Whether we should tag streets indicating whether it has an associated footway/cycleway is a discussion that comes up again and again on OpenStreetMap forums. Currently there's an ongoing discussion on the mailing list for Denmark discussing whether or not the cycleways in Copenhagen should be represented as cycleway=lane tags on the streets or as separate highway=cycleway ways alongside the street.

Rather than discuss that specific issue I think it's worth stepping back and thinking about it makes sense to represent the sort of complex map data we're likely to get in the future where we want to accurately represent highways, pedestrian areas, intersections and other things like that.

Right now most intersections in OSM look like this:

These ways may or may not have an associated pedestrian pavement.

Here's the same intersection with added pedestrian ways & crossings:

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This is on overdue follow-up to a previous blog posting where I managed to flood my GPS by swimming with it.

After I got out of the water the display briefly had color distortions before the unit turned off completely. I unwisely tried to power it on again with out success.

After I got home I pondered taking the unit in for warranty repair. I'd bought it in Iceland but was presently in Germany, after contacting my dealer I found that Garmin had global warranty which I could use in Germany, but I might have to provide a receipt which was in Iceland. Instead of dealing with all that I decided to try to repair it myself.

So here's the unit after disassembly:

When I opened it a bit of water flooded out, probably equivalent to at least 1-2 tablespoons.

I dried off the water I could see with a cloth and then dried all the components for 12 days at room temperature. After that I assembled it again:

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The main OpenStreetMap website can now be translated on the web using Translatewiki. I originally floated the idea in July and after meeting up with the maintainers of Translatewiki at Wikimania 2009 we made it happen. Nikerabbit and Siebrand (Translatewiki guys) have done some great work on making this happen.

If you want to translate OpenStreetMap site you can now do so at the Translatewiki site.

Since it was imported yesterday from the OpenStreetMap SVN server we've had 1500 edits to the translations by 10 different users. 9 of those are to languages that didn't have translations already (although they're still small):

• Stats for yesterday
• Stats for today
• Stats for *now*

These translations aren't automatically being synced back to the OpenStreetMap SVN repository yet. Me and Nikerabbit have been fixing bugs in the import/export process required to make this happen. Those bugs don't affect translations on Translatewiki.net, but it might be a few days before we can start committing back so the translated strings will show up on the OpenStreetMap site.

So please go to Translatewiki and help make OpenStreetMap available in your language!

I finally finished the Garmin MapSource installer I blogged about in June. It's a program aimed at distributors of Garmin maps who can easily zip it up along with their maps to support installation via MapSource on Windows.

Here's what it looks like currently:

And this is the installed map in MapSource:

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I made a small change to the website yesterday so that when objects are being browsed the name tag corresponding to the user's language is used by default.

To see an example of this look at the node for Copenhagen, Berlin or anything else that has i18n name: tags in your language.

mkgmap now has support for sea polygons. This means that when you view a map generated by it the ocean will actually be blue, as opposed to the same color as the land with a small coastline separating the two which was previously the case.

I've updated my daily map export of Iceland to use this feature. Here's a before & after picture taken using QLandKarte:

It happens that I get so frustrated at the lack of a feature in JOSM that I actually go and implement it. The last time that happened I added regex search support. Now I've added plugin search support:

Now when I want to install some plugin it won't take me a minute just to find it.

Usually there are easier ways to implement features in JOSM. You just whine (kindly and specifically) on their bugtracker and the code fairies will take care of it.

There's now a petition to Google requesting that they grant us permission to map with their aerial imagery as a backdrop, just like Yahoo! allows us to do.

Kudos to Richard Fairhurst for bringing this to the attention of legal-talk.

See e.g. this changeset. It's easy to translate once you've grabbed all the place=city nodes with capital=yes.

Unfortunately the capital=yes tag is somewhat confused since some people are adding regional capitals.

The videos of my talk as well as Katie Filbert's and Christian Becker's talks are now up on the Wikimania 2009 website.

Here's a direct link to the video of my talk and my slides (PDF and ODF).

(As discussed in this diary entry)

Videos of it will probably be uploaded tomorrow (here) but the slides are already online.

I'm currently at Wikimania 2009 and I'll be giving a talk tomorrow on August 27 about the integration of OpenStreetMap into Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia.

The talk will be held at the Centro Cultural General San Martín.

I've put up a tileserver that renders OpenStreetMap in all 279 Wikipedia languages.

There's e.g. a German and French rendering of Europe.

