Today being the 11th day of February, 2023, I took the decision to join the OSM training after some persuasion from my friends who have been a part of this community. The training this morning opened my eyes to quiet a lot of things as it concerns the global mapping community. Before the commencement of the training, I received a T-shirt and a bag, which made me feel I was already a part of Unique Mappers Network.

I didn’t know what to expect but I can confidently say now that I am glad I took the decision to attend. In the course of the training, it came as a surprise that I was actually interested in what was being done as I started to find it educative and interesting. There were some initial difficulties I experienced especially in learning how to map a community but I didn’t let it deter me.

I gained the knowledge of what Open Street Mapping is all about, being that it deals with the local and global community at large. I learned that Open Street Map is a global map of the world that is open to the people as it is a humanitarian service geared towards helping people in need.

This evening, I joined the zoom meeting of which I gained better clarity on how to map on HOTOSM. We were encouraged towards mapping the disaster struck Turkey as a way to enable search and rescue teams have better access to buildings that may have been struck in the course of the Earthquake.

At the moment, I’ve mapped over a hundred buildings and roads In Turkey and would continue to do so with the knowledge that this is my contribution to community development and a humanitarian service to the world.

UMTMapTurkey

#uniquemappersteam #uniquemappersnetwork #uniquemappersnetwork2023

              #STATE OF THE MAP TANZANIA

STATE OF THE MAP TANZANIA

State of the Map Tanzania is a national conference that celebrates the culture of open mapping, open data, GIS, and its impact across East Africa. The conference took place on 20th-22rd January 2023 in Dare salaam, Tanzania. The conference had the following goals

-Learn from one another to improve OpenStreetMap and Open Data in Tanzania.

-Promote cartographic innovations in Tanzania.

-Place OpenStreetMap as a governance and sustainable development tool.

-Bring together all OpenStreetMap Tanzania Communities to share their experiences and achievements. For more info about the conference visit https://stateofthemaptanzania.org/

activities Joined

• I participated in the Mapbox and how to utilize it for free. it was my first time understanding that Mapbox can be used for free by the communities. I learned that MapBox allows individual subscriptions and enjoy their services.

curious experience, being locked out because of etiquette misbehaviour.

I heard about the procedure against me only after the procedure had been closed with a condemnation, 4 votes approving, 1 abstaining. not only no space to present my point of view with the people who were to decide, even no notice of the pending procedure. speak about openness.

what were —concretely— my abuses? I may guess, but I was not —concretely— notified of what was the violation. maybe the same as my previous block. I had to review my own behaviour myself, perform a radical self-criticism, purge myself of all evil, then came back once purified.

I’m happy I renounced my membership of such a Foundation.

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a clarification apparently needed, seeing the first two comments to this entry: I obviously do know that I have a continuous latent conflict with YouthMappers and HOT. I did not know that steps were being taken against me. then I received the following email:

… See full entry

Editor note: Written by Heather Leson, Dinar Adiatma, and Can Unen

Having the most up-to-date and accurate map data is crucial for emergency response. The OpenStreetMap community and partners create this to support humanitarians. The OSM data is shared on the Humanitarian Data Exchange and is used to develop information management (IM) products for decision-makers responding to emergencies.

This short note is to help new mappers get started and to encourage data quality. The local Turkish community, Yer Çizenler, and HOTOSM coordinate this activation. For Syria, mapping is more complex as it is a conflict zone. HOT is working closely with OSM colleagues and partners to assess any HOT tasks in Syria carefully. As it is a conflict zone, we will collaborate to ensure that HOTOSM Task Manager OSM contributions cause no harm. We are here to help the helpers. We know that many want to help. We ask that you talk with other mappers to learn and help the responders while respecting the local guidance.

Data quality is important in OpenStreetMap (OSM) because it directly affects the accuracy and usefulness of the map. All data should be fit for purpose, and to make it fit purpose, it requires a minimum gap. Poor data quality can lead to incorrect or outdated information, negatively impacting the people relying on OSM for navigation, planning, and decision-making. Learn more here.

Contacts - The HOT Activation Coordinator contacts can be found on the OSM wiki

New Mappers

Are you new to OSM? This is a complex emergency, and we are glad to help you get started:

1. See basic videos on how to map via MapGive
2. Review Learn OSM and see the OSM wiki guidance for this emergency
3. Observe the daily live stream and join a mapathon
4. Use the MapRoulette challenges of Yer Çizenlerto tag the collapsed buildings from verified datasets.
5. Join the HOTOSM slack channels for #disastermapping and #mappersupport
6. Ask for help - the community is here to support your OSM journey

… See full entry

Short update to the previous post on whether mappers are really helping anybody in a disaster situation…

CJ Hendrix from OCHA reached out and shared statistics on the downloads of all of the OSM datasets for Turkey, provided by HOT through HDX…

… See full entry

I received this question through the HOT feedback form today. Here is my response in case anyone else wants to know.

