seav's diary
Recent diary entries:
Xapi is cool!
I never had the opportunity before to try the OSM Xapi and now that I did, I find it really, really cool!
I recently noticed that the Mapnik layer displayed the names of the provinces of the Philippines in low zoom levels and when I panned around, I observed that labels were missing for the newly created provinces like Dinagat Islands and Zamboanga Sibugay and that there was a label for Kalinga-Apayao which has already long been split into Apayao and Kalinga provinces. These labels were being displayed based on place=state nodes imported from the GEONet Names Server.
I had no idea how best to correct this (e.g., verifying that there were indeed missing place=state nodes so that I can add them) so I sent out an email to the talk-ph mailing list. Maning and Mike pointed me to Xapi and after trying it tonight using the following call http://osmxapi.hypercube.telascience.org/api/0.6/node[place=state][bbox=116,4,128,21] (I was unsuccessful when I tried it before) I was able to download the existing data and edited it to my heart's content in Merkaartor.
This is fun! :-)
Posted by seav at Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:06:16 +0000 in English (English)Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 0 comments
New roads inside the University of the Philippines
The construction inside the Science Education Complex inside UP is currently in full swing. All the science departments will eventually vacate the old Palma Hall and will be transferred to the new buildings being constructed. The migration actually started more than 10 years ago (with the Math, Marine Science, Geological Sciences, and Library being the first tenants) but the transfer stopped due to budget problems. The migration then restarted a few years ago with Physics, and right now the Biology and Chemistry buildings are being constructed.
There's a bunch of new roads here and I finally had the chance yesterday to drive around the area after dropping off my sister to her morning class. See my GPS trace. I added the streets to OSM last night and so I believe that OSM has the most updated map of this area anywhere, online or dead-tree. It feels great to forge new territory in OSM. :-)
Coordinates:Posted by seav at Sat, 04 Jul 2009 04:21:18 +0000 in English (English)
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Tagaytay Mapping Party a success!
While it's hard to fail when the goal is "map as much as you can," I think that in many respects, the Tagaytay Mapping Party that occurred last Saturday, May 16, is a real success. This is the first ever Mapping Party in the Philippines and, I think, the first in Southeast Asia. We brought together eight OpenStreetMappers from Metro Manila, Rizal, Laguna, and Cavite (one is a newbie) many of whom have just then met each other for the first time, and we managed to gather thousands of trackpoints, hundreds of POIs, and tens of kilometers of roads. While we weren't able to do live editing after going out mapping (due to the lack of Wi-Fi), we did share stories, anecdotes, and details of mapping rigs over coffee (sadly, not beer).
Thanks to maning, we have a draft party render animation of the mapping party. Expect the final version to come out before the end of the week.
Here's to more success for OpenStreetMap Philippines!
Coordinates:Posted by seav at Mon, 18 May 2009 07:03:04 +0000 in English (English)
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How about primary-source maps?
I find this OSM diary entry and comment thread about map and geocoded photo copyrights interesting. This brings me to the particular situation of primary-source publicity maps, i.e., maps of places made by the people who own/manage the place.
Let's say you were surveying on the ground a large public zoo, and you happen to come across a "you are here" map somewhere there. Is is wrong to get your bearings by looking at the map or even comparing the map with your own to find out areas you have missed? While it's copyright infringement to take a photo of the map and distribute it (since the artistic and creative elements of that map is definitely under copyright), using the map as a source of facts, not creative expression should be ok.
Isn't looking at that "you are here" map which was created by the zoo owners for publicity purposes a form of on-the-ground surveying? Aren't street signs a textual form of "you are here" as well? Take note that we are all going into a really fuzzy gray area here.
For an even more fuzzier example, take the case of Japan addresses (see this Wikipedia article). In most dense urban areas of Japan, most highway=unclassified/residential roads are unnamed and places are addressed by using a building-number (gō), then block-number (banchi), then area-number (chōme) system. You can often find maps of the buildings per block so that you can locate a particular building in a particular block. These maps function in the same way as street signs do in Western countries. I've been to Tokyo and I've used these maps to locate buildings.
So, is it so wrong to use those building maps as a source of facts and information, especially when you're surveying them on-the-ground, the same way you use street signs to collect street names and access restrictions?
