I have just read in the OSM weekly that Michal has published analysis of the OSMF 2021 survey. I thank him, and others in the OSM community for the time and work spent on this.

Re-visualising the responses

One thing that drew my attention, is the visualisation of the 5 “sentiment” questions from the survey. The questions had Likert-style response options, where the respondents could either disagree or agree with the statement. There was also a neutral option in the middle. Such data are better visualised using a diverging colour palette. Since Michal kindly released all the files through github, I could recreate the maps using what is, in my opinion, a more suitable visualisation.

1: Code Of Conduct

2: Fundraising

3: Software Investments

4: iD Editor

5: Microgrants

Relative agreement

I also attempted to compare the relative agreement with each of the actions/sentiments. I did it based on the microdata. I simply added up the response averages for each of the questions. As a result, the actions/sentiments with which the respondents seem to agree, from most to least, are:

1. Software Investments
2. Fundraising
3. iD Editor
4. Microgrants
5. Code Of Conduct

I’d like to start a discussion to arrive at a consensus of standardising placenames in Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

Please comment on this entry if you would like to participate, as well as your initial thoughts and ideas.

If we have enough people who are interested in this, I will set up a more permanent place and channel for discussion (a wiki page or a mailing list).

I’m wondering about what looks like multiple tag schemas existing in parallel. Apart from the general tags developed, I understand, from a European/western perspective, there seem to also exist highway Africa schema which evolved from Mali-specific schema, as well as East Africa guidelines. There are probably more. I can’t help but imagine the western tagging schema growing and swallowing up the whole continent, while the eastern coast holds out with its own schema, and then they, presumably, have a line of contact somewhere, where the tagging differences need to be reconciled.

However, all the systems seem to me to largely say the same thing: “function rather than surface matters for classification, don’t tag for the renderer.” So - is it helpful to have these parallel schemas? What are the issues we’d all encounter if we were to apply the main tagging schema in Africa? Isn’t having multiple definitions for the same tags existing in the OSM database too high price to pay for whatever advantages we gain?

I’m sure this discussion has been had over and over, I just can’t seem to find it. Thanks to anyone who can point me in the right direction.

Below is a description of two interactions I recently had with CartONG.

Tagging schema

Late last year I noticed that the place=refugee_camp tag that was unknown to me was used on hundreds of OSM elements. Failing to find any documentation for it, I left a comment on one of the changesets that introduced the tag. The changeset author requested that I contact CartONG’s Missing Maps project (which I thought was a HOT initiative, but no matter) by email, which I did. I received a response from the Project Coordinator who kindly explained the thinking behind the tagging and that a tag proposal is in the works. A few months of discussions and two tag proposals later (first of which seemed to raise a concern about rallying last-minute votes from “colleagues and friends”), we all arrived at an approved tag.

I thought that it would have been best to first launch a proposal and have the tag approved, rather than tag features in OSM and then try to push through a proposal that conforms to the de facto tag usage, but that’s just my opinion. We are all working towards the same goal, and in the end I congratulate CartONG and Missing Maps on the result.

Data imports

Fast forward two months, yesterday I came across what looks to me like an import of non-cleaned UNHCR refugee camp data into OSM done by CartONG in two parts (1, 2), both of which had already attracted comments on their quality, and one of which had been reverted. The revert seems to have been preceded by direct communication that ended without satisfactory explanations from CartONG. I have contacted the user who reverted the changeset to see if the second changeset raises similar concerns, and they have promptly reverted that one as well.

As best as I can tell, these imports were not documented or discussed beforehand, and thus do not follow the Import Guidelines. In my opinion an effort could be also done to improve compliance with the Organised Editing Guidelines, though I am grateful for the #RefugeeSiteMappingDataGlobalStandardization hashtag, which is the one way I have of finding all the related edits. Following the hashtag through OSMCha, I found a few further edits that seem, to me, questionable. In particular, existing valid tags (like landuse=residential) are occasionally removed. This, in my opinion, looks like CartONG through this effort cares only about the refugee camp tags, sometimes (infrequently) doing damage to other valid data.

Overall the process looks to me as if the idea was to have a non-cleaned UNHCR database dump imported into OSM, and then take the time to go through the imported features one-by-one and check them, effectively turning OSM into a data cleaning platform. In my opinion the cleaning should be done first, and only then data should be uploaded to OSM. As a side effect to this approach, the import changesets can now be queried to get email addresses of a dozen or so UN employees, which I imagine was not intentional.

Conculsion

I think CartONG is doing some very useful and needed work, however these two examples of their use of OSM show potential for better communication. I request CartONG to be more transparent about their intentions and processes in advance, conduct discussions through community channels rather than private emails, and to follow the Import and Organised Editing Guidelines. I’m sure the issues of the second example will be resolved just as in the first one, and I look forward to having documented, standardised, and well-tagged humanitarian data in OSM.