Re: Is what I am doing really helping anybody in a disaster situation?

The short answer is yes, we think so - the tasking manager projects have been created based on requests from organisations who plan to use the data.

The long answer is that in the immediate aftermath, everyone is looking for resources, including data, but we get very little feedback initially as to who exactly is using it.

People and orgs are busy responding. This info usually surfaces a little later and we will update when it does. In previous disasters such as the Haiti earthquake in 2010, Philippines typhoon Yolanda in 2013, and Ebola outbreaks in West and Central Africa, we have observed that responding agencies often begin using the map data a few weeks into the response, after the initial rush to establish the basics is done. This is only possible if we start early, so that by the time responders need it the data actually exists.

One proxy we do have is that the downloads of OSM datasets provided by HOT through the HDX platform are spiking. There is a lag on the reporting (so latest numbers are from 06 Feb) but we do see them going up. HDX is a key data source for humanitarian responders.

… See full entry

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

What’s covered this week in brief?

Earthquake response in Turkey and Syria // The first OSM diary from State of the Map Tanzania // Thank you packs received by top performing validators // An interview with OSM Somalia // Advances in the OSM contribution decline analysis and research // OSM Malawi @ community working group // Mappy quote of the week

This week we were excited by…

Earthquake Response

This is not ‘exciting’, but very significant… The open mapping / OpenStreetMap community have responded in numbers to support people affected by the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria.. Just yesterday, over 1200 people contributed to mapping tasks in Turkey. New projects have also been published for Syria. The response in Turkey is being coordinated locally by mapping NGO, Yer Çizenler, who are working to connect local partners with the data.

OSM Diary — SotM Tanzania

… See full entry

I’ve been seeing Little Libraries everywhere for years now, I’m not sure if these exist, but it would be nice to have a local map of all their locations and at each location marker people could post lists of books or a picture

Of course we woke up to this every single morning!

This year started on a high note for all YouthMappers selected for the 2023YouthMappers Leadership Fellows Summit in Montego Bay, Jamaica.

YouthMappers from different parts of the globe embarked on a very exciting trip to Jamaica, I was one of them representing my mother country Zimbabwe. I bordered from Lagos, Nigeria and calculating the hours and days to get to Montego Bay kept me in suspense and some kind of curiosity. I travelled with YouthMappers from various states of Nigeria, it made the trip much exciting and fun. The joy of meeting someone new, someone who’s passionate about the same things you are also into, exchanging those big smiles and hugs made it worthwhile. So I’d say my summit experience commenced the instant I met my first Summit mates and trip mates!

… See full entry

Cartography in OSM is twofold: drawing and tagging. While the former only require the ability to click with a mouse for drawing a line on a screen, tagging a feature is more demanding. There are only two options for finding appropriate tags to describe a feature.

The first is to browse the wiki and find the feature’s page. Once there, you often need to dig through many other pages to find the accepted keys/values that would describe the detailed characteristics of the feature. All of this is very laborious, even for a seasoned contributor, particularly when mapping a feature for the first time.

The second option is to use search tools to find the tags you are looking for (keys or values). You can use a search engine (e.g., Google) by adding “OpenStreetMap Wiki” with your keywords to narrow down the results. You can also use OSM tools, such as TagInfo, TagFinder, OSMantic JOSM Plugin and some others. These tools work well if your keywords match existing keys or values, but it gets trickier if they don’t. However, for a few months now, a new tag search alternative has been offered: ChatGPT.

ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022 [1]. OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research and deployment company that gives a free access to its chatbot for the time of the “research preview” [2]. Basically, once registered, a user can ask any type of questions to the chatbot. I then decided to test the chatbot on its ability to find appropriate tags for OpenStreetMap features.

Since I’m currently working in tagging businesses, I tried a few ones. Here are a sequence of questions/answers tried on ChatGPT.

Q: What would be the tag use in OpenStreetMap for a restaurant serving pizza?

A: In OpenStreetMap, the tag for a restaurant serving pizza would be “amenity=restaurant” and “cuisine=pizza”.

