Introduction

This short blog is covering my trip and OSM updates in Republic of Panama. I will still update few things, but most of my knowledge is already in OSM. In first part, i will describe few minor edits useful for anybody who want to spend few days in Panama (just skip it, if you don't have plans like that) and in the final part something more interesting.

Most of country is realy deserted, with only few POIs or buildings here and there. Bing coverage is OK, but large parts are under clouds and imagery is really old. I stayed in one place that was operating for one year or even longer, but on satellite images you will find just nice green grass.

Obviously, it is not possible to map all useful things you noticed in another country during two weeks trip, but still you can create few gpx and some useful changesets (and not only hotels ;) ). source: How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?;; Copyright © Pascal Neis (neis-one.org) Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

I have read something about growing popularity of triathlon in Panama and because larger towns aren't bike/walking friendly, maybe OSM will grow there too ;)

Small edits

Two trails in International Park La Amistad, though El Retoño trail is still missing:
source: Waymarked Trails: Hiking;; Map data © OpenStreetMap under ODbL, elevation data by SRTM/ASTER

Some bus stops (though bus stops in Panama are more about shelters, because you can flag down most of buses almost anywhere) and taxi wait point in Cerro Punta and Las Nubes, Chiriqui, where is located entrance to International Park La Amistad: source: OpenStreetMap;; © OpenStreetMap contributors

Platforms and toilets (fee=yes) in Terminal de Buses de David in David, Chiriqui. That small platform is for Terminales - David - Panama, s.a. company operating on David-Panama City route and the larger for other "local" buses: source: OpenStreetMap;; © OpenStreetMap contributors

Bus stop in Almirante, sidewalk (not visible at zoom 16) and Taxi 25 office (shop=ticket is not rendered by Mapnik, but you can find it in search), where you can board on a boat to Bocas del Toro town: source: OpenStreetMap;; © OpenStreetMap contributors

In Bocas del Toro, there was more relax and solo_traveler_fear_of_stolen_tablet_from_beach than OSM, so i uploaded only few POIs there. Probably that is the reason, why is this place so deserted in OSM compared to how touristy that town and islands are: source: OpenStreetMap;; © OpenStreetMap contributors

Larger edits

And at the end, probably my largest edits in PA - Metrobus in Panama. It is operated by Mibus company. They have almost all routes on own website, but compared to European standards, it is realy not user friendly. Are you looking for best bus route to your hotel? You will spend maybe one or two hours comparing all those pdf's with road network in your favorite map.

Did i wrote 'almost all routes on own website'? Well, thats correct. I don't know, if it is that mañana thing, but i created at least one relation, that i can't find on their website. You can also compare this name deducted from bus with name on Mibus website (though my name is maybe missing 'Estación La Cabima', I am realy not sure about this). And of course, no timetables...

During my 5 nights / 4 days in Panama City, i recorded GPX traces for few Metrobus routes, some of them too short or without description, but result is 9 relations in Openstreetmap. Apart from Albrook - Amador and Albrook - Esclusas de Miraflores routes, all other are incomplete, covering only few routes from Albrook to El Carmen/Betania area.

I was able to add few more bus stops and i will try to add some more comparing bus speeds from gpx and Bing imagery (i am pretty sure about IDAAN and Policia Nacional positions). But right now, I am almost done. I will leave Metrobus network in Panama in this early Alpha state; we need some Panama City resident's to make it better and useful. Somebody, who knows the city, is wiling to spend $0.25 for one ride, collecting gps traces and editing it all at home. And also create all that new roads for these routes. source: ÖPNVKarte;; Map data © by Openstreetmap contributors licenced under ODbL 1.0. This map is available under CC-BY-SA licence (© by MeMoMaps). Website design: Raffael Görich

This is complete route Albrook - Esclusas de Miraflores (and back to Albrook): source: OpenStreetMap;; © OpenStreetMap contributors. Tiles courtesy of Andy Allan

And another complete route, from Albrook to Amador showing last/first stop on Isla Flamenco: source: OpenStreetMap;; © OpenStreetMap contributors. Tiles courtesy of Andy Allan

(note: both these routes are on last stop turning around back to Albrook, so there is only one relation covering all variations for both routes)

This last Metrobus in Panama part is also used in Panama OpenStreetMap Forum for obvious reason.

