So I’ve been using the Strava data quite a bit recently. I knew the service from before, but then it was quite empty. The tip came from our übermapilliariator Filip when I was making too much notes mapping a nearby forest.

Strava for forest trails

I have mapped a lot of trails in Flemish forests. We’re a densely populated piece of land, with very little forest (in fact, our environment minister literally said that “the purpose of a tree has always been to be cut down”). But even here, I have hardly ever visited a forest where all forest paths were mapped.

It requires local surveying as paths below trees are completely invisible, and we tend to do a better job mapping stuff you can see on sat pics… But even when you do go out to the woods, the resulting GPS tracks can be of bad quality. Strava to the rescue! Several million trips by hiking and biking-nerds are mashed together to give a clear indication of where people run and bike.

The easiest way to use it, is with the Strava ID editor, which comes preloaded with the layers you need. I often switch of the satellite imagery to improve visibility of the tracks. This ID version also contains the Slide tool, which lets you adjust geometry to the available tracks. I haven’t had very satisfying results with that myself though. In Belgian forest, you can basically zoom in anywhere and find missing tracks. (For JOSM instructions, see the wiki)

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Why do we map? It’s a question in every OSM mapper interview, and it’s often a bit confronting. We do it because we like it, but why do we like it? And in the case of many of us, why we spend such an enormous time on it?

After a brief exchange with a self-proclaimed GIS dinosaur, I felt the need to remind myself exactly what it is I like about OpenStreetMap. I noticed that both for her and me mapping really became part of our identity. It was almost like discussing refugees or social fraud.

This article is very personal. If you like the same things as I do, you’re bound to like OSM. But you might like OSM for a completely different set of reasons. If you want a much larger frame of thinking, like why the world needs OpenStreetMap, that’s explained somewhere else.

It doesn’t wait for anyone

it does what you make it do

it doesn’t make big plans about what it will do in the future, it simply does what it can now

There is nothing OpenStreetMap does perfectly. However, you can change that at will. Do you want it to have all the hedges in your town? Just look at the data model adapt and extend if needed, and add them to the map. There’s your perfect map of local hedges. Now show off your work and get other people hedging.

OSM does not make big plans about what it will be doing in the future. Instead, it simply does what it can now. I like this mentality. If enough of us follow, we actually accomplish big things [like having more roads mapped in most countries of the world than the CIA believes there are]. But we do it without having wasted money and time on big studies.

We’ll have us studying ourselves or have other people collect the funds to study us, thank you very much.

OSM does not tell you what to do. There are no “priorities”, so no one has to set them. There is only leadership by example.

It has what I need

Here are some of the things OSM can do, and no-one else can:

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TLDR: Scroll down for some “pretty” maps showing paved and unpaved roads. In between is a wall of text about how and why I made these.

Waiting for a paved/unpaved road map

So I’ve been waiting for someone to make a useful map for navigating South America for quite some time. When you want to drive from A to B in South America, there is one essential piece of information you want: is the road paved or unpaved. When you want to travel slow and enjoy using your 4x4, you want the unpaved roads. When you feel sympathy for your kidneys or your car, you tend to stick to bitumen. Either way, you need to know.

Surprisingly, there are hardly any maps available that show this. Paper maps are hopelessly out of date even for basic road network completeness. OSM to the rescue! The road network completeness is pretty impressive considering the relatively small OSM communities there. And even the surface tags are mostly mapped - and I can tell from experience: generally correct.

So use the Humanitarian style. That only shows road surface when you zoom in. You tend to make route planning decisions from far away. I’m in Lima and I want to got to Titicaca over Cuzco, that’s zoom level 8. I don’t want to zoom in to level 11 to see which roads are paved. Also, default rendering is “paved”, so you can’t tell the difference between paved and untagged roads. As finding an unpaved road in reality is a nastier surprise than the other way around, it would be better to switch it around.

So post an issue to the main style maintenance. Well, someone did that two-and-a-half years ago. And even with the recent road rendering shakeup, nothing changed to address the issue just yet. One of the problems for mere mortals is that you have to develop the solution yourself, then hope the maintainers (and the community) accept it. And for that to happen, your solution should play well with the rest of the style.

Solutions

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8900 people. That’s all it took to make one of the best maps available of Belgium. (*1)

I don’t believe there’s a decent way to count labour hours, but here’s a rough number: 61 labour years, assuming 200 days worked a year, 8 hours a day (*2). Considering Belgian labour prices, I’d guess that represents at least 3.000.000 euros.

I started doing these statistics after someone assumed that the southern/Francophone part of Belgium was underrepresented in Belgium. There’s nothing as fun as being able to check these things. Some numbers I published before: it looks like the Dutch speaking part is mapped in more detail.

