’s Day this week, too… My recommendations…

• Loved hearing Letwin Pondo from OSM Zimbabwe share her story on the esahub podcast
• The brilliant talks from the International Women’s Day Mapathon in the Caribbean
• The Mujeres, mapas y datos: un conversatorio por el Día Internacional de la Mujer (in Spanish or see a summary in English here)

Encourage you to watch and listen!

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My appreciation goes to the national coordinator and Team mentor, Mr. Sunday N. Victor for showing up to welcome and up board the new team leaders of LionMappersTeam Nsukka campus. we look forward to your community volunteerism, contribution, and impact.

cheers.

Thank you Daniel Akor for an amazing job, hosting the Orientation and training of new team leads of LMT-Nsukka.

Look forward to their most active participation with Unique Mappers Community Nigeria as well as university community engagement at UNN

Cheers

Just looking it up as a corral only found this one person asking how to, but they are actually describing an arena. When I was a camp counselor for a summer and generally did the horse units, there was one advanced unit that did an overnight ride. We rode to a place with an arena and made do with that to keep the horses overnight. It doesn’t have the watering and feeding station common to these, but plenty of room to keep nearly 3 dozen horses from running off, including the one that would untie any knot no matter how complicated.

It can’t be just a western US thing. You find them all over on Forest Service maps as a little dotted square with “corral” written next to them. They’re on USGS too. The #1 answer on the question refers to this Riding page on the wiki, but then gets the wrong answer for this or a corral. It might match another sort of corral, maybe.

A “corral” is a temporary space for keeping stock animals. They really come in two types although they are marked the same on the USFS and USGS maps. The type that’s most important to me to map is usually smaller, just a fenced box with a gate on one side. There’s usually a trough for water and a bit of wire to hold a bit of alfalfa. Sometimes there’s a spigot. (It’s a good idea to assume these are non-potable water.) The second type is for collecting herded animals, such as cows or sheep. These are usually larger and more elaborate, having a long arm of fencing that funnels the animals into the enclosure. There is often a ramp for loading the animals into a truck. This second is probably known to those who need to know it and the general public would only be looking up “what is that?”, but the first is an amenity that someone might be searching for.

Part of the answer

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Shane Braddick is here. Hello everyone. Love this mapping site.