As time passes I am delving further into the discovery that I outlined here, and contextualised a little more here and all relating to the Fingal task set up by myself and the osm community three years ago.

In quantum of the problem there are new data available from the Heigit counting service. This shows that as the validation continued up to the 18th December 2024 when the task was a year old an additional 14 thousand missing buildings were added.

Looking further into this missing building set it is distributed as follows by building tags:

*building=shed up 3700

*building=garage up 1800

*building=farm_auxiliary up 200

*building=service up 58

*building=ruins up 56

There is also some re-tagging of building objects from the building=yes tag, which mappers were requested to attempt to do.

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Here I go again…. part 2.

I was pleased to see someone pick up on my first diary item. OSM weekly is hardly the New York Times, yet I know that the editors like posts which are constructively critical, and they did spot that I was hoping for something to happen which would let us all “do better”.

I decided to look in more detail at how the lack of detail was leaving validators with a lot of mapping to do. Evidence of this is seen here, where the mapper marking the tile as “completely mapped” is nowhere near being the main contributor of objects and the validator – DeBigC – has add or adjust 62% of the objects in the tile. This shows the last mapper to touch any object. Note: I do accept that this is one tile, but it’s not unusual to find this all over the Fingal task.

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Backround

About 6 years ago now, the Ireland OSM community had a bunch of online and face-to-face discussions. There was a desire to have a common campaign, rather than everyone just paddling their own canoe, mapping old boundaries, addding 110KV monster pylons, plotting the holy stones of Clonrickert, or whatever you are having yourself.

Why Buildings?

And so #osmIRL_buildings was born. It took lots of months to pull together. There was a discussion document put out, and lots of decisions and guidance via videos, long conversations on Telegram, and frequent issues discussed on the mailing lists. The task was designed with a few things in mind. Firstly, the community recognized that compared to other territories, we had relatively small levels of completion of buildings. Secondly, a prominent academic had stated that the Irish Government knew more about the number and condition of cattle than it did about buildings. Thirdly, a lot of citizen science projects were trying to collate and capture where derelict and disused buildings were located in cities, with the hope that they might be repurposed for housing. Fourthly, there was a National Planning Framework launched in 2018 that concluded that the spaces for the next 1 million people to live in could not be sprawl outside of Ireland’s cities and towns. There were other reasons too, but those are the ones I recall, so apologies to all those other reasons and their proponents. Nevertheless, all of the ones I mention here could have been addressed by the creation of a fully open spatial dataset of the buildings on the island, and not what passes for open data by data.gov.ie.

Reservations

Of course there were detractors; some mappers worried about the threat of being inundated by the glibness of millions of “building”=”yes” objects. One man in Kilkenny was worried that the climate would have changed by the time the task would finish. He might yet be right.

Kick Off

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b-unicycling has her own wonderful YouTube channel, where she mainly focusses on history aspects of osm, and I recommend all of you reading this to subscribe and understand the infectiousness of her enthusiasm and zeal for mapping.

I have put the following item on the Irish mailing list. I will put it here to widen out the inputs. If you have some time, and some experience of adding this landuse. Rather than repeat all my concerns I will simply post visual some examples of the issues I am talking about here.

Example of an urban landuse=residential which is gigantic.

Example of a landuse=residential interpreted at running along a roadway to incorporate ribbon(roadside) developments. This landuse connects a huge number of disconnected places.

Example of a landuse=residential residential where the landuse is trimmed back from the public highway and walkway, and doesn’t extend beyond the collective block of properties.

My annual diary post from last year is here, for which the summary of the targets set back then is now:

• I definitely stayed in the top 10 #osmIRL contributors for the whole year. There was more to that of course, as in 2021 I contributed more mapping days than ever before, missing only 16 out of 365.

• In August 2021 I reached 200,000 contributions in 60 days, this is the most intense contribution to OpenStreetMap I have ever achieved, and i wrote about that here

• I undertook “as an extra kick” to build a tool to visual osm for the whole island. This is here, but needs a bit more work, especially a process to keep it up to date. Thanks to Rusty and Amanda for helping plan and execute this.

• I set myself a “not hard target” of raising my mapillary contributions to 1.5 million. While I did add around another 100k images mapillary changed a load of things about their upload process and web app in the year, making it nigh-on impossible for me to report exact numbers, and also leaving me with an upload queue that I carry into 2022.

• I met my StreetComplete Target of raising myself to be #3 in Ireland. For most of the year I was #2 with huge early progress in the first #8 months. I am now #3 so this target is achieved.

• I didn’t clear up all the gaps I mentioned, because a demon keeps asking me to help with bits of rural Ireland. However, I addressed a huge number of gaps in buildings that I didn’t already know about. From now on this task has the gaps and if you feel like helping me jump in there :)

My rating: Looking at these, using mild re-interpretations of the targets I am giving myself 4.5 out of 6. I didn’t fail completely in any area.

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The helpful webstats that are provided by Pascal Neis measure map contributions per sovereign territory. In Ireland we still have a relatively small community, and would seldom have over 400 mappers appearing in his ‘kinda random’ 60 day view of the mapping contributions. It would also be rare to have over 100 map changes recorded by more than 100 of those who make it on to the chart. The pascal records these excludes Northern Ireland, who are part of our community, and where our active mappers also map a good deal.

Anyway, a few weeks ago myself and my fellow Traveller, AK challenged each other to get to the 200K mark. AK has been to that summit before, and me never, though it wouldn’t be uncommon for me to have 100K map changes. I am so thankful to have her comradeship and support. It became less of a race, and more of us egging one another on to map every day for the 60 days, which we duely did, and here is the proof.