Posted by seav at Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:19:32 +0000 in English (English)Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 5 comments
Did some armchair mapping for Muntinlupa
A large part of Barangay Cupang in Muntinlupa City, Metro Manila has been empty for quite some time now, so I went ahead and mapped all the remaining exclusive gated communities in that area—but only the road topology and landuse areas, no street names yet.
I also did and experimented using boundary relations for the first time by drawing then grouping the boundaries for barangays Ayala Alabang, Alabang, Cupang, and Buli. I got the information about the barangay boundaries from the website of the City Planning & Development Office of Muntinlupa City. It was fun guessing where the boundaries actually are based from the map provided in the website (which is apparently not drawn to scale); it seems the boundaries follow the rivers and creeks as much as possible.
That's quite enough mapping for me for the rest of the week. I have to go and take care of my other responsibilities now. :-)
Coordinates:Posted by seav at Fri, 10 Apr 2009 20:16:47 +0000 in English (English)
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Driving around Bonifacio Global City
As I said in other places on the Web, Bonifacio Global City is the area in Metro Manila that has seen the most drastic changes in development. Roads are pretty much reconfigured every now and then and new buildings are being put up since several years ago.
So, I drove around the area for almost one and a half-hours before going to work and writing down building names, new roads, and other notable stuff on a piece of paper (first time I ever did that despite having been an OSMer since 2007!). I also left my GPS phone in tracking mode and I'll be uploading the trace later for future use. After work, I set about updating as much data as I can and I'll be continuing the work in the weekend.
Coordinates:Posted by seav at Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:35:50 +0000 in English (English)
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Finally did the basic outlines of Greenbelt Mall
This is my favorite shopping mall in Metro Manila since it doesn't look like a typical Philippine mall. The Yahoo! imagery is woefully out of date for this area so I managed to go around and have a lot of on-the-ground look here (and looking at the you-are-here store directory maps—this is still surveying, right?—to help with getting the building footprints down pat).
It's still unfinished. There's still the matter of mapping the footpaths in and around the Greenbelt Park as well as the various driveways and parking areas, but it's a great start. =)
Coordinates:Posted by seav at Sun, 01 Mar 2009 09:42:20 +0000 in English (English)
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I am now a "classic" OpenStreetMapper
That is, I am now mapping with the help of GPS traces. :-D I have been contributing since mid-2007 but all of my contributions are based on Yahoo! imagery and personal observation. But now that I am the custodian of a GPS mobile phone (the Sony Ericsson W760, touted as the first GPS-enabled Walkman) I am now able to record GPS traces and I have uploaded a bunch of them concentrated on places where there are new streets not seen in the Yahoo! satellite imagery.
"Proper" mapping via GPS. The first such place that I have mapped with the help of GPS is the Frontera Verde area (map link in this entry). Before, the roads I placed were an approximation, but I'm surprised to say that I've managed to map the major roads almost perfectly even without the help of GPS, save for the L-shaped unnamed street that I had corrected via my GPS trace (which I loaded into Merkaartor and before uploading it to OSM).
Another street that I added with the help of GPS is Palm Coast Avenue near the SM Mall of Asia.
The power of having GPS to do mapping has affected my driving habits. I now try to plan my trips to maximize unmapped areas, go around unmapped roundabouts at least once, and take detours, all of which are best exemplified by this GPS trace. :-P
The quest for a GPS logger. The quest to find a nice GPS logger for the phone is another "interesting" story altogether. The W760 has a pre-installed Sports Tracker software that could store GPX traces but I couldn't customize how often it stores a point. In tests I saw that it records about every 4 seconds, which is too infrequent for my tastes, so I went on a quest to find a good Mobile Java-based GPX logger. I sent an e-mail to the talk-ph mailing list and somebody suggested I try Mobile Trail Explorer. It wasn't good for me since it defaults to using an external GPS device via Bluetooth and forcing it to use the internal GPS (via these instructions and not at all intuitive) made the application hang the next time I opened it. So no MTE for me.
I tried a bunch of other applications with the help of OSM Wiki pages like Making Tracks with Homebrew-ware and Category:Java midlet and finally settled on TrekBuddy. One thing I like about it is that it doesn't arbitrarily accesses the Internet and two, I can pre-load OSM layers into it and I did just that via this handy online tool that generates the files that TrekBuddy uses to display maps.