But the best simple proxy of map quality seems to be contributor density. So where are the contributors at?

Well, they’re in Flanders.

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Three weeks of @mapillary mapping. Most eventful day: aggressive Porches overtaking, goats on the road, snow avalanche, overtaking Porsches with an accident Just back from a three week road trip, mostly in Italy (here’s the complete GPS track in a pretty umap, obviously already available for mapping purposes). Just before leaving, I got a mail from Mapillary asking how come I stopped mapping with them. I explained how I use my smartphone for both navigation and Mapillary, but you can’t do both at the same time. This is an Android limit: an app is not allowed pictures while in the background. There was an idea to get around that by making an Osmand plugin, but there doesn’t seem to be progress on that. Anyway, I mentioned I do have a second phone I could use, just no mount. So for the second time, they sent me one of their perfect little smartphone mounts. Of course, now I had a moral obligation to be Mapillary mapping the whole trip.

This is how we ride:

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Solo de algunos caminos Bolivianos sabemos si estan pavimentados o no. Existen varios heramientos como para verificar esta informacion, como por ejemplo lo hacen estos mapas de ITO. Tambien se puede visualizar en Osmand. Pero no existe ningun estilo de mapa que muestra esta calidad de rutas a un nivel de zoom muy bajo. Por esto, hizé este mapito que lo muestra bien clarito.

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Somehow, I was able to not worry about multipolygons until recently. You see, if you want to cut up the planet into little pieces according to administrative borders, you are bound to meet those. One expects a place to have a simple border, forming a long closed line. Reality is more complicated. My home country Belgium is a fine example. Brussels is a simple polygon. But Brussels is also a hole cut into Flanders, the northern region. So Flanders is a multipolygon. You need to know the shape of the larger area, the shape of the smaller area within it, and the fact that you need to exclude this inner area. And then that extra non-connected bit in the east, Voeren. We also have the relatively famous Baarle-Hertog, which has bits of Holland within bits of Belgium within Holland. Nothing a multipolygon can’t do on a wednesdayafternoon.

However, a lot of software can’t handle multipolygons. One of those is the otherwise amazing osmpoly-export QGIS plugin [UPDATE: since March 2016, it does handle it!]. I used that one to convert my shapefile (OGR) archive to the POLY file format I needed for the History importer. POLY is a standard in the OSM community. I mostly use programs with a user interface, so the QGIS plugin was my tool of choice to build a dataset of all the regions in the world based on Openstreetmap (part of my larger project. And my sloppyness means that these pretty statistics for test-case Flanders were based on this not so pretty image:

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Esta semana, encontré un par de pueblos en Bolivia (mi zona de maximo interes) que tenian el nombre “aldea”. Fijando me bien, encontré mas que 600 en el pais. Encontrar erores como este es facil con Overpass Turbo. Tiene un asistente, donde pones name=”aldea” y ya. Gracias al Twitter de OSM Argentina, sabia que se puede puscar en un pais, no solo en un bounding box. Aqui el resultado. Dejé un par de pueblos como para mostrarlo.

Obviamente, el “name” tag no es para la descripcion de lo que es. Los nodos ya estaban clasificados como place=hamlet , village, etc, asi que el nombre no llevaba informacion extra tampoco. Eran nodos en general sin tocar, me imagino de un mapeo remoto - no es que alguien remplazo el nombre verdadero. Consulté un poco con la comunidad Boliviana, y decidimos limpiar ya.

Como mapeador Potlach2, no tenia idea como arreglar esto en JOSM. Cada vez que hago un intento con JOSM, me desanimo dentro de 15 minutos. Ya lo sé, es problema mia.

Habia visto un par de aplicaciones para Level0, y me parecio util para este trabajito. Era aun mas facil de lo previsto. Una vez hecho el query en OverpassTurbo, se puede Exportar en diferentes formatos. Y uno de estos es exportar directamente hacia Level0. El unico que te falta hacer es dar le el permiso de utilizar tu cuenta OSM. Copié el texto hacia Notepad++, hizé un “Encontrar y Remplazar” de “name = aldea” a “fixme = needs a name”. Lo guardas, y boom, 500 pueblos corregidos (max 500 cosas cada edit!).

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Recently, I came across some villages in Bolivia which have “aldea” for a name. Upon closer inspection, I discovered there were over 600 in the country. The size of the problem is easy to find with Overpass Turbo. Just tell the wizard to search for name=”aldea” and it will do everything you want. Thanks to the Argentine twitter feed, I knew that you can search for this in a whole country, as opposed to within a bounding box. Here’s what the output looks like. I left some cases as a reference.