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I map a lot of buildings in northern Dublin City. I also interrogate housenumber interpolations, view mapillary for little peeks of the housenumbers that aren’t blurred, and do my own StreetComplete captures to add as many address details as possible. Lately I have noticed something, born from a concern that I was doing something wrong, or making a mistake.

In a few housing developments around Dublin housenumber=13 doesn’t exist. I have heard of such indulgences before, for example some airlines dropping row 13 from seating plans, or the Irish car registration authority famously dropping its numeric system in 2013 to avoid the unluckiest of car numbers.

So out of curiousity I hit OverPass Turbo and launched a series of queries like this into the existing housenumbers. I couldn’t do loads of these so I thought that maybe 19 would be a sufficient sample (42,000 building objects) to make comparisons and establish patterns.

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My intention

It is what it is. This is some feedback for the organizers, speakers and community at large. I’m just picking out my main impressions and experiences. I sat through about 80% of it except for a couple of the Sunday things. The conference, being the second remote one had a dead atmosphere about it, even judged by the remoteness yard-stick. I have always been remote, for various reasons, and I enjoyed Japan, Milan, Heidelberg, and even the shell of Cape Town last year from afar. In those years small glitches occured, but despite these things did improve and did get better with the passage of time.

My intention is to give positive feedback, without being a cheerleader because cheerleading is just noise, not specific and not credible. Positive feedback is honest, and helpful with its honesty.

The content

I think the speakers, their topics, the content decisions, the preparation, the enthusiasm and the concern for the rest of the community and the project shown by the speakers was exemplary. As a viewer of several SOTMs I can certainly see interests in the community maturing, specializing and upping its game in terms of evidence behind ideas, and explanation of these ideas, and calls for engagement. I don’t dare to pick out my favourites as I have 4 friends who presented, but there were talks that were surprisingly interesting, beyond how they were billed. This needs to be preserved, firstly by naming it for what it is, and maybe the process of selecting and focusing talks is working well.

The format

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This diary post is a follow up on the one I did last week here where I was looking at how much, and for what the Ireland OpenStreetMap community uses the StreetComplete(SC) app.

The StreetComplete creator Tobias replied showing an interesting worldwide trend for SC usage. The trend here shows that there has been an upturn in SC usage worldwide in the last couple of years in terms of the users and edits contributed:

In particular Tobias shows that co-incidental with the Covid-19 months that there was a big upturn in the changesets contributed, starting gradually in May 2020 with a doubling on the previous month, but continuing to rise until the changesets remained at about 4 times the normal level for the forthcoming year. Most users are in the Northern hemisphere, so to see the higher level of changesets sustained through the Northern Hemisphere’s winter months is impressive.

In Ireland the changes, as in the big upturn are also reflected in a little bit of analysis done here.

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StreetComplete was designed by Tobias Zwick and launched in 2016 as a handy “low-bar entry” field capturing application for OpenStreetMap. In the following 2-3 years it rapidly rose to have a share of 3.9% of contributors favoured application, since it requires no real prior expertise in OpenStreetMap. The beauty of it is that it exploits the opportunity of a mapper being in situ where some features have been mapped, but lack details about their attributes, and tags on the OpenStreetMap database.

The UX is good, even for the experienced mapper it masterfully detects the absence {not to jump down a rabbit hole, but very like my favourite Pink Floyd Album } of tagging details, and then it supports the insertion of the correct tags with menu systems that are visual rather than everything being list driven. Perfect for being on the move, a car passenger or a leisurely walker. This is not supposed to be a review of the app, but you can probably detect that I am a fan.

With some help from my friend Amanda who downloaded the .pbf, and extracted all the editor traces of StreetComplete here I was able to get hold of a csv of all of the Ireland edits and then use that to make a heatmap, with some help from RustyB. The heatmap shows, what we would expect, greater use of the app in Ireland’s cities and large towns.

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The tag #osmIRL_buildings is a kind of handy brand name our community has developed for our mapping campaign to map all of Ireland’s buildings. The campaign started with a brief test at a single mapathon in Galway in September 2019, and kicked off in earnest in Kilkenny at the end of November the same year. I say “in earnest” because this is when tasks were opened and the tasking manager started to be used every day.

The campaign has a number of effects which merit discussion beyond just the obvious upturn in mapping. But let’s mention that upturn first. The upturn started at the same time as the task manager being opened at the end of 2019. The number of buildings went from 810k to 1.5million in those 15 months, which means 47 thousand buildings were added each month.

picnic images

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As a Director of OSM Ireland (osmIRL) chapter I occasionally get to do nice jobs for the community. Our chapter received a microgrant from the OpenStreetMap Foundation which we are using in conjunction with the agreed community task to map all 5+ million buildings on the island. With the support of this microgrant the chapter deployed the concept of rewarding mapping landmarks with a small token of appreciation for reaching the landmark of 10,000 buildings.

In this case we are giving our contributors a handy mouse mat, which is made with foam and nylon and carries a nifty design. Bias declaration: I designed it!

The background image is simply one part of suburban Dublin, showing the importance of adding buildings to the map. It also shows the campaign name #osmIRL_buildings. We have a task manager here to co-ordinate all this work.

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Deja Vu, again :)

This is now the 3rd annual instalment of a crazy naval-gaze about my mapping. Blame it on whoever called this part of the osm space a diary. If there is a chance to speak about my personal reflections I’m grabbing it. And what better time of year than now, since I see other people reflecting and goal setting.

My Targets