I'm now a giddy OSMapper since. :-)
Coordinates:Posted by seav at Sun, 22 Feb 2009 07:05:03 +0000 in English (English)
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Refining the SM Mall of Asia (Philippines)
I've started refining the SM Mall of Asia complex (building upon the initial work done by ianlopez1115). To be specific, I've edited the Main Mall and the North and South Wings such that they now have approximately correct shapes (including the zigzagging edges flanking the two pedestrian streets). I'll continue with the Entertainment Mall to the west sometime this week or the next weekend.
In addition, I've more or less completed mapping the Blue Wave commercial center located about half a kilometer to the east of SM Mall of Asia. I pass by this area almost every workday and I've taken plenty of dinners in a the fast-food restaurants located here so I pretty much know how to tag the area through the help of the Yahoo! satellite imagery.
Coordinates:Posted by seav at Sun, 01 Feb 2009 06:48:36 +0000 in English (English)
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OSM is far too addicting
I have a lot of online projects and activities and OSM is getting an inordinately large slice of the pie. Also, whenever I go out, I notice little details that I need to add/update or verify in OSM as soon as I get home. Fixing these details immediately will take up too much time.
As a sort of compromise, I've taken to adding lots of stuff into OpenStreetBugs. I'm making OSB as a sort of to-do list for when I have more leisure time to edit OSM. It's ridiculously easy to add stuff in OSB so it fits my needs appropriately. :-)
Posted by seav at Sun, 11 Jan 2009 03:54:21 +0000 in English (English)Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 2 comments
OpenStreetMap Routing Service is cool!
I knew of the OpenStreetMap Routing Service before but it was only recently that I got to play around with it. It's a pretty nifty service and I've been trying out various routes within Metro Manila since I've pretty much driven most major streets in this metropolis and I wanted to cross-validate what I know with the service's algorithm and the OSM data.
As a result of my playing around, I've identified several major errors in the routing-related data in OSM (e.g., one direction of a dual-carriageway trunk bridge had a reversed oneway tag) and isolated a possible routing algorithm issue.
The Routing Service is definitely a must-have tool for verifying the OSM data (Maplint can only do so much). :-)
Posted by seav at Fri, 26 Dec 2008 04:37:17 +0000 in English (English)Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 1 comment
Trying out Merkaartor
After seeing someone using Merkaartor to edit in OSM, I decided to give it a try last night. Before this, I've been exclusively using Potlatch. Potlatch is a pretty good application and is definitely the best Flash application I've ever seen but I quickly ran into one of its limitations while I was doing Eastwood City and Bonifacio High Street (in Metro Manila, Philippines). The limitation is that at the highest zoom level, you cannot place nodes more accurately: the nodes snap to a 3-pixel "grid". This 3-pixel grid translates to a resolution of almost 3 feet at the latitude I'm working at. This is more than good enough for roads, but not adequate for buildings. (I'm kinda OC ["obsessive-compulsive", slang in Philippine English] when mapping the details of buildings, and this limitation prevented me from making nice right angles of small idented corners of buildings. See this view of Bonifacio High Street for an example of non-perpendicular corners. I find this lack of right angles maddening! :-P) I asked Richard, Potlatch's creator, about it and he acknowledged this limitation (our conversation is at the OSM Wiki).
If you're using Potlatch, then Merkaartor gets some getting used to with regards to its interface. The workflow is pretty much the same as in JOSM: you go to an area, download the data, edit at will, then upload the changes. I like it because it doesn't have the aforementioned 3-pixel limitation, and in addition, it blows up the Yahoo! map tiles if they're not available in a higher zoom level; Potlatch just shows Yahoo!'s "We're sorry, the data you have requested is unavailable" tiles. (I'm not sure if Merkaartor's behavior is allowed by Yahoo!'s TOS).
I'll still continue to use Potlatch as a general editing tool since it's pretty quick and I'm used to it. I'll just bring out Merkaartor if ever I want some finely wrought detail. :-)
(This is also cross-posted, with some changes, to the talk-ph mailing list.)
Posted by seav at Sat, 20 Dec 2008 02:17:11 +0000 in English (English)Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 3 comments
Mapping NAIA
Went crazy today and fixed as much of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport as I can. I added a helluva lot of taxiways (even the turning points--I'm not sure if I did it as expected--since the white painted lines are easy enough to trace from the Yahoo! satellite imagery), added the refs for the two runways, and refined the shapes of the terminals.