Obviously, the name tag is not for the description. These ‘aldeas’ were already properly classified as hamlet, village, etc, so there was no information in there. These were untouched nodes without a history. After brief consultation with the Bolivian community, I decided to go ahead.

Now, as a Potlach 2 mapper, I didn’t know how to fix this in JOSM. I’ve opened JOSM maybe five times, and every time I shut the thing down after 15 minutes. I know.

I read some use cases for Level0 before, and this seemed to be one. It was much easier than I thought. After running the query, you can hit the “Export” button and choose Level0. This opens the Level0 editor. You still have to log in and allow the editor to access your account. Apart from that, I just copied the text to Notepad++ and did a Find and Replace for “name = aldea” to “fixme = needs a name”. Hit save, and you just fixed 500 villages (max 500 objects per edit!).

Now I know, you shouldn’t just mass edit these things and walk away. So I though why not create a Maproulette task to check these villages - maybe some of them had a duplicate node around with the name. After reading the simple guide to creating a Maproulette task, I changed my mind. But I did remember seeing a guide to taskfixing in Potlach. So I made a new query for the fixed villages. Didn’t work when trying to load as a GPX, but worked a charm when I exported the query to GeoJSON format.

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Ik was van plan om naar de Open Tuinendag te gaan. Maar ik plan zo’n dingen graag op een echt kaartje. Op de website van de Open Tuinendag zelf krijg je wel een overzicht, maar bepaald geen handig kaartje. Als je mogelijk meerdere tuinen wil bezoeken, moet je zelf nog de adressen overnemen om te zien hoe je ze zou kunnen combineren. Ik had even een uur of twee niets anders te doen, dus ik dacht, dat kan beter. Dan leren we nog eens iets bij.

1. Data verzamelen

De website zag er proper en overzichtelijk uit, dus die zou te scrapen moeten zijn. Web Scraper plugin voor Chrome geïnstalleerd, maar die kon er niet aan uit. Of ik niet aan de scraper, dat kan ook. Maar de HTML van de site zat super ordelijk in elkaar, dus met wat vind.alles en kuiswerk in Notepad++ had ik zo een propere dataset. Elke tuin een rij, elke eigenschap een kolom, zo heb ik het graag.

2. Waar zijn die tuinen?

De kernvraag van de geografie: waar is het ding. Helaas, geen coördinaten beschikbaar. Na wat Googlen bleek dat mijn collega Kay dé tool gemaakt had die ik nodig had. In QGIS zet het ding een csv om in een feature class. De plugin zelf installeren bleek voor een keer direct te werken vanuit de plugin beheerder binnen QGIS. Nog de funcie vinden om de coördinaten aan de feature class toe te voegen, en de bijhorende dbf toevoegen aan mijn tuinentabelletje.

De Geopunt plugin gebruikt de webservices van Agiv, de Vlaamse overheidsdienst voor GIS. Dat werkt behoorlijk goed, maar er ontbrak nog wel wat in mijn lijst. Grootste probleem: een tiental tuinen in Nederland. Dus alweer naar Google, en daar de Excel Geocoding Tool gevonden, die hetzelfde doet met webservices van Bing Maps. De kwaliteit zag er opnieuw niet slecht uit, en wat nog ontbrak snel opgezocht op Google Maps zelf. Daar krijg je ook coordinaten van de plaats waar je op inzoomt.

3. Op de kaart prikken.

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Que pasa en Valdivia, Chile? Tres meses viajando en Chile con datos OSM me ha hecho mimado: de casi todas las rutas puedo ver si están pavimentadas o no, casi todos los atractivos están, hasta hay muchos senderos dentro de los parques nacionales. Pero en Lago Ranco, faltaba asfalto nuevo, después había una carretera larga supuestamente asfaltada, de pura tierra. Y el mismo día, un camino con asfalto no muy nuevo, mapeado como tierra. Llego a Curiñanco, con más errores de asfalto, y no hay el sendero en la reserva.

En general, alrededor de ciudades universitarias esta re buena la calidad. Pero que pasa en Valdivia?

Cuando escribí esto, estaba acampado en el camino al parque Oncol. En una media hora, tres personas me preguntaron si esto era bien el camino a Oncol. Este parque sí esta bastante bien mapeado en OSM, así que alguien debería explicarle a los Valdivianos a utilizar nuestro mapa :)

Since the State of the Map in Buenos Aires, Ive been able To try out some possible indicators, I tried out a dataset for my home region Flanders. Here’s some examples of things to measure.