Can we please fix the SEO Blacklink Spam?

I have been mapping here for a few weeks now and what caught my eye from day one was the pretty large amount of spam here and how long it sometimes takes until it gets removed - IF it gets removed at all...

And while diary entries usually get removed pretty quickly (which is still annoying as they show up in the RSS feeds and on Social Media), some accounts with spam in the user descriptions are over 1 year old as I just found after reading this entry.

So What's the Solution?

User Descriptions:

• Someone has to work his way trough the list in the Wiki and remove the profiles.

• Maybe implement a report Button

User Diaries:

• Only publish them after a moderator has approved them.

• Require accounts to have a certain age or amount of edits (the 2nd one could obviously backfire as it might lead to vandalism)

With all the active people and programmers involved in this project there must be better way to deal with this and get it under control.

Don't you think? Anyone got any better ideas?

Nachdem ich im Großarltal alle Häuser und Adressen erfasst habe.Widme ich mich wieder einem Gebiet, mit dem meine OSM Leidenschaft begonnen hat.

Ich habe mir zum Ziel gesetzt alle Adressen und Häuser rund um den Attersee zu erfassen. Die Hälfte ist schon mal geschafft. Leider geht es nicht so schnell, wie gedacht. Immer wieder mache ich abstecher in das Hinterland.

So, about six months after promising Ben Abelshausen, I'm finaly organizing a MeetUp in Antwerpen.

As I know organizing isn't quite my forte, I've been thinking a lot about what other thing one can do to make OSM more social today. As opposed to "how could we make it more social if we were programmers with all the time in the world". So, there was one piece of very low hanging fruit we identified on the last "monthly" "summer" meetup in Gent . We could just let all the new contributors in our area know that OSM are people. So when you join, you wouldn't think OSM is somewhere you just dump some data, but a place where people actually meet and collaborate on a common dream. (in case you wondered: yes, nerds can be romantic)

So I made a Google Spreadsheet where all new Belgian contributors are listed quite clean. You can click a link to their profile and send them a welcome message. After you sent it, you just add some info to the spreadsheet, so the same new user wouldn't be getting more than one welcome message. I made a draft standard welcome message (in Dutch) anyone can use or modify of completely throw away and make something better.

The welcome letter is available on a Google doc. The spreadsheet is available as a read only here.

I don't want to be doing this alone. I would like to share both Google Documents with anyone who wants to help out. All you need is a Google Account. We'll obviously need a French translation. And I would like there to be different letters of introduction.

If you're interested, I used (of course) one of neis-one's services. This RSS is read by an IFTTT recipe into Google Docs. It's read a bit messy, so I introduced a second worksheet that cleans it up a bit with some basic formulas.

I noticed SPAM in English is removed from the diaries quite promptly. What about the other languages? Who to report SPAM in the diaries?

Please remove that diary entry in Russian http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/weze/diary/21151 and maybe its author as well.

http://revolutionarygis.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/laos-district-data/

http://revolutionarygis.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/romania-unitati-administrativ-teritoriale-romania-administrative-units/

I'm at the OpenStreetMap Hack Weekend March 2014. Things done:

1. One of the things I'm really happy about is that Richard Fairhurst's addition of routing to the OpenStreetMap main website is really close to being ready - just a couple of tiny bugs and UI bits to iron out, and who knows, maybe it'll go live soon. I helped with a couple of little improvements and fixes.

2. The other thing is a conversation with new mapper Micky Allen, who is interested in mapping blue badge parking spaces. It turns out that in OSM we have a handy tag capacity:disabled=*, which is already used quite well in London, but we just need a bit more community effort to map these "blue badge" parking bays whenever we see them. Micky now has some ideas about how to extract these data from OSM, and he also has some ideas about encouraging the community to join in mapping them. I'll certainly try and remember to map them when I see them.

3. Next thing we've done this afternoon - some improvements to v2 of the HOT Tasking Manager. I've made it auto-unlock locked tasks after time (feature migrated from v1) as well as a couple of smaller tweaks.

Пользователи OSM из Курска, особенно Сёмыч, ввели в OSM все маршруты городского транспорта. Я отрендрил карты маршрутов трамвая, троллейбуса, и автобуса Курска в osmot/TileMill.

