I have been an active OSM mapper (and contributor to some HOT task mapping projects in different countries ) since 2013, mainly mapping based on satellite imagery. My main focus has been on Ethiopia, North Korea and DR Kongo.

At the moment (from March 2025 on) I try to map waterways and watersheds of the Ethiopian tributaries of the Blue Nile (called አባይ = ābayi/Abbay/Abbai in Amharic). A lot of theses waterways and the areas around them have been very poorly mapped yet. I have started with the river which is called Rahad (نهر الرهد) in Arabic and Shinfa (ሽንፋ ወንዝ) in Amharic.

The rivers in the Ethiopian highlands are of crucial importance for the cultivation of the land and the settlement structure - in a way which is unusual and often uknown for European people: The settlements are usually on top of the mountains (using the rain at the main water source) between the rivers, not at the rivers. A lot of the rivers and their ravines are blocking travelling and transport, not supporting it.

River Shinfa (ሽንፋ ወንዝ / نهر الرهد)

Relation of the main course of the river

Detailed Mapping Finished based on Esri Imagery
Downstream
River Shinfa - right tributary A
* about 10m wide at confluence, clear/dark water, meandering (SI = 1.84)
* so far mapped length 7.60 Km - E to W
* from 12°03’21.0’‘N 36°37’51.5’’ E to 12°03’54.6’‘N 36°35’39.0’’ E
* height: 1225 m to 1080 m (19.08 ‰ botton slope)

River Shinfa Section 1
* up to 30 m wide, ravines, light brown water, twisting (SI= 1.436)
* length 7.18 Km - SE to NW
* from 12°03’54.6’‘N 36°35’39.0’’ E to 12°05’33.5’‘N 36°33’28.1’’ E
* height: 1080m to 1000 m (11.14 ‰ botton slope)

River Shinfa - right tributary B
* 35m wide and more at confluence, light brown water, twisting (SI = 1.504)
* so far mapped length 21.39 Km - NE to SW
* from 12°08’39.8’‘N 36°40’37.9’’ E to 12°05’33.5’‘N 36°33’28.1’’ E
* height: 1200 m to 1000 m (9.35 ‰ botton slope)

… See full entry

Vincent Privat posted on twitter of a gun shop across the road from a bank. WeeklyOSM reported it in №634. So it got me thinking. 🤔 And hacking. 🙂👩🏻‍💻

I built a new tool osm-distance-to-nearest which calculates “how close the nearest X is for every Y?”. When you download the OSM Planet File (~70GiB!), and run this command, you’ll get a CSV file for every shop=weapons in OSM, with how far away the nearest bank or ATM is.

osm-distance-to-nearest -i ~/osm/data/planet.osm.pbf -b amenity=atm,bank -a shop=weapons -o p_guns_bank_

Vincent’s case is a weapons shop Armurerie du Vieux Bourg de Kourou (node 2,992,825,744) which is 60m from an ATM operated by La Banque Postale (node 3,022,885,288). at 5° 9′ 55.134″ N 52° 38′ 28.9788″ W in Kourou.

But there are more than 300 weapon shops within 60 metres of a bank or ATM! There are many weapon sells next door to a bank. This is so practical! 🤣🤣 Full formatted table is in this comments.

Had to correct the school premises because it place houses people lived in as school buildings and marked one of the 2 school buildings as a house. overall the school premises on the map have been halved as it also contained a farmers field

Hi everyone, I started my own Web development company in London, I would like to add it on the map on openstreetmaps, how to add it?

Arthur Brown

Joseph Bazalgette is rightfully lauded as an accomplished Engineer & heroic in many actions, including in his role as chief engineer of London’s Metropolitan Board of Works, implementing gargantuan sewage works that will have saved millions of Londoner’s lives from the threats of cholera & other water-borne diseases. Few people will realise that there are many similar Victorian-era heroes within Nottingham’s history, and it is likely that even fewer people could name any of them.

Go to this diary entry for more info on any year quoted here.