The nodes table contains all POI’s defined as nodes, but also all the nodes that make up the lines and closed lines (polygons) of Openstreetmap. We can reasonably assume that almost all untagged nodes will be part of lines or polygons. Some tagged nodes are also part of lines. For example, a miniroundabout, a ford, a barrier, etc, should always be part of a line.

The total number of nodes is made up almost completely made up of nodes that belong to something else. That’s to be expected of course.

Over time the number of tagged nodes increases. But the number of tags on these nodes increases faster. In 2009, there were on avarage only 1,24 tags on the nodes, now it’s over twice as many.

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I know a lot of people have a problem with OSM objects not having a dependable unique identifier. Of course, a node has an ID which will never change. But a campsite mapped as a node will get a very different ID when someone decides to re-map it as a polygon. This makes life complicated for external applications who would like to link up their data to OSM. For example, a fabulous application like iOVerlander (collects data, reviews and ratings on wild/formal campsites) might want to make all the campsites available in OSM rateable in their application. But it would be silly to also copy the geography to their database - as OSM geography is improved upon all the time. Of course, [there’s a fuzzy way to refer to a specific object] (osm.wiki/Overpass_API/Permanent_ID), but that’s really of no use in this case. Imagine a campsite without a name. Then you could tell OSM to look for a campsite within a certain radius of where you found it. But what if a new campsite has been added? What if the campsite has gotten a better coordinate? What if it has become a caravan site. Etc… Or a more complex case: take a bar that has moved locations. Do you give preference to the location or to a bar with the same name somewhere else in town.

This would be an argument to just include much more data within OSM, as that way the link between the thing and its description cannot easily be broken. But considereng even adding some price information is controversial, adding opinions etc. would be unthinkable.

As I’ve been playing with the idea of using Openstreetmap as a base for an open alternative to Tripadvisor, I’ve been thinking about this problem a lot. In a flash of inspiration, I thought of this concept. I would like to hear some opinions about that. Anyone who has a project that requires a thing to have a unique ID can look it up through a query to an www.osmdata.org . All objects that have linked external content, get an extra tag, for example “osmdata=uniqueid01”.

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So after 8 months on the road in South America, navigating with Osmand, I’m now number 37 in the world when it comes to opening/closing notes. I make the notes mostly for myself, so when I get the time (and access to good wifi), I fix the problems I spotted.

Twice in Ecuador and once in Peru it happened that local mappers spotted the errors and started fixing them. A big thank you to users giomaussi, Diego Sanguinetti and agranizo! But that means that in large parts of Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina no-one is watching notes.

If you feel like doing some random mapping in South America (mostly Argentina and Chile now), please feel free to correct some of my notes. If something isn’t clear, I do respond to questions. Here’s a direct link to my notes page

TLDR: click these links to play with South America OSM contributor statistics on a continental level, in detail. It’s ready for the world. Or even easier, get a ready made report for a continent, a country or a region.

This is a writeup for the presentation I gave at State of the Map 2014. Slides available here (since it’s such a bother to add images to diary entries, you’ll have to refer to the slides for pretty pictures). You know about these motivationals saying things like “do one thing every day that scares you”? Well I did, and I wouldn’t recommend it. So I’m thinking maybe a written version might be a little more coherent. But if you want to, you can see me talk here.

Intro

During my one year road trip through South America, I’m trying to do as many things OSM as possible. Of course, I’m navigating using Osmand, contributing tracks, notes and POI’s along the way. I’m trying to convince other roadtrippers to use OSM, which in a lot of cases they’re already using anyway. Making contributors out of them is harder: a lot of them seem to know they can, feel like they should, but just “haven’t found the time to really look into it”. Then recently, I did a presentation about OSM in Carmen Pampa, a village near Coroico, La Paz, Bolivia.

But mostly, I want the world.

The job I’m on a one year break from, revolves around generating and providing data in such a way that people can make their own analysis. In a lot of cases, that means taking GIS data or agregated statistical data and simplify them to a geographic neighborhood level. A quite literal example: count the number of green pixels within a neighborhood and devide them by number of people. So here’s what I do: a bit of automation, some basic statistics, some self-thaught GIS skills, some translating problems back and forth between humans and database querying. I’m great at none of those, but I understand a bit of all these worlds.

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Viajando en Sudamerica con movilidad propia, me surprendio la calidad de la informacion. En Chile y Ecuador, esta muy claro que hay una cuminidad trabajando duro. En el Peru falta mas trabajo, pero gracias a imports, la mayoria de los pueblos tiene calles con nombres, aun que ni hay cobertura Bing. Lo que para mi era una de las lacunas mas importantes, es informacion sobre la calidad de las rutas.