Coordinates:Posted by seav at Mon, 01 Dec 2008 07:02:23 +0000 in English (English)
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Mapping Eastwood Mall
So Eastwood Mall just opened last weekend and I finally got to see the area between the huge central building (tentatively named One Central Park) and the 1800 and 1880 Eastwood Avenue last Monday after work. I've subsequently refined the building footprints in that area. Since I don't own a GPS unit, the positions and shapes of the new buildings that aren't on the Yahoo! layer are approximate and interpolated from other known buildings.
The updated data should now show up in today's Mapnik update. :-)
Posted by seav at Thu, 20 Nov 2008 03:13:11 +0000 in English (English)
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Pamela Fox of Google is talking about Map Maker right now
I'm currently at the Google DevFest in the University of the Philippines, Diliman, where people from Mountain View and elsewhere are presenting and demo-ing various web-related Google APIs. Pamela Fox of the Google Maps team is currently talking about Google Maps API (and Map Maker, Earth API, etc.).
I talked about Google Map Maker vs. OpenStreetMap before and found Google Map Maker wanting (just like the reaction of many OpenStreetMappers).
Anyway, Pamela Fox hinted that Maps API developers might be able to use Map Maker map tiles as an option instead of the regular Maps map tiles. However, there's no mention yet about the licensing issues of the map tiles and the raw data. I plan to talk to her later regarding this.
(I also want to ask if Google would be inclined to go the way of Yahoo! in letting OSM use the satellite images as well for tracing.)
Posted by seav at Fri, 07 Nov 2008 11:35:23 +0000 in English (English)Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 1 comment
Going to the cemetery, and remembering details to map it!
Today is November 1 (All Saints' Day) and, just like the millions of Catholic Filipinos all over the country, my family went to the cemetery to pay our respect to our dearly departed loved ones (and have a mini-family reunion while we're at it). In this case, it's my paternal grandfather at the Garden of Memories Memorial Park in Taguig City.
And just like any good OSMer, I noted down as many details as I can of the memorial park and the surrounding areas. After I got back home and opened up OSM, I noticed that somebody has outlined the basic shape of the memorial park based on the Yahoo! imagery. Of course, looking at the satellite imagery is just an aid and no substitute for real on-the-ground surveying, so I went ahead and corrected the landuse region to the best of my recollections and added the internal roads and as many of the footpaths as I can remember (and see from the Yahoo! imagery).
I also went ahead and mapped some of the surrounding areas, including the finished main road we took to get to the park (which was still unfinished in Yahoo!'s imagery).
Coordinates:Posted by seav at Sat, 01 Nov 2008 14:37:00 +0000 in English (English)
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Ortigas Online is using OSM
I was browsing for the location of a building in Ortigas Center when I stumbled onto this website, Ortigas Online, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it uses OpenStreetMap for its map section. :-)
Posted by seav at Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:02:11 +0000 in English (English)Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 2 comments
Tweaking Eastwood City
I believe that OSM has the best online map of Eastwood City (apart from the the static map available at its website). Eastwood City is a mixed-use compact district containing malls, condominiums, and office buildings. Since I go to work here, it's just appropriate that I make this area as complete as possible.
Anyway, I just tweaked several things here based on the last look-around that I did this morning. I finally got the name of the northwestern exit road (Richmond Road), fixed the name of Palm Tree Avenue, and confirmed that a building is actually named Athena Building and not BPO Building. There's still plenty to do here such as putting the building footprint of the finished but still unopened 1880 Eastwood Avenue.
My next area of focus is the Fort Bonifacio Global City. I've already written a diary entry for that area.
Coordinates:Posted by seav at Fri, 17 Oct 2008 09:49:29 +0000 in English (English)
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Official Philippine launch of Google Map Maker
I was invited to attend the official launch of the Google Map Maker service in the Philippines last October 7. I blogged about the event in my blog here: http://vaes9.codedgraphic.com/posts/google_map_maker_philippine_launch
The post is quite lengthy and the last part talks about OSM vis-a-vis Map Maker so you guys might be interested in that.
Posted by seav at Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:33:39 +0000 in English (English)Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 1 comment
Wishes there was good Recent Changes feature
But ITO (http://www.itoworld.com/) is better than nothing! :-)
Now if only there was a way to graphically see diff's; that would be really sweet!
Posted by seav at Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:08:23 +0000 in English (English)Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 0 comments
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