I pleased to contribute in order to find response to the areas affected by floods and landslides due to heavy rainfall in South Africa through mapping.

I am thrilled to have my first session with OSM Rwanda, This is where Geospatial data are free woow!!!!

I am so pleased to attend this training of the Rwanda monthly mapathon today being 29th October 2022 at Classic Hotel

It is my pleasure to attend that event (unique mappers network Nigeria collaboration with OSM Rwanda to map Rwanda Monthly Mapathon). I have earned more skills, which will help me to improve my mapping skills so that i can edit too many features like roads, buildings and many others, which will help me to contribute to global spatial data.

It’s an amazing opportunity being one of the mappers around, kudos to the OSMRwnda chapter and The #UniqueMappersNetwork for this training

I am very happy to be one of the contributors of map Rwanda, this is my first mapping and I will keep mapping,

Thank you

As some will know by now, crannogs are my “thing” at the moment. I was hoping to produce a couple of videos about them on my channel, but it takes a bit longer to get the tag approved than expected. And I can’t tell people how to map crannogs when there is no standard.

But I digress…

While mapping buildings in Co. Cavan in Ireland, I had discovered 12 suspiciously circular features in the lakes within the last 3 weeks, and I had reported them to the National Monuments Service this week. They got back to me yesterday and confirmed 3 as actual crannogs (the rest were apparently just naturally occurring circular vegetation).

• osm.org/way/1102716166
• osm.org/way/1106651412
• osm.org/way/1105294164

If you want to check them out, Bing or Esri Clarity imagery are best.

There are a couple more to report, but I’d rather do it in bulk than send an email every 3 days or so.

I made a quick video about it: https://youtu.be/7BJukQ8hKXw

So, two of my interests are tagging waterways and highways. And of course, where they intersect, there is often a bridge. Here is how my bridge tagging method has progressed over time:

• Bare minimum - split the highway (using e.g. aerial imagery), set bridge=yes and layer=1. This is conventional, if not particularly informative.

Then I found the National Bridge Inventory, which contains not all, but certainly many of the significant bridges in the USA. This data is quite interesting, it includes detailed info on the bridge structure and its integrity.

One can use this to verify the length of the bridge as drawn on the map, in many cases what’s shown in aerial imagery matches to within 1-2m of the specified length. You can also find data on when the bridge was constructed or rebuilt.

• Added context - add start_date tag.

Today, I was thinking, it’s not much more difficult to add an area object for the bridge structure itself using the man_made=bridge tag. In fact, one could then move such tags as start_date and bridge:structure into the separate object.

There is also an existing bridge:ref tag which is loosely defined. Here’s my idea. What if we used the NBI structure/bridge number, where available (in the USA)? You might wonder why that would be useful. Well there is a site https://bridgereports.com, which parses the NBI database with some additional refinements, and displays a nicely formatted summary. A plugin might use the structure/bridge number to display such data.

Something like the following. For the highway:

bridge=yes
highway=secondary
layer=1
ref=KY 218

And for the bridge structure [edit: updated per discussion in comments]:

ref:US:nbi:state_code=21
ref:US:nbi:structure_number=044B00032N
structure=beam
layer=1
man_made=bridge
start_date=1978

Here’s how the metadata could be displayed (using bridge ID “044B00032N”): https://bridgereports.com/1211803

Not only “the mole people” live underground, as there are large urban areas, publicly accessible, built below the ground level, and indoors in general.

As an example of an indoor world: Easton Helsinki, in Finland, which has about 4.8 million visitors per annum. (Source.) It’s built on multiple levels. OpenStreetMap doesn’t yet have support for such multi-levelled maps, but it could: a level is just a layer.

Mostly underground is the bus terminal at Kamppi, in Helsinki. It has elevators and escalators carrying countless people up and down, in and out of tunnels and halls. Most of this world underground isn’t yet seen in OpenStreetMap.

TL:DR River Polygons with river lines good, river lines alone bad.

Water Body digitization is the base line of water networks on openstreetmap. Every point, line, and polygon has been either manually created or generated through a computer application. Much like roads, rivers and other water bodies can be and sometimes are crucial resource for transporting goods.

Historically, cities and small towns were generally near a water body for drinking/bathing water, cargo transportation, and in the past one hundred and fifty years rivers are used for electric power generation.