There might have been a misunderstanding…

A very useful talk, interesting especially to see how OSM is seen from the perspective of people who perhaps have the most authority on what actually goes in the map - the DWG. However, I am wondering about the format and channel of delivering this message. I’m not sure how many people have seen the talk, but I expect the sample to be self-selected from those who are already relatively deeply engaged with the OSM, and, consequently, they already know a lot of what was said here. A lot of this content is available through the wiki, but I’m wondering if it shouldn’t be made more prominent on OSM landing page. Or perhaps the ID editor could be augmented so that the walkthrough that is offered to the new mappers does not only focus on how to edit, but also what to edit?

An Incomplete History of Companies and Professionals in OpenStreetMap

A solid opening, and a lot of informative background. This talk makes me think it would indeed be useful to write up - perhaps as someone in the Q&A suggested, in a collaborative way (or at least with more than one perspective represented). Worth to watch together with the “Curious Cases of Corporations in OpenStreetMap 🎓” talk from Day 2.

What to do when local citizens do not consent?

An interesting talk, with humanitarian principles such as do no harm and informed consent at the centre. For me personally, it highlights the tension that is created when a company or an organisation is contracted to do some OSM work, and then, for reasons beyond their control, this proves to be challenging.

For example, a humanitarian mapping project may wish to create a tag, or an interrelated tagging system, for a specific aspect of humanitarian operations. They may have things well thought out based on the examples in front of them, but the OSM community could be resistant to the new tag because while it would work well in Africa it would not be applicable to Asia, or because the tag is too specific and only really suitable for this one particular project’s requirements. Now the organisation is in an uncomfortable position where they have to deliver on a contract, but the OSM community is rejecting their contribution.

Aa another example, another humanitarian mapping project may wish to upload a sizeable chunk of refugee camp facilities data into OSM. Even assuming there are no licensing issues, the organisation may or may not be the author of the data, the person doing the upload may or may not be the one who collected the data in the field, finally, the data may or may not fall under the Imports or Organised Editing categories. Again, the project is contractually obligated to upload the data, but the community may reject it.

Both of these examples point to the need for careful consideration of how to engage with the OSM community and understand procedures before undertaking any work contract.

Opening session

The speakers were Gregory Marler, Bernelle Verster, Christine Karch. Despite reading all (well, almost) the messages that come through the Osmf-talk mailing list and following the OSM Telegram group, I don’t think I recall ever seeing their names in the discussions. This shows to me that I am not aware of voices of some of the people who clearly contribute a lot of time and effort to OSM and OSMF and are probably among the most productive community members. I wonder if others have similar impressions? Is it perhaps that OSM and OSMF conversations are fragmented through so many channels that I simply don’t realize how many people out there are having important conversations that I just miss?

Winds of change

Very useful and refreshing talk, dense with great points. I’m particularly interested in one of the dichotomies discussed:

free-form tagging <-> need better data consistency

I’m reminded of an article I came across a while ago that I’m sure has a lesson in it, somewhere: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mm4z/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss

I’m continuing using the Tasking Manager and mapping around Zubaidiyah. I’m using Bing as reference image, but there’s newer Maxar imagery available. Trouble is, they’re misaligned by 5-10m. I’m trying out https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JOSM/Plugins/Imagery_Offset_Database to keep the images aligned so I don’t have to switch back and forth between them.

I’ve create a private Tasking Manager project for myself to split up the work of mapping the area around Zubaidia (Az Zubaydiyah), Iraq, and just completed the first ‘square’. It looks funny - lots of detail surrounded by low-detailed area. Sticking to the very basic things for now - highways, canals, residential areas. Even so, it was a lot more work than expected. Will subdivide the squares into smaller tasks in the future.

Does anyone know how to best tag this:

I guess these are ponds of agricultural runoff water.

So out of things I did not expect I’d ever do on OSM, here’s one of them.

I’ve been using OsmAnd to cache OSM data to have with me as a reference while hiking in Bosnia a couple of weeks ago. I noticed that one of the trails in the app goes through what on a paper map I had with me was marked as a suspected minefield - a remnant of the 90s war. I checked with the local mountain rescue service, and indeed they confirmed that there is a danger area there.

So while I do not have enough data to map out the actual extent of the suspected minefields in these mountains, and I do not want to digitize it from the paper map I have, what I can do is to correct the path that the previous hiker took - and thankfully lived long enough to map - and snap it to my own GPS trace. I followed the hiking trail markers, which I was told was the proper thing to do in the area.

