There are several extensions to the Upper Macatawa Mountain Bike Trail system that have been completed and there will be more forthcoming in the coming year. It seems likely that it will finally connect the bike trail along Byron Road to the trail along 84th Ave.

Once it is dry enough to hike, the tiny dog and I are planning on mapping it out.

Version 6502 of JOSM has just been released as new tested version.

Notable changes

major enhancements

• Ask Windows users to update from Java 6 to Java 7
• "Improve way accuracy" enabled for normal users
• Add Hungarian EOV projection and GRS67 ellipsoid
• WMS auto-zoom configurable in preferences dialog
• History dialog:
  • Load and display changeset comment
  • Show history for any object

minor enhancements

• Ask for source tag in changeset/upload
• Make "jump to position" more visible (added in View menu in expert mode)
• Direct menu items to preset/imagery preferences
• Search: support less/greater-than, e.g., start_date>1950
• GeoJSON support improvements
• Shortcuts:
  • Zoom with '+' and '-' in download dialog
  • Additional shortcuts for copy/paste (ctrl-inser and shift-inser)
  • Geoimage: select first/last image with Home/End key
• Presets/Map styles:
  • Update of presets for man_made=monitoring_station, water, addr:interpolation, building=dormitory, bridge, place_of_worship, highway=residential, highway=speed_camera, man_made=surveillance, internet_access
  • New *name preset
  • Adjust color of retail/commercial landuses
  • Make presets selected values searchable/findable via F3
  • Separate icons for tree types conifer, broad_leaved, palm
• MapCSS: add support for negated regular expressions
• Relation editor: improve sorting of associatedStreet/street relation members
• Validator:
  • Tests improvements
  • Warnings for source:* tags without their main tag
  • Basic validation of source:maxspeed
  • Sorting of validation results

Summarized changelog

Complete changelog

Happy mapping !

Is there a tool, with which I can get the length of a certain way of openstreetmap? The tool should be so made, that one has just to enter the URL of the way and than get its length.

I have a range of (Australian) post codes and some values assigned to them, e.g.

postcode,value
2000,81
2001,2
2007,10
2009,5
2010,31
2011,10
2013,1
2015,4
2016,6
2017,8
2018,8
2019,18
2020,11
2021,6
2022,49

I'd like to visualise this data on OSM in different shades of colour. Is that possible and if so how?

Seen on this openstreetmap.fr blog, the main open data portal from French administrations collecting all public datasets data.gouv.fr includes now 11 datasets extracted from OSM. These extracts are performed either by the French local chapter team openstreetmap.fr or by various local public administrations.

I keep coming across beautiful OSM-based maps! Here is one for Poland:

Go explore for yourself here.

Doing your christmas shopping on Amazon? Remember using the OpenStreetMap affiliate links!

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Merchandise#Amazon

I organised yesterday my first OSM meeting, at the Brisbane Square Library of Queensland. Because of a lack of advertisement and the difficulty to access the library after hours, I ended up giving my presentation to a crowd of two attendees: my wife and a good friend. It was ok because it was my first try and it was a good way to give my presentation a go and get some feedback. My very good "students" got to do a tiny survey of the Brisbane Square and add a few POIs together, and this brings two new users to OSM! We'll see if they end up coming back to contribute to the project a bit more ;)

Here is my presentation, for anyone curious or needing ideas for their own. Feedback would be very welcome!

Hopefully I can organise more meetings / mapping parties around Brisbane; I got a few responses from contributors who would have loved to join but could not make it, which is a great sign!

Another on of my projects will be to reorganise the big mess in the Brisbane events on the wiki - it gets very confusing.

I've obtained a government document from La Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas. I converted the pdf to a shapefile here: http://revolutionarygis.wordpress.com/

If you want other gis let me know. I am working on Nicaragua, India, and a few other places.

Fidel

Finally, after some requests I published new design and functions for osmapa.pl, map designed for Polish custom map style and hosted by OpenStreetMap Polska Association.

Currently map is in Polish only, but if you're interested i18n is possible.

We are trying out something new here in Salt Lake City, Utah: Saturday Mapternoons. The next one is tomorrow, and I am looking forward to it. Saturday Mapternoons are a mix of mapping, catching up with fellow local OpenStreetMappers and geeking out over all things geo. If you're in the area, join us!