The answer is good, but restaurants and pizza could easily be linked together. So, I decided to make it more difficult…

… See full entry

Fuck politicians and those responsible for current internet situation, since when in tarnation I need to use VPN for accessing OSM and it’s relevant services?? Seriously? That much of disruption in internet that tools like josm don’t work?? Internet already sucks enough, I have to use a damn VPN for using OSM Imma gonna fade into horizon!

After the earthquake in Turkey and Siria I will be starting editing again. Some of my colleagues will join soon, I think.

[Ed note: this is a ‘preprint’ because my usual blog has technical problems]

A few days back I read this article about the longest straight lines on land and sea and I wondered how routers would handle the load, at least for the land one.

So I set up a route between Rua da Fortaleza, Sagres, Portugal, and what looks like the main square in Quanzhou, China. SRTM and GraphHopper handled the request just fine, while for some reason valhalla didn’t. Then I upped the stakes, by requesting foot routes. Foot routes are harder because the foot network is way bigger than the road network. SRTM and GH succeeded, but not without some effort. I tried to benchmark it, but it seem at least OSRM seems to cache the results, which makes sense. Interestingly, the route more or less follows the great circle all the way down to around Tyumen, Russia, where it starts to deviate more and more as the roads become less and less frequent. Also, OSRM proposes a land only route, while GH also includes ferries, but that depends on how OSM uses GH and how GH (and probably OSRM too) are configured.

I also read the foot notes on that article[1]. It mentions that Sagres is also the end of the longest land route, period; the other end is in Russia. First thing to note is that is says that the end is close to the North Korea border, “the eastern terminus of that country’s road network”. I wonder where he got that nibble, because I found there are connected roads almost all the way to the Chukchi Peninsula, crossing the antemeridian. I found that all routers choke there. So the calculation for the longest foot route will have to wait until this is fixed; I’m not going to settle for partial results :)

Lastly, That Other Map does not even has those routes, so technically they don’t have that problem :)

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[1] you do that, right? :)

Neural machine translation (NMT) is a method of machine translation that uses deep learning techniques to improve the accuracy of the translation. The success of ChatGPT already shows the great potential of generative AI and transformer-based language models. This diary will investigate the feasibility and performance of applying neural machine translation for OpenStreetMap, by fine tuning a pretrained translation model on OpenStreetMap data.

How to fine tune a pre-trained translation model on OSM data

I first found a pre-trained translation model in Hugging Face that translates from Chinese to English: https://huggingface.co/Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-ro. This model is a MarianMT model, with 77 million parameters and ~300MB in disk size. So, it’s a small model. In comparison, GPT3 has 175 billion parameters.

Then, from OpenStreetMap, I collected all the existing Chinese-English translation pairs for any map objects located in Taiwan (as of 2023/01/31), and split them into training data and test data. I fined tuned the pre-trained translation model on this training data for five iterations. Finally, I evaluated the performance of the fine tuned model on the test data.

The code to fine tune the translation model is here: https://github.com/liyinxiao/neural-machine-translation-on-OpenStreetMap

Evaluations

After manual inspection on the first 200 rows of test data, the performance seems pretty good, and it performs especially well on ways. The details of the evaluation can be found in https://github.com/liyinxiao/neural-machine-translation-on-OpenStreetMap.

Conclusion

… See full entry

Hi OSM! I’m MoiraPrime, a mapper from Mississippi, and I wanted to reflect on the current state of the map in my region. Since joining the community fully in January 2021, I’ve seen all kinds of things across my state, and I wanted to use this opportunity to talk about them.

TIGER Fixup

Fifteen years have passed since the initial TIGER import in Mississippi. Despite all the work various sparse mappers have done in the state, there are still 84,400 ways that remain untouched since they were imported.

In an effort to move this along in a way that’s compatible with my ADHD brain, and to maybe encourage a few random OSM users to venture into Mississippi, I’ve created a few different MapRoulette challenges!

TIGER Fixup Projects on MapRoulette

I created a project called “MoiraPrime’s Mississippi TIGER Fixup Projects” and put 2 related projects under it as an initial tryout of the approach.

… See full entry

Hi, my name is James Crawford, and I’m running for the OpenStreetMap US board.

About me

I’m a regular editor from Auburn, Alabama. I mainly contribute by editing TIGER road data, importing from external sources, POI surveying, street level imagery coverage, and backcountry trail details. I’ve been active on OSM for over 2 years, and I love keeping in touch with the US community about mapping efforts across the country, and I like seeing community leaders that are active in public forums, and are willing to mingle with their mapping peers.