I prefer to not have OSM explicitly or implicitly suggest dangerous behaviour!

https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/72868513#map=17/43.56621/17.89029

وقد وضعت العديد من المدن والبلدات والقرى في العراق على الخريطة عن طريق الاستيراد التلقائي من مصادر البيانات القديمة وليس من قبل الناس الذين يعرفونها. وبسبب ذلك، فإنها غالبا ما تكون اما خاطئة، او توجد في غير مكانها، او هناك خطْـأ بالكتابة او ذات تاريخ قديم غير مستخدم او غير ذلك. يجب التحقق من جميع الأسماء من قبل أشخاص لديهم معرفة محلية بالقرى.

الفئة

المدن هي مستوطنات كبيرة و عادة لا يوجد فيها زراعة. اما البلدات هي أصغر من المدن و فيها بعض الزراعة. اما القرى هي مكان زراعي.

يوجد كثير من القرى القديمة أو المهجورة. يجب اختيار (abandoned:place=village) لهم.

الأسماء

يجب أن نضع اسم المكان المستخدم حاليا في (name = tag) و يجب ان نكتب الاسم الاصلي باللغة العربية. و يجب وضع الأسماء القديمة (على سبيل المثال الاسماء المستخدمة قبل إعادة التسمية في 2003) في old_name = tag للسماح لها بالتقاطع مع الوثائق التاريخية. الأماكن التي ليس لها أسماء محددة باللغة الإنجليزية، ولكن يمكن أن يكون لها أسماء عربية مكتوبة في الأبجدية اللاتينية يجب استخدام (name:en-Latn= tag). الإنجليزية واللغات الأخرى (الفرنسية والألمانية والإسبانية …) يمكن أن توضع في (=name:en) ، الاسم: (=name:fr) وهكذا على العلامات.

الطرق

يجب ربط جميع القرى بطرق فرعية إلى الطريق الرئيسي - عادة (highway=tertiary) أو (highway=unknown) كافية.

Are you bored of looking at your neighbourhood in OSM, trying to find the last unmapped tree, the last sidewalk still left to be drawn? Are you tired of trying to come up with even more complex relations so that landuse near your town is perfectly represented with multipolygons? Are you getting cross-eyed with the galaxy of POIs in your nearest city centre?

Wouldn’t you prefer the thrill of being the first person to put entire villages and towns on the map? Discovering hundreds of kilometers of new roads, never before touched by OSM? Or relaxingly drawing completely rivers and canals, shooting straight across open plains?

If only the frontier was still open. If only there was such a place of vast possibilities. If only there was somewhere where life, pardon me, mapping, was still simple, honest, and true. Well, fear not! Such a place does exist. Come join us over at WikiProject_Iraq and talk-iq and claim your place among the pioneers.

Just look what you can do. No features visible on these images are drawn AT ALL:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/31.9591/45.2747

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/35.4781/45.0456

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/30.2741/43.7037

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/31.5219/44.7666

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/31.6960/44.9555

Many cities, towns and villages across Iraq have been placed on the map not by people who know them, but by an automatic import from older data sources. Because of that, they are often wrong, misplaced, misspelt, out of date, or otherwise of bad quality. All the names should be verified by people with local knowledge of the villages.

CATEGORY Cities are large settlements, with no or little agriculture. Towns are smaller, with some agriculture. Villages are primarilly agricultural. There are many abandoned or old villages across the country. These should be tagged as abandoned:place=village.

NAMES Currently used name should be placed in the name= tag, in original Arabic spelling. Old names (for example used before renaming in 2003) can be placed in old_name= tag in order to allow cross reference with historical docuemnts. Places that do not have specific English names, but can have their Arabic names transcribed into Latin alphabet should use name:ar-Latn= tag. English and other (French, German, Spanish…) translations may be placed in name:en=, name:fr= and so on tags.

ROADS All villages should be connected with minor roads to the main network - usually highway=tertiary or highway=unknown tags are adequate.

Many of the placenames have been renamed once or more over the last decades. It is common in official sources to refer to such as ‘New Placename (Old Placename)’.

It is common for the same name to be recycled and applied for multiple places (villages, city quarters/suburbs), however usually not within the same governorate.

There are cases where a village or a city quarter is named according to origin of people inhabiting it, so there may be a quarter in a city called after another governorate, district, or a city.

There are multiple languages used in Iraq. Two official languages are Arabic and Central Kurdish (Sorani), both written in Arabic script. In many pockets of various ethnic groups additional languages are used: Syriac/Neo-Aramaic (locally referred to as ‘christian language’) which uses Syriac script, Azeri (‘Turkomen’) in Latin and Arabic scripts, Norther Kurdish (Kurmanji) in Arabic and Latin scripts, and others. In areas of mixed ethnicities it is common for a village or town to have a name in each of multiple languages - often these names sound completely different, so they are not the same names in multiple scripts. City and street name signs throughout the country often feature Latin transcriptions of those, usually inconsistent.