Today’s diary will commemorate Nottingham’s Borough Surveyor and Engineer Arthur Brown, and underline his achievement in designing & building the 1884 Beck Valley Storm Water Culvert.

… See full entry

First edit was very long, adding 39 new housing outlines in my town

OSMCha (https://osmcha.org/) was down and i felt crippeled. This tool has become an essential part of my workflow lately.

So to be prepared for the next time OSMCha is not available i gathered some usefull alternatives (although less “luxurous” as the original).

Changeset level:

• osm.org/changeset/100000000
• https://overpass-api.de/achavi/?changeset=100000000&relations=true
• https://osmhv.openstreetmap.de/changeset.jsp?id=100000000
• http://level0.osmz.ru/?url=changeset/100000000

Node/way/relation level:

• https://osmlab.github.io/osm-deep-history/#/way/1000000000
• https://pewu.github.io/osm-history/#/way/1000000000

This is primarily a “note to self”.

But if someone has nice additions to this list, please add them in the comments.

I never anticipated such an awesome experience at the State of The Map 2022 conference in Firenze, probably because it was my first time. It felt like I was with a family basically because we all have one thing in common; Map. Meeting people from several fields utilizing the geospatial open data was mind blowing for me. I learnt a lot from professionals with advanced expertise in using OSM data in solving global problems. I would say that after this conference, my motivation to contribute to OSM took a drastic boost and this is evident in my recent engagement on the platform. I say a big thank you to Himmanitarian Open Street Map Team for awarding me a travel grant to attend the conference.

I had planned to do monthly updates, but instead after a Europe trip, I returned home to a mostly-mapped Chicago and stopped editing so much.

Chicago

• A local news article covered the Winthrop Family Historical Garden - a park marking the only block where Black Americans could live in Uptown in the 1920s. I added this to OpenStreetMap.

• Following a Reddit comment, I added the pull-off area and path for a Schiller Woods water pump which attracts the superstitious. Google StreetView shows the area had cars going back many years.

• My local park recently replaced a ‘desire path’ with a paved sidewalk, so I finally could add it to the map.

Las Vegas

I removed some OSM paths which made it look like you could enter the MGM Grand monorail station from the street level (you need to walk through the casino).

The new Caesar’s Forum conference center was well-marked with indoor mapping (restrooms , exits, etc. ) but the building did not appear shaded in on OSM. It’s unclear what was wrong, but I checked today and finally it’s appearing.

Border edits

I was inspired to resume editing areas along the Myanmar-Laos-China border. A lot of times there are marked residential areas or some little bubbles of roads which should be connected to the larger road network. Other times, as previously discussed, there are large tracts of new construction in part due to the Belt and Road Initiative. I found myself making a lot more edits, and occasionally stumbling on roads which I previously edited in summer 2020.

… See full entry

Time for a humiliating admission.

Year-dates below can be cross-referenced within my last diary-entry: Mapping Changing Street-Names in Nottingham City.

This was sparked by a visit to the Manuscripts & Special Collections (MSS) at the University of Nottingham on 6 July this year. I was conducting research into water & sewage history within St Ann’s and was there to research (what turned out to be) the 1883 Beck Valley Storm Water Culvert. That needs a diary entry all for itself, but today I need to stay on subject.

Mapping the culvert began on 15 September and, fortunately, began at the River Trent end (on Trent Lane). ‘Fortunate’ because, 5 years ago, will_p had mapped it and — my assumption — had found the culvert outflow nameplate and had both recorded and used it in his mapping.

So, mapping started at the southern, riverside edge of Trent Lane & continued northwards towards Bath Street, ending today as I reached The Wells Road, following what had been recorded in the MSS.

I was in great mood as I started, since I now had an official name for the culvert. That mood began to deteriorate as it continued. Roads were skew-whiff & houses off their centre. It seemed that earlier mappers had not used any imagery-offset corrections. I was fixing everything that I met as good as I could, but it was beginning to wear me down.

… See full entry

---

We have released version 6.0 of GraphHopper:

https://www.graphhopper.com/blog/2022/09/19/graphhopper-routing-engine-6-0-released/

https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper/releases/tag/6.0

Many thanks to all who contributed!