My current priorities for OSM are as follows:

1: Encouraging the coordination of importing high quality data from external datasets. There are numerous datasets from government agencies in the United States with permissible licensing for use with OpenStreetMap. These datasets provide useful information about a variety of objects mapped in OpenStreetMap, and save huge amounts of time over having mappers collect the data redundantly. It is important to be in touch with the community when coordinating data imports, and it is important to be in touch with government agencies so that we can be more aware of available data that is free to use.

2: Prioritizing focus towards what OSM is useful for. OpenStreetMap defeats commercial competitors in the predictable niche- where there is a demand for geospatial data but no lucrative monetary return. Trails and public land data make a good example. Outdoor enthusiasts have a demand for accurate and low cost map data, but large scale commercial map providers have no commercial incentive to allocate resources towards maintaining this kind of data.

I’m a big fan of outreach, and I’m not a fan of the idea of serving on the board without having meaningful communication with the community. I manage a local community myself, and I love keeping in touch about mapping activities!

Thanks for the consideration,

-James

कवठा बदनापूर KAWTHA BADNAPUR

Edit (november 2025): Bing Maps Builder was abandoned in july 2024 - one year and a half after publishing the post below. In the meantime, I’d like to do a shoutout to an article about Visual Studio Code which expresses the same fear of community fracture that I feared for OSM.

Edit: A small update happened after publishing this article - you can read it here: osm.org/user/Pieter%20Vander%20Vennet/diary/400992

OpenStreetMap is in trouble

It is a long-standing tradition that every now and then, a member of the OpenStreetMap-community posts that OSM is in trouble. Often times, these essays complain about some trivial things which are, in the end, not that important. For example, they complain that we didn’t implement Bézier curves yet (we don’t need them), or that the data model is stale (it isn’t, new tagging appears every day), that the main OSM.org website doesn’t have some feature and isn’t on par with Google Maps (that’s by intent) or that AI will make the entire manual mapping space obsolete, in “just another ten years time”.

However, most of these things miss the crucial point of what OSM is: a community; a group of people that are working together on mapping the world in an Open Data way and building related tools with Open Source. Our strength is the unison in this goal, even though everyone pursues this differently, through different technological means and for different motivations. Motivations range from the most mundane reasons up till political activism. And that’s fine. All this activity and diversity strengthens us as a global community.

However, recently, a new participant has entered the ecosystem with parasitic intents. It tries to capture away precisely what makes OSM strong: the contributors.

The means to this end is called ‘Bing Map Builder’.

A bit of history

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Hello, there!

Hello, everyone! Welcome to my first OSM diary entry! I’m Charmyne Mamador, project lead at Ausome Maps, a She Leads and She Inspires grant-funded project and co-founder of GeoLadies PH.

She leads and She inspires

Together with a number of awesome women all over Asia and the Pacific I went through the 6-month She Leads and She Inspires program. The program covered topics from how to build teams, leadership, solution formulation, and project management .

This program culminated with a project proposal and a chance for 10 projects to be funded. Ausome Maps was one of the proposals selected to be funded. For me, it was a dream come true. I first presented the idea for the Ausome Maps initiative almost 4 years ago at a Geoladies PH meetup. I even created some preliminary screens on how I envisioned the data viewer will look like. Since then, I was waiting for an opportunity to make it happen.

Now, through the She Leads and She Inspires program I finally was able to take this initiative closer to reality.

Pista ng Mapa for me

I was always an admirer of the open data and mapping community. Everyone is genuine and passionate towards the cause that they are working on. These passion-driven (as well as purpose-driven) individuals makes Pista ng Mapa a go-to annual conference for students, professionals, and enthusiasts to learn about new mapping technology, techniques, and relevant projects.

Pista ng Mapa is a conference that is truly close to my heart. It was where the first GeoLadies PH workshop was held! Here was where I also tried to bring my human-centered design expertise into mapping by doing a Human-centered Design (HCD) mapping workshop.

And now, Pista ng Mapa 2022 is where Ausome Maps was officially launched to the public.

Journey to Bicol

The journey from my hometown in Oriental Mindoro to Manila was already long. However, I’m already used to that.

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About me

I started mapping in June 2020 as a way to find parks and trails near my home in Redmond, Washington. My daughter loves adventures and provides huge motivation. I am a software engineer by trade and from that bring my passion for great tools. I love being able to work with others on a project that is expansive, vivid, and important.

My mapping

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