Water Body Polygons are used in all types of maps so why not make these features correct by providing a more detailed polygon over just providing a line.

EX. The Sprague River in Klamath County Oregon is a perfect example of having many twists, turns, islands, and variable width across it’s path. Detailing these features in larger scales may not be as necessary as smaller scales below 1:150,000.

YouthMappers Pre-conference meeting.

On the 18th August YouthMappers called its members to meet. This was a great moment ever for YouthMappers member to meet again for second conference since 2017. This gathering was the combination of the 2020 research fellows, regional ambassadors, YouthMappers technical supporters, director, communication officer and the board members.

The first meeting created a space for YouthMappers members to be updated, knowing one another, interacted, collaborated and above discussed the major impacts in their communities as a collective. In the process of continuity in the building of young people who define their future through community works and actively engaged in identifying problems and offering solutions, YouthMappers awarded certificates of appreciation to all its young people. This was a great motivation to Youths who tirelessly and selflessly contribute to open sources.

Highlights:

In 2022 during the conference YouthMappers @[youthmappers.org] launched the first ever documentary in history, highlighting the major impact and voices of young people inclusively. Additionally, in recognizing the efforts of young people across the #67 countries with #327 YouthMappers chapters, young people combined their voices and released the book around all sustainable development goals. This book is a true reflection of YouthMappers current, Alumni, technical team and board of directors voices. It has showcased some major impacts, works and efforts of the young people in their different communities.

The original of this post is on Discourse https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/what-happens-if-let-others-keep-sponsoring-against-openstreetmap/4343?u=fititnt .

---

The ad (circa 2017)

Source

https://twitter.com/sp8962/status/838676848301260800

Finances (2020, around 100x difference without need to do any core function)

• OpenStreetMap Foundation (226,273 GBP at 2020, https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/w/images/d/df/OSMF_directors_report_and_unaudited_financial_statements_year_ended_20201231.PDF
• Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team United States Inc (26,562,141 USD at 2020, https://github.com/hotosm/hotosm-website/blob/gh-pages/downloads/2020-Form-990.pdf)

• Mapping
  • Keep up the regular mapping around the place, and while at SotM
  • I wish people would stop adding new man_made tags. #
• I posted about my State of the Map 2022, which used up most of my mental OSM energy for August.
• OSMF Board
  • Some suggestions for SotM 2023 generated some board ⇄ sotm wg emails. (I tried to do the right thing and CC the right people while communicating. This policy was adopted by the Board last year. The board member who claimed the board supported the CM bid didn’t tell the rest of the board of this).
  • Local Chapters
    • At SotM, apparently 2 groups asked a fellow board member about becoming a local chapter for Nigeria & Eritrea.
    • I got their contact details and started reaching out to them to start the process
  • Board Meeting
    • I attended the Aug 2022 Board meeting
      • I did plan to schedule an AB meeting with corp. memb.
    • also attended the Aug 2022 mid month chat, there was discussion about
      • odbl-only imports
      • prep for SotM 2022 (osmf stand, board AMA)
      • whether monthly reports from pers. comm. were needed (probably not)

(sorry if i’m missing some details, I’m trying to finish this)

Previously…

2022

Jan.

Feb.

Mar.

Apr.

May

June

July

2021

Jan.

Feb.

Mar.

Apr.

May

June

July

Aug.

Sept.

Oct.

Nov.

Dec.

2020

Jan.

Feb.

Mar.

Apr.

May

June

July

Aug.

Sept.

Oct.

Nov.

Dec.

Social Media: 🐦 twitter: @lalonde / 🐘 fediverse/mastodon microblog: @amapanda@en.osm.town (rss feed)

This is a plan for the addition of building footprint data for Tanga City, Tanzania. The import is currently going through the Import Guidelines steps, and it should be soon an ongoing crowdsourced task

The goal is to import building footprint data developed by Ardhi University (ARU) in Collaboration with Tanzania Communication Regulatory Authority (TCRA) in 2021, using 2019 satellite images.

Read more at : osm.wiki/Tanga_Building_Footprints_Import

Promoting a data-driven decision making culture in Tanga under living lab initiative, we are complementing the global objective of OSM i.e. to create a free editable geographic database of the world by various mapping activities around the region. The initiative uses local member by building capacity on how to use OSM and contributing to it as well as University Students. These mappings have been putting the missing pieces of the community on the map and addressing challenges they face so far. The usage of GIS data as a tool for community as a decision-making data tool can help in timely action and on-time problem-solving.