Check out all upcoming OpenStreetMap Utah events on our meetup page.

over on my regular blog: http://www.averillpark.net/thisendup/index.php?/archives/127-The-current-mapping-rig.html

The problem

I noticed that the standard/default osm-map does not show a lot of things that are in the map-database.

Examples:
* Shops - only a few are rendered so far: bakery, florist, hairdresser, clothes, bikes, DIY and supermarket
* Ambulance-stations
* Emergency-Phones (but regular phones are shown)
* Bike-Parking
* Benches, waste-baskets
* Flagposts
* Fountains / Artwork
* Rocks / Boulders (e.g. with memorials / engravings on them) * Clocks / sundials
* ...

Other users also noticed, and there are various entries under questions:
* shop appears only in edit mode
* Store Name Not Visible On Map
* more icons going to be available for additional types of shop...
* ...

The usual "answers" / excuses go something like * "we cannot show everything",
* "icons are missing", * "you can make your own map if you like". etc.
I think that is not the way to get ahead...

The standard map has to be at least as useful to the average map-user as google-maps, to get any traction.
Maperitive and Tilemill might be fine, but I don't want my own nice map, I want nice maps for everyone.
Also, I don't see the average map-user, looking for a shoe-shop / ambulance-station / emergency-phone etc. saying "great map, I can do the missing stuff myself" :)

I rather suspect the average map-user does not want a map-construction-set, he wants to see his shop / POI / whatever NOW. If he doesn't find what he need, NOW, on the STANDARD-MAP, he wil most likely go back to googlemaps / bingmaps / mapquest / whatever --> another wasted good first impression.

The ability to do your own maps with OSM is a bonus, but not the most frequent use-case.

Telling people about special-purpose maps, or "you need an account" etc. is also the wrong way to show them how great OSM is.
For the average map-user, if something is not reachable from the frontpage, with max. 2-3 clicks, it effectively doesn't exist.

The goal

So, I have been looking for a workaround, not just for arguments sake, but to also show what actually can be done.

Shops

Mislabeling shops that don't show up on the map would be an easy way to show that they could be rendered (i.e. there is space enough on the map to write icon and text).
A standard-icon (cart, bag) shouldn't be a big problem too - iD-editor uses a bag-icon.
However, it is a problem to find out the correct spot/person/forum/mailinglist etc. to set things in motion...

Example:
* Weiterstadt - a building with 3 shops.
Most of the other shops in that area are occuping a whole building, so they don't have a problem to put their name on the map.
This building has a computershop, a shoe- and a kitchen-shop (ComputerMax, Sioux, Plana). These shop-types don't have their own icons yet.
Just across the street, you can see another shoe-shop and kitchen-shop ("Schuhcenter", Küchen-Keie), and to the west, another electronic/computershop (MediaMarkt).
I would consider it quite unfair to show those other shops on the map, (just because they are located in their own building, which is supported by the rendering), and not the 3 shops in a common building.
So, here we see them, as "supermarkets".
For contrast, there is yet another computershop "Maxs-Master", just across from ComputerMax, where normally, all you can see is "9".
With some tweaking, (put name of shop into addr:housename, and remove addr:housenumber) we can at least show the name of the shop on the map.

Important stuff

• Ambulance-stations
  
• Emergency-Phones

I really fail to see why these are not rendered,
e.g. just use the red cross from hospitals, and the icon for regular phones.

...

Other stuff

Artwork, Fountains, Flagposts, Clocks/sundials (Tourist), Bike-Parking (Bikers), Benches, Waste-baskets (Pedestrians), Vending-machines, Grit-bins (everyone needs stuff:)

This is were I get into rendering stuff, using the poor man's way.
As shown above, with the current rendering, we can put text onto the map that is in the tag "addr:housename".

My showcase is Alter Friedhof DA - the old graveyard of Darmstadt (which now has quite some more details than most graveyards :)

I have been using:
* Bike-Parking "ofo"
* Benches "="
* Waste-baskets "u" or "µ"
* Emergency-Phone "("
* Flagposts "F"
* Artworks "@" (e.g. dry fountains - during winter, the difference can be hard to tell) * Fountains "f" or "\!/" (for the splashy kind)
* Clocks / sundials "Q"
* Vending-machines "V" or "Z" (cigarettes)
* grit-bins "#"

Also plain "address-markers" for the layout of the graveyard, i.e. as "place=locality".