See the Maps-l mailing list and the server setup notes for more info

The fun! project of getting OpenStreetMap maps deployed on Wikimedia
servers (e.g. Wikipedia) is grinding forward at a healthy pace. For those who have no idea what it is you can read the original announcement on the Wikimedia techblog.

Unfortunately the project has been somewhat delayed by the
Wikimedia.de servers mentioned in that posting taking a bit longer to
arrive than expected (the DB server is still not up).

I've personally had some much needed time to work on it recently,
right now I'm hacking static map generation as outlined in this RFC.

(see also this posting on wikitech-l)

If you'd like to help here's the bug list I'm working on.

There are lots of tasks to be done. One very interesting task that I'm
sure someone would be happy to work on is seeing how this setup scales
to >200 languages or so.

Ideally Wikimedia will have static map generation / a tileserver
that'll render maps in the locale of the target wiki, so it'll e.g.
use name:de tags for de.wikipedia.org.

I went out for a walk with my girlfriend today taking the GPS along. She ended up stealing it and obsessively mapped every footpath we walked on.

So far so good, but once we got home showing her how to post-process the data wasn't as easy.

She downloaded the experimental Windows installer for JOSM which doesn't default to Mercator for some reason, and Yahoo WMS doesn't work either for some reason, with no way to find out why.

Once she was running JOSM she had trouble with its interface, mainly the stickyness of it. She'd create a way neglecting to double click to explicitly end it. Or once the way was created she couldn't select it because you have to switch modes in JOSM (add -> select) to be able to do that.

Of about 3 hours with JOSM probably 1/3 of that was spent fighting the interface. I had very similar problems with my first 12 hours or so of JOSM myself. It's easy for me to edit with it now but getting good at it takes a long time.

"I would never have been able to find out how to use that program if you weren't helping me, it's completely unusable by default".

The only reason *I* know how to use JOSM was that I spent 2-4 hours of those first 12 hours reading online manual and experimenting with it.

Maybe we're just idiots, or maybe JOSM isn't very newbie friendly.

Then I thought I'd show her how to use Potlatch, at first the website yelled at her and once we opened Potlatch it showed giant black holes all over the Yahoo layer:

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A new user has added the fictional island of Lummerland which appears in a German children's TV show to the map, quite an impressive feat of fictional mapping.

Here's a website that shows the island that was mapped, along with a bigger picture of it.

Today I cycled out to a beach by Groß Glienicker See. Noticing that the two islets around 250 meters from the shore weren't on my recently updated Garmin map, and incorrectly recalling that that area of Berlin didn't have Yahoo aerial imagery I decided to swim out two the two islands to record a track their dimensions.

As it turns out those islets weren't rendered on my map due to a missing multipolygon relation, there is Yahoo aerial imagery available for that area, and my Garmin 60CSx isn't quite as waterproof as advertised.

The two islets are more accurately traced now though, and I'll see if I can't get my GPS working tomorrow after drying it off overnight.

Update: I've written a follow up blog posting describing how I repaired by GPS.

I maintain a Garmin map export of Iceland which is updated daily. But I've had complaints from Windows users about the maps being hard to install, they expect to be able to upload maps from Garmin MapSource.

Unfortunately the only GUI MapSource installers are proprietary and seem to expect you to use cGPSMapper. To work around this other mkgmap exports have a .bat install script. That works, but not very user friendly for the general Windows userbase.

So I've started to write one, it's really basic at the moment but it's coming along:

And it can install maps that are viewable in MapSource later on:

… See full entry

Þórir Jónsson on the talk-is mailing list got Kadeco or the Keflavík Airport Development Corporation to release a PDF version of a map of Ásbrú.

Ásbrú is a new suburb of Reykjanesbær (previously Keflavík) on the site of the former Naval Air Station Keflavik. The site has been converted for mixed University & Industrial use.

I rectified the map using mapwarper and drew the road network/buildings/landuse that wasn't there already. And here are the before/after pictures:

Before:

After:

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The tah-heatmap I made of the globe is the current featured image on the front page of the wiki:

Maybe I can convince the t@h guys to run a job on their servers to report tile sizes with more granularity than z12. That would make for a nice map at the country-level.

I've also been in contact with stevefaeembra who made some very nice heatmaps using flickr data overlaid on OSM maps. He's going to release the code behind it so others can render their own as well.

Getting access to OSM tileserver request logs and rendering heatmaps for requested areas and comparing them with heatmaps of our data would make for a very interesting project.