En el Peru, por ejemplo, hay muchas carreteras que hace poco se asfaltaron. Sin asfalto, eran muy dificiles, ahora mucho mas facil. Pero, como Mapnik es Eurocentrico, no toma en cuenta esta informacion. Si una carretera es importante, en Europa esto siempre estaria asfaltado. Si es que la carretera es poco importante, todavia poco probable que es camino de tierra. En paises como Peru y Bolivia, no es asi. La carretera no tan grande entre Cajamarca y Chachapoyas se encuentra con asfalto nuevito, mientras la carretera importante de Huaraz hacia la costa por el Norte tiene un parte importante sin asfalto.

Si uno planifica un viaje, no solo es importante que este la informacion, pero tambien que se visualisa. Mapnik tiene dos fallas, aplicandole en Sudamerica. Primero, que no se ve la diferencia entre paved y unpaved. Y lo que no se ve, no se mapea. Segundo, que el estilo es hecho por paisas pequenos con muchas carreteras. La preocupacion es de que no entra tanta informacion en la pantalle que ya no se puede leer. En Sudamerica, hay tan pocos carreteras que el problema es al reves: hay que ir a niveles de zoom muy altos haste que se ve donde estan las carreteras. (otra razon, creo yo, porque tantas carreteras se pusieron como trunk)

Que podemos hacer?

Completar datos, y mejorar la visualizacion.

Mapear todos los surfaces y calidades de la rutas que conocemos

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There is no navigation app like Osmand. But it is quite complicated. So I made this write-up based on what I’ve learned over the past two years using it. I wrote it with people like myself in mind: navigating overland trips in third world countries.

Feel free to suggest changes, additions or to copy/paste.

EDIT: yeah, so my little hosting package didn’t agree with your interest (you consumed 12 times my allotment). Fortunately the nice people at OSM.be came to the rescue and offered me some space. Thank you Ben!

I have a big scheme in my head to do somehing fun with OSM data. Unfortunately I’m still taking babysteps. Still, here is one step that makes me pretty happy: a map of the evolution of La Paz, Bolivia. EDIT: as I’m a disaster in reading manuals, I didn’t add timestamps to the first few tries. I’ll re-run them with timestamps when I get the time.

La Paz, Bolivia

Gent, Belgium (with timestamp)

I can make an animation like that for any bounding box with just a couple of minutes work (and some waiting time, depending on the data-density of the area).

In fact, doing this is extremely easy. It still took me two months :) All you have to do is follow the instructions here: https://github.com/MaZderMind/osm-history-renderer/blob/master/TUTORIAL.md (this was very helpful too: https://github.com/MaZderMind/osm-history-splitter)

Only for me, that meant setting up a VirtualBox with Ubuntu, understanding how to install software on Ubuntu and how to fix messed up installations, getting Ubuntu to be able to read data from my host Windows 8 laptop. A big challenge was also not throwing the laptop out of the window (everyone LOVES Windows 8, right?). I could have not done this without Mazdermind Peter who didn’t just make the data available in a workable format and the tools to work them, but also gave me personal support. Eternal gratitude and what not. Also free Belgian beer (or chocolate) on any future IRL meetings.

If you want something similar for a bounding box that interests you, let me know. Just send me a bounding box made with http://maps.personalwerk.de/tools/bbox-paint.html and send me the “EPSG:4326” line. That way I can stupidly copy paste the coordinates.

Next step: creating yearly statistics about the state of the map.

Here are some requests:

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I woke up one morning, and realized I needed a reusable dataset of all the communities in the world. Not just X-Y, but administrative areas. Obviously, I started looking on OSM. With a bit of playing around (and a little help from my friends), I had a nice set of admin areas of various levels from OSM in a shapefile. Then I started noticing holes. If a country is mostly made of holes, you know there is no data. But if there are a few holes, well, something is fishy. What happens is, there are no extraction tool that can make an admin area if there are gaps. A line is not an area, only a closed line is. Borders in OSM are relations. These are collections of lines, joined together in virtual union. Often, someone deletes one of these lines, and replaces it with a more detailed version. That’s sort of OK, but then you have to add the new line to -all- the relations the old one was part of. This is of course very exotic to new mappers, and even experienced mappers don’t always seem to care.

Data use = data cleaning

Data will only get fixed, if they are used. And even on the forum, I saw people referring end data users to other sources to get their admin areas. It is complicated to extract a dataset with borders from OSM. So why care about this data? It shows up okay on OSM even if it’s broken. BUT, user Wambacher made this great tool to download shapefiles by country with all available admin areas. So now that it’s easy to use the data, please help maintain it.

Fixing things up

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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.