...

I'm wearing my OpenStreetMap polo shirt in the office today. All set for tonight's London winter pub meet-up at the Monkey Puzzle.

We've had a couple in the series of winter pub meet-ups already this season. There's also been these awesome things which already have write-ups:

The typhoon crisis mapping event at the ODI. My diary entry, and my write up on the ODI blog, and Sam's blog

The OpenStreetMap Hack weekend. Jerry's blog gives a good run down of various hacking activities. There's also this from Dan. Looks like it was a great event. Sad to have missed it! Apparently this photo is everyone trying to do the Harry grin:

It's not quite right guys. Keep trying. ...having said that you're probably getting it closer than this lot at SOTM :D

At the hack weekend there was somebody from the BBC doing some recording of interviews for a radio 4 documentary. I did an interview with the same people a couple of days after. It will be interesting to hear how all of that edits down. (This is in addition to the BBC world service interview which already aired).

So a couple extra-non-pubular activities lately, but don't worry. We have also been to the pub!

The Gun pub in Spitalfields was an interesting place. Bit of a scruffy old man's boozer, but with a lot of suited city folks. Luckily the music was only blaringly loud at the entrance, so we had a good chat around a table further back. Here's Paul doing his best old-man-down-the-boozer impression:

More photos here

I was talking about wedding planning, and how I need an "OpenWeddingBudget" site to let me find out what are some typical amounts to spend on certain things like flowers. It's one of those curious questions which is not entirely easy to find an answer to using google, partly because people don't tend to openly share information about how much they've spent on stuff. ...anyway I remember that conversation, but we probably also talked about maps!

As a wedding related aside, last week I was designing wedding invitations which included a map of Ilkley. Didn't have long to do it. We were sending bitmap files to printers at sort of 300/400dpi, so the old dilemma of pixel resolution in text labels cropped up again. A basic screenshot of a web map at its native resolution is not great for printing. It either needs to be stretched at bit making it blocky, or would end up with really tiny little text labels on the paper. Since it was a fairly small area of map I needed for our invitations, I was able to work in SVG. I decided to try out a Maperative SVG export for this. It has a special export especially for inkscape, which puts all the objects nicely in separate layers. Much easier to work with afterwards than Mapnik SVG exports from OpenStreetMap.org . Also I decided I rather liked the imitation google rendering rules which maperative comes with. At the end of the day google does have good cartographic style, and I find it amusing when people say "What's this Harry? Surely you should be using OpenStreetMap on your invites!". Here's a little 1:1 sample. Various things added afterwards in inkscape, and then exported to raster (at whatever resolution I choose). You can see the text is all big (hi res) enough to look good on a printout.

So anyway ...we left the pub and headed for burritos just down the road, and then afterwards we headed to a different pub. We walked (slightly further than expected) to the Crosse Keyes.

I remember discussing real ale there. Did we actually talk about maps at all? I'm not sure. On the way home grant was doing a bit of opencellid.org mapping. He was pleased to be picking up a lot wifi data in the city.

We went to the blue posts more recently.

Mode photos here

We had along a few new faces, the names for which I have forgotten, but great to have them along starting interesting conversations and ideas for new (open) mapping projects on topics such as "OpenSickMap", mapping occurrences of vomit which needs clearing up in the streets, and "OpenSexualSlangMap" mapping the words that kids are using when they're talking about having ...a bit of how's your father. Apparently this is quite varied but geographically clustered.

We also had along a guy visiting from the U.S. who works with Planetizen, producing video courses. He's interested in doing one for OpenStreetMap. I think I've mentioned video before as something we should totally do more of, but also something which is massively time consuming. With my various attempts I've picked up a few tricks, not necessarily to make my amateurish videos better, but to make them take a bit less time (At least if a video is going to look amateurish, it shouldn't be the unsatisfactory result of many hours of work) but maybe we have an opportunity to get some video professionals involved.

There were quite a few other topics of conversation, which I forget. You just have to be there... and you can be!

Tonight we're in the Monkey Puzzle pub in Paddington in about an hours time! All the details on the wiki

overpass turbo is a helpful tool for hundreds of mappers every week. But it could be an even better tool for even more people if only there was a way to assist with the creation of actual overpass queries. You know that it's quite tedious to type all those queries that are mostly the same all the time. Not to mention that one must remember all those overpass statements and their parameters all the time.

