OpenStreetMap
So, there’s this gem:
This is the Warren H. Brock Reservoir overlayed with the BLM 356 track from the latest BLM GTLF data set. Construction started on the reservoir in 2008, so the BLM GTLF data in this area is at least that old.
Sometimes dealing with external data sources requires a little creative interpretation. Aerial imagery shows a track that goes around the reservoir, so that’s the new alignment for BLM 356.
I had the perfect writing set-up on my rented Airbnb apartment: a cozy roof deck where I could be alone with my thoughts for hours and with an astonishing view of the world’s most perfect cone-shaped volcano: Mt. Mayon. And then, as with all other things, life happened and I am just publishing this one now. Even so, I believe that my attendance during the State of the Map Asia x Pista ng Mapa 2022 held last November 21-25, 2022 at Bicol University East Campus (fondly called by the locals as Buceng) in the lovely city of Legazpi, Albay still bears lessons and experiences worth sharing up until now.
My presentation on Mapping for Cultural Sustainability, a project I am pursuing with another She Leads and She Inspires (SLSI)^ champion from Nepal, was selected as one of the lightning talks for Day 1 of Pista ng Mapa. No matter how much I looked forward to all the things the conference was about to offer, the first day was nerve-wracking for a person like me who wasn’t that used to speaking in public, more so in front of 300 people who all have left their marks in the mapping community. There I was, a lone participant from Davao City (at least, that’s what I first thought) and a neophyte in the OSM community about to deliver her first public speech in years. Nevertheless, the purpose of my attendance pushed me to brave the stage and share my SLSI experience and the community project, a product of our six months of SLSI training, that I am working on.
Today was the first day of my GIS & Cartography training organized by H.O.T, i was nominated by the unique mapper’s network team. It was educative and insightful can’t wait for the next two days of the training for more practical sessions.
A ‘polling station’ or ‘voting center’ is a place where people vote, i.e. where ballots are cast. It can be a room in a building where voter registrations are checked, ballot papers are provided, and ballot box are available to put the ballot papers.
In Nepal, generally some rooms or blocks of schools and community buildings are used as the voting centers or polling stations for the purpose of voting in the election. While mapping a polling station in OpenStreetMap, we will add a node for a voting center and tag it.
In the third week of October 2022, unfortunately, there was a big flooding event in Jembrana District Bali that caused several damages and casualties.
Right after the flood happened, Bali Disasater Management Agency (BPBD) contacted Open Mapping Hub Asia-Pacific (OMH AP) team to give some mapping support in some of the affected areas. Before OMH AP launched the tasking manager mapping to respond to the request, we conducted rapid data gap assessment through disaster ninja to see whether we still need remote mapping support or we can directly support them in the data utilization to create a flood impact map on that area. After we found that there were OSM data gaps on the affected areas, OMH AP created the Tasking Manager Project to support that event.
I’ve written a long blog post on sealed and unsealed roads in NSW. OpenStreetMap now has comprehensive coverage of road surface tags in NSW and the post provides lots of maps and tables to illustrate the patterns. Hope you enjoy it.
While I’ve been working on BLM Ground Transportation Linear Features (i.e. highways) in Imperial County, I took a small diversion to put in the BLM Off-Highway Vehicle Areas in California. Four of the major BLM OHV areas are in Imperial County, so it was relevant. These boundaries are important because many of the OHV areas are “open,” allowing cross-country travel off of designated roads and trails.
I’ve been working with the BLM CA Off Highway Vehicle Designations data set, which has 31 OHV areas in California and one OHV area from Nevada that slipped in because it’s managed by a BLM field office in California.
As I started adding the OHV areas, I noticed that almost all of these areas have never been mapped. Some of these areas are notable institutions in the off-road community, like Imperial Dunes (aka Glamis) and Johnson Valley (home of King of the Hammers). So adding these areas is a significant contribution to the map.
Tagging these areas is a little bit of a challenge. After some discussion with Minh Nguyen, I settled on landuse=recreation_ground and leisure=offroad_driving to tag all the OHV areas. The recreation_ground tag is a slightly odd fit but it seems close enough to be appropriate. And some renderers have an idea what to do with it.
Some of the OHV areas only permit vehicles on designated routes. That’s no problem because the access tags go on highway features and the OHV area doesn’t need any additional tagging. But many OHV areas permit open cross-country riding, so tagging vehicle access is an issue for these areas. I settled on adding motor_vehicle and ohv access tags directly to the areas, with values like yes for unrestricted access, permit where vehicles must have a pass, and permissive for the shared-use area of Johnson Valley which is periodically closed for military use (but not on a predetermined schedule).
A few days ago I wrote about extracting GPX location data from the raw videos coming out of my A129 dashcam, and uploading to Mapillary. I was doing this one video at a time. A typical drive yields a lot of short videos, each 1, 5 or 10 minutes long depending on the settings. Some automation would be nice!