Курский автобус

Курский троллейбус

Курский трамвай

I see the map as a garden. It needs love and care from local mappers who know the area and can look after it regularly. This means editing regularly in the area, as against armchair mapping -- of which I do quite a bit (!), but there is nothing like a community of locals taking care of an area.

What areas of the US receive such community love and what areas do not? Digging into the raw changeset dump produces some interesting results.

Methodology

This is what I did :

1. For all changesets, approximate the location of the changeset to the center of the bounding box and geocode the point to the country level -- throw out all changesets which are not geocoded to the US and which seem to be over 2 latitudes or 2 longitudes wide (these are mostly programmatic edits)

2. Remove changesets by special users, davehansentiger, milenko, OSMFRedactionbot, bot-mode, woodpeck_fixbot and nhd-import (these were the big import accounts I identified, did I miss any?)

3. Divide up the country into .1 X .1 latitude / longitude squares (this is approximately a 11km X 11km box) and treat each box as a little garden of its own. For each of these of these gardens ask the following questions:

a) how many unique users have made commited a changeset in this area? b) how many unique users have made more than 5 changesets in this area? c) how many unique users have made more than 10 changesets in this area?

1. Once I calculated these three metrics, then I was ready to generate some pretty maps and analyses! I'm presenting some results below.

Findings

1. Here are the top OSM Gardens in the US that are well taken care of in the US.

• Bay Area 64 contributors with 10+ changesets
• DC 53 contributors with 10+ changesets
• Seattle 42 contributors with 10+ changesets

The complete top 10 list can be seen here: http://pastie.org/pastes/8897892/text

1. And here is map of places with at least five contributors commiting more than 10 changesets:

1. Here is a similar map, with major cities marked as airplanes. All the major cities seem to meet this bar of having at least 5 members who have made more than 10 changes. But at the second tier there is a lot of variation. Looking in the south, Alabama, Huntsville and Montogemery and Alamaba all seem to have at least one area that is well taken care of, while cities in Louisiana (Lafayette) or Arkansas seem to have no real communities to speak of. Memphis, TN and Knoxville, TN seem to have very little acitvity -- while there seems to be a decent community in Nashville. I think there is a lot of interesting variation here that goe beyond simply saying that places with people are places with contributors.

Going forward

This is very much a work in progress. If there is interest I could compile lists which state more clearly (large) cities that could do with community engagement and others that seem to have plenty going on. I should also figure out how to make these maps in TileMill and have embed them so that people can play around with them.

Depois de umas férias em Ouro Preto, volto ao Rio e suas comunidades. Mas até nas férias andei mapeando. Não mapeando propriamente, só encontrei uma rua que não estava no OSM e agora está (eu só não sei o nome da tal rua, ao lado do teatro). De resto, apenas melhorei a identificação dos pontos turísticos (basicamente igrejas e museus), e mapeei a parte turística da Mina do Chico Rei (que por se tratar de um buraco no chão, não tinha GPS para mapear com precisão).

De volta ao Rio, agora é a vez do Complexo do Alemão. Dessa vez, como tenho poucos mapas do local o procedimento será um pouco mais lento porque será feito do zero e com logradouros ainda não reconhecidos pela prefeitura. Vamos lá, devagar e sempre.

Meu nome Jose Bernardes Sou de Livramento /Bahia , adoro mapas, estou melhorandos os mapas das cidades do estado da Bahia principalmente Livramento, Dom Basílio e Rio de Contas.

Great Video on OSM

http://blogs.state.gov/stories/2014/03/07/openstreetmap-diplomacy-mapgive-and-presidential-innovation-fellow

Mi intención es completar los caminos de las zonas de Villanueva del Rebollar, Riberos, y Cervatos de la Cueza, por una parte, y la zona de Arconada, Villovieco, y Villarmentero de Campos, por otra, ya que son dos zonas que conozco bastante bien.

Después ya veremos. Y se me ha ocurrido que se pueden grabar minivideos contando "como añadir caminos para dummies" e intentar difundirlos por YouTube y Facebook, para que la gente de los pueblos se anime y cada uno complete su zona. Lo tengo que madurar.

Este año me encuentro en un nuevo proyecto, y voy a empezar a hacer el mapa de las comunas 8, 9 y 10, que les falta bastante información, quien quiera apoyar este trabajo es bienvenido.