But here comes a way that makes overpass turbo both easier to use for beginners as well as quicker to use for experienced data-miners:

The Query Wizard

Designed to transform simple, human-readable search terms into functional Overpass queries.

Here is an example: To get restaurants, now all you have to do is fire up the Wizard from the tool-bar (or using the keyboard-shortcut Ctrl+I) and type in the appropriate tag amenity=restaurant:

The wizard is quite powerfull: It understands different kinds of tag searches as well as some meta data filters which can be joined together with logical operations like and or or.

By default, data is searched in the current map viewport. But the Wizard also recognizes some other location filters. For example, you can simply write tourism=museum in Vienna and the query will work just magically.

Read the Wiki for more details and technical background.

New Overpass-Shortcuts

If you tried the museums in Vienna example (tourism=museum in Vienna) from above, you may have noticed the following line in the produced Overpass query:

<id-query {{nominatimArea:Vienna}} into="area"/>

As the Overpass API doesn't really know which Vienna it should use to search in, we ask Nominatim instead. The {{nominatimArea:Vienna}} part is then replaced with the details of the Nominatim search results (just like {{bbox}} is replaced with the bounding box coordinates).

Appart from the just mentioned nominatim-shortcut (which actully comes in several flavours depending on your use-case) there is also a new {{date:*}} shortcut, which allows one to specify relative dates (typical use-case: <newer than="{{date:1 week}}"/>). Read more in the docs.

What else is new

You can now inspect tiny features more easily by zooming in one more level (overscaling): Like here for the smallest house of Vienna:

PS: You can now Flattr my project, if you want.

I've looked at OSM before but it didn't really fit my needs at the time. Like many, I found myself too attached to G00gle Maps. With everything going on these days in regard to copyright and privacy, I want to give OSM a full chance especially since I have already converted to being a GNU/Linux user at home. At the very least, I can contribute a lot to the area where I live in the San Bernardino Mountains as I have already made one correction and see many more things that can be added or changed to get that portion of the map up to date.

NOTE: Entry made from my place of work in San Dimas.

Lake Horo, or Lac Oro (18,900 ha) is located on The Inner Niger Delta in Northern Mali, it is separated from the river by a dam and a sluice gate. The Niger River is the longest river in West Africa and the third longest in Africa.

Delta topography is a complex mix of submerged lower areas and higher, unflooded areas known as tougérés. The floodplain consists of a vast network of river channels with leveés separated by low, clay-based floodplains.This natural depressions are filled once a year when the Niger River overflows.

Lake Horo is the only lake that has been developed for irrigation in Mali. In the bowl of Lake Horo, soil fertility is maintained by alluvial deposits of the Niger flood.

Prior to regulation, Lake Horo, contained at least some water throughout the dry season in years of good rainfall, but dried out completely by April in dry years. Now the sluice linking the lake with the Niger is opened in mid-November (earlier in years with poor rainfall) to all the lake to fill.

Floodplain recession agriculture is traditionally done along the banks of the major rivers, lakes and seasonal watercourses after the rainy season. In October-December flood recession enables sorghum and cowpea cultivation on floodplains, maize and sweet potato cultivation on exposed river banks using only soil moisture and harvest occurs on February-May. The funding window for this season goes from August to September.

OSM Mapping tags that I'm using:

• waterway=drain => artificial waterways used for irrigation

• natural=wetland => area subject to inundation by water, or where waterlogged ground may be present

• seasonal=* => indicates if the wetland is seasonal

• natural=floodplain => floodplain is land adjacent to a stream or river that experiences occasional or periodic flooding

1 L'irrigation peut-elle se substituer aux cultures de décrue ?

2 fao: west-african-sahelian-floodplain

3 MALI: FLOOD MANAGEMENT - NIGER RIVER INLAND DELTA

I was mapping in rural Darfur today and discovered an entire city which was completely unknown/unmapped. It did not appear in Google, Bing, OSM or anywhere else, not even as a village dot. It's 90 km SSE of Nyala, Sudan (latlon: 11.28, 25.14, i.e. http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/11.28/25.14) with an airstrip, two large markets, and large street grid. I've mapped it now, anyone care to find a name for the city?

I just created some unclassified roads, but I am very, very new to this; please let me know that what I did was O.K.

Us map