Mapper n76 suggested in the comments to my previous post to concatenate the short videos first and then process the resulting single video. I tried this following the instructions on the ffmpeg website, but I could not get exiftool to extract location data from the resulting longer video. So what I did instead was write a simple bash script that just loops over all MP4 files in the directory and does the GPX extraction and Mapillary processing / uploading for each file. Here’s the full script I used, which has the gpx.fmt file you need for exiftool baked in for convenience, but the loop itself is simply:
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for f in *.MP4; do
exiftool -m -p gpx.fmt -ee -ext mp4 -w %f.gpx $f
mapillary_tools video_process_and_upload $f --geotag_source gpx --geotag_source_path ${f%%.*}.gpx --skip_process_errors
done
I found that I need --skip_process_errors because there’s usually one image extracted from the start or end of each video file that cannot be matched with a timestamp from the GPX file. I don’t care enough about one single image out of an entire sequence to try and figure out why, but I’m sure someone more determined than I could fix it :)
Should consider going back and associating sidewalks with roadways, and adding curb type to ends of crosswalks
A few days ago i provided an example Overpass query to show buildings with a mapped start_date colour coded by age. This was in response to a query by long-time Latvian contributor richlv. Another user based in Latvia asked on Mastodon if it was also possible to look at data by how long ago since it was edited.
This proved to be quite a lot harder than my previous example. The issue is that the “@timestamp” field in Overpass-Turbo is always treated as a string and is never cast to a number or date. This meant that the MapCSS queries have to deal with regular expressions, so I’ve just done the bands in years (“way[@timestamp=~/YYYY.*/]”), as I haven’t experimented with how rich the regexp implementation is for MapCSS. An example of the amended query for roads and buildings in a given bounding box is here.
Pista ng Mapa and State of the Map is not new to me because I attended some of their events before. In my previous conference experiences, I mostly share what we are doing in our institute (UPRI) and how open-source works. Now, what’s new to me is to do a technical workshop in this conference. I able to share what tools I mostly used for the development and discuss some information about geospatial development through python.
Our goal in this workshop is to encourage the participants to make themselves be involved in a open-source community and to tell them the importance of open data. In the workshop, I also did some hands-on activities using python. Most of the participants, don’t have experiences in programming but still able to do the activities. I hope that even after the workshop they will still continue to explore python and the tools I shared for geospatial analysis.
Thanks to a contribution by user danieldegroot2, dates and date ranges are now displayed in Dutch. Other languages which are currently supported are: English, French and German. If you are interested in adding another locale, please check out the module openstreetmap-date-format (HOWTO).
The reason for this module is the flexibility of the date system in OpenStreetMap, which allows for inexact dates like “C16” (16th century), “early 2000s” (sometime between 2000 and 2003), and “1848..1855” (between 1848 and 1855).
Back in October in we had a London pub meet-up in the Monkey Puzzle pub. It was pretty well attended. There were three or four people I hadn’t met before. For example I was pleased to meet user okwithmydecay. This username was familiar, I think because I’ve just seen him doing lots of editing in London. Good reason to recognise somebody’s username! We like that!
I took along some OSMUK leaflets which I have received a pack of (Order OSM UK leaflets here). I say leaflets, but they’re more like postcards. Single sheet of card. I think there’s five different designs with five different messages/target audiences. Me & Andy (gravitystorm) were critiquing them in the pub, although on the whole we decided they’re rather good, and certainly good that people have organised this.
Today, I mapped over 500 buildings in other to map my area to the OSM world, I have come to believe that mapping my locality will make tasks easier for gov’t and NGOs for carrying out their task, census, flood mapping, household, etc. I will send a goodwill message to #UNIQUEMAPPERSTEAM for introducing OSM s to me
Inaugural State Of The Map Conference Nigeria 2022 was super amazing experience and moments I ever share with folks in my entire life. I’ll like to seize this opportunity to share my way to unique mappers network and to Hot#openstreetmappers network. my name is Mamman Ali from Biu local government area of Borno state. I was was introduced to unique mappers network of Nigeria in early 2018, when I was opportune to attend the institute of certified geographers of Nigeria (ICGN) training here in federal university of port Harcourt. with the kind of gesture and hospitality I received from good people of port Harcourt and our humble national coordinator for unique mappers network Nigeria, with the little knowledge and amazing experience I share with people around the unique mappers teams of Nigeria I begin to develop passion and interest mapping and other humanitarian activities that comes intoto my line.
Seriously. Me being sleep deprived made me create a huge issues. Lucky for me I knew how to before hand fix the issue…. At least I hope so. Double checking tomorrow to ensure no stray nodes are about again.
Sleep deprivation leads to mistakes. Mistakes lead to even less sleep because they need to be fixed.
TL;DR go the heck to sleep so you don’t make mistakes that’ll cost you more time.
I purchased a dashcam a while ago because (1) people drive like absolute idiots where I live (seriously, watch that video) and (2) who knows what you might capture? It’s a Viofo A129 Pro Duo, it has a 4k front-facing camera and an additional HD rear-facing camera. It also has built-in GPS.
Because it’s always on, I figure it would be nice to use the footage for mapping purposes as well! The process is not completely straightforward, hence this blog post.
Let’s look at what the camera produces:
The State of the Map conference gave me even more reasons to map my society under the leadership of the Unique Mappers. We had engaging hands-on sessions with Tomtom, who showed us how to map using MapRoulette, and with Mapillary, who showed us how to map using the Mapillary smartphone app. I also got the opportunity to meet with skilled mappers, and their guidance inspired me to resume mapping. As a travel grant recipient, I am thankful to the organization for its assistance. The conference was a huge success.
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