The iD editor has used the name suggestion index for quite a while and it was something that I wanted to support in vespucci in the upcoming release. The one thing you do want to reduce in a mobile app is typing.

Basically the idea is to suggest correct spelling (and tagging) for some of the more prominent chains of restaurants and shops to the mapper. The way it works in vespucci now is slightly different from the current implementation in iD and at least some aspects might be worthwhile supporting there too.

Using the name as a short cut for tagging

If you are creating a new object, or adding tags to an object that previously didn't have relevant tags you can use the name as an "Ersatz"-preset (note vespucci supports normal JOSM-style presets too, and I may expand this functionality to automatically add further tags from the presets):

Enter the name tag

Start typing and get the auto-complete list

Further typing refines the list

Selecting the correct item set the name and the corresponding tags

Adding the name to a "pre-tagged" object

In the example the building has already been pre-tagged with amenity=restaurant, which while not really wrong is not the best tagging for a fast food restaurant.

Enter the name tag

Start typing and get the auto-complete list

This includes suggestions not just for amenity=restaurant but for potenially further refined tagging.

Select the correct name after further refinement

Vespucci now asks for confirmation if the old tags should be replaced.

The new functionality is available in the vespucci test builds.

اثناء جولة لي في حي الروابي بالرياض لأضافة بعض الاماكن للخريطة لاحظت وجود لوحات جديدة للمنازل مثل هذه

و بعد البحث وجدت موقع الادارة العامة للترقيم و التسمية و في هذه الصفحة موقع امانة الرياض

و جدت ان الباركود يحتوي علي

• اسم الشارع

• رقم العقار

• اسم الحي

• و الاهم, الاحداثيات

اعتقد انا هذا يمكن ان يسهل عملية ادخال ارقام و عناوين المنازل في الخريطة باستخدام برنامج علي الموبايل مثلاً.

هل يوجد مشترك عربي ؟

Just finished to import a city - before and after pictures

More interactive images can be found on the OSM Romania Page

https://www.facebook.com/OsmRomania/posts/10202774066008863?stream_ref=10

Noi del LUG di Villafranca (www.linuxludus.it) abbiamo avviato una collaborazione con il comune di Mozzecane, il cui ufficio tecnico e l'assessore Antonio Faccioli, che ha la delega all'informatizzazione, sono molto attivi nel coinvolgere la cittadinanza. In funzione della restituzione di dati pubblici sul sito del comune e, forse in futuro, anche nell'app Municipium che stanno usando in questo periodo, stiamo organizzando un'uscita con la cittadinanza per il giorno 12 aprile, dopo una piccola introduzione pubblica a ciò che andremo a fare e come. Questo progetto è organizzato sia da noi di LinuxLudus, sia da due architetti veronesi che stanno lavorando al concetto di Smart City e che stanno organizzando un convegno su questo argomento a Verona per la fine di maggio - inizi giugno. In questo convegno verrà portato il caso di Mozzecane come esempio di buon uso dei dati pubblici e di coinvolgimento della cittadinanza.

Chiunque sia interessato a dare una mano, con dei consigli o in qualunque altra maniera può contattarmi inviando una mail al seguente indirizzo: carlo.benini1@gmail.com

Grazie.

Carlo Benini

Atelier OpenStreetMap sur Nantes

La société 2i2l organise un atelier OSM gratuit le vendredi 4 avril 2014 de 18 à 20h dans les locaux d'Alliance Libre de Saint-Sébastien-sur-Loire près de Nantes. Il s'adresse à tous les curieux d'OSM qui n'ont jamais franchi le pas de la contribution. Merci de leur relayer cet événement. Je serai l'intervenant de cet atelier

Au menu :

• Présentation du projet
• Comment contribuer (Traces, Notes, éditions,...)
• iD, l'éditeur en ligne
• Utilisations des données OSM
• La communauté

Les participants sont invités à venir avec leur ordinateur portable dans la mesure du possible. Inscriptions ici

Formations OpenStreetMap et Géomatique

2i2l propose également des formations payantes autour d'OSM et de la géomatique:

• Qgis
• Contributions avancées avec JOSM et exploration des données OSM
• Le design de cartes avec Tilemill