Check it out and let us know your feedback!

Uploaded tracks for Beau, Bluff, Wolf and Khyber Pass September 15, 2022

On Saturday September 10th 2022 , the OSM local group of Grenoble organized a mapping party in Claix, Isère, France. We were about 10 mappers and we survey this city of 8 000 inhabitants.

We used the tag #CARTOCLAIX2022. Below the area covered by all our changesets:

… See full entry

There was an interesting discussion following my recent diary post asking about searching diary content. A couple of people remarked that most search engines have built-in syntax that lets you narrow down search results. One person suggested that it might be enough to just mention this on the OSM wiki. When I went to add this tip, I found that there was no wiki page describing User Diaries at all. So I created an initial version. I’m writing this in hopes that others will go in and help improve it. Thanks, and happy mapping!

It has been almost a month since the annual State of the Map (SoTM) and Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) 2022 conferences, but the stories and experiences are still fresh in my memory. Both were the most awaited conferences in the open mapping and open software world and, undoubtedly, the best conferences I have attended.

SoTM and FOSS4G conferences were hybrid – held in Florence, Italy, and online. SoTM2022 was held last Aug 19-21, 2022, while FOSS4G took place on Aug 22-28, 2022. On top of the conference sessions and workshops, different organizations hosted additional events, like the HOT unSummit, and the YouthMappers documentary premiere. GeoChicas also hosted their social night.

The beautiful sunset in Firenze, taken at Piazzale Michelangelo

… See full entry

Hi all,

Actually, this note is mostly just for me. One of the approved aerial imageries for sweden is the one used by Min Karta. Just use this as a custom imagery:

https://minkarta.lantmateriet.se/map/ortofoto/?BBOX={bbox}&FORMAT=image/jpeg&HEIGHT={height}&LAYERS=Ortofoto_0.5,Ortofoto_0.4,Ortofoto_0.25,Ortofoto_0.16&REQUEST=GetMap&SERVICE=WMS&SRS={proj}&VERSION=1.1.1&WIDTH={width}

Best regards and peaceful mapping, Dmitry

How did it end?

To be honest, the experience was different than I expected. It was a lot of struggle to understand the codebase. The feature in itself was not too complex but understanding the code to a point where I made substantial progress did take a lot of time and effort.

With most real-world large projects, the outcome (the lines of code) produced at the end doesn’t depict an accurate picture of the hours a developer spent behind the scenes. But that’s with most creative jobs, I guess.

In the end, I am glad I was able to complete it. Seeing the feature work did make it up.

You can find my final report in a GitHub gist

• Final GSoC report 2022

If you are interested in how I understood the codebase, you can see

• Understanding the codebase

Should you contribute to open source?

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a good product. Just try to edit your home or your neighborhood or any place you like using iD editor; you’ll realize what I mean. If not for open source, OSM wouldn’t exist.

If you are thinking of becoming part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) in the future or know someone who can be or wants to be a part of GSoC or just wants to contribute to OSM or any open source project, I recommend it.

Note: relations in brackets [ ] are not part of the Empire State Trail, but are relations that were helpful in creating the trail.

Note: in this list, some relations have distances indicated after the relation ID number.

Top Level Relations

• Empire State Trail (super, hike) (11682611 https://hiking.waymarkedtrails.org/#route?id=11682611

• Empire State Trail (super, bike) (11486089) https://cycling.waymarkedtrails.org/#route?id=11486089

Sub-relations

… See full entry

I was going to search to see if someone had already written about this, but..

It would be really useful to be able to search the diaries.

There is so much valuable, fun, informative, personal writing on here, but it is really hard to discover.

Fortunately, Weekly OSM does a good job of capturing some of the interesting entries posted here, but they can’t possibly cover everything.

I’m not sure what would be involved in adding this functionality, I am sure if it were easy, someone would have already done it. Someone did open an issue for it on Github but it has received no comments so far.

Is there anyone here who speaks Ruby, cares about this, and wants to implement it?