This is an Initiative for scaling up the OpenStreetMap Project by addition of buildings footprint data for entire region of Tanga,Datasets was developed by Ardhi University Students (ARU) in Collaboration with Tanzania Communication Regulatory Authority (TCRA) in 2021. Furthermore, There are different community mapping activities as micro-works going on in the region, as the mission of enriching and making freely global spatial data as well as capacity building to the local community on how to use free and open source tools in contributing data to OSM.

The current usage of tags in OSM for junctions between motorways is really dangerous in high density areas.

• There is currently a tag for the junction that is put at the point where the driver can’t change anymore way but at great risk.
• Author of the current situation say that it’s fine as there is some tags on main lane say there is a junction and mode lane during the split of main road and junction.

I tried it around Paris with Organic Maps in navigation mode. An oral announce is made few hundred meters that driver should at left or right in few hundred meters, then when the change is no more possible, that the change should be made.

In high density areas, junctions can be on the left or on the right, two or three exits can follow from few tens of meters, making it more confusing, especially if there in not any announce of the name or number of the exit (as in case of Organics Maps), and on often overloaded traffic in these areas.

A good solution could be the announce of the exit direction, number or road name/number to follow, that could be verified on traffic signs, this imply that traffic signs nodes contains these informations. In France, on A6, exit numbers are given (ref field), but not the exit direction/name (name field).

Around Ris-Orangis in about 1000m (~40s at 90km/h) there are lot of changes at left/right between A6a, a6b and A10 The current representation doesn’t display at all the parallel lanes, but only start at the last moment the change can be done, from few tens of meters to several km after the start.

The driving rules, say to go as soon as possible on the exit and THEN to slow down quickly, not to slow down on the main lane, nor to wait for last time to change to exit lane.

Warning: you read this at your own risk and you may collide with a wall of text. I’m sorry, but it didn’t fit in a few words.

I listened with interest to Florian’s speech at SotM 2022 (https://youtu.be/BRv-IFp_zZs), unlike him I do not feel I am a long-time contributor, although I consider myself active, both in terms of OSM editing and my activities in the Polish OpenStreetMap community. I would like to add my voice to the discussion and support Florian’s position a bit.

Let me start with why, in my opinion, the replacement of the current OpenStreetMap operating model, both in terms of the organisation and the database, is necessary. The reasons are the threats and challenges that are becoming more and more apparent and, paradoxically, stem from the growing interest in OpenStreetMap and its development.

By way of introduction, I refer you to Jennings Anderson’s speech at SotM from 2020: https://youtu.be/BI0VrPyAtcQ

and the update he made a year later and published in his diary: osm.org/user/Jennings%20Anderson/diary/396271

I’ll start with the scaremongering - here’s a list of the threats I think we will face in the near future:

Threat One - loss of community control over the project.

… See full entry

Still influenced by my proposal for settlement_type=crannog, I’ve looked at how historic settlements are mapped on OSM. There are three more or less “right” ways to do it (and so many wrong ones…). The three options are * map as historic= [whatever type of settlement] * map as historic=archaeological_site + site_type= [whatever type of settlement] * map as historic=archaeological_site + site_type=settlement + settlement_type= [whatever type of settlement]

The distribution today¹ was (in reversed order from above, sorry):

settlement type/ form	settlement_type=*	site_type=*	historic=*
ringfort	131	2	0
crannog	82	0	2
hut_circle	24	348	1
oppidum	8	15	3
city	6	612	16+(messy mapping) 2
village	3	11	58+ (messy mapping3)
town	2	0	12 (+ 3 “ghost_town”)
longphort	1	0	0
rundling	1	0	0
hut_site	1	0	0
hut	0	0	12
vicus	0	24	0
shieling	0	0	20 371
settlement	n/a	3 788	~25

In my opinion, historic= [whatever type of settlement] should only be used when the remains are still recognizable as buildings, like a ghost town or some sort of preserved settlement used as a museum (or “visitor experience”, as they’re now known), like some of the Pioneer towns in America.

Everything else I would classify as an historic=archaeological_site, and I personally would like to be able to classify settlements as such and then use sub-classification, if they are known. The high number of site_type=settlement supports that in my opinion.⁵

… See full entry

Just at home working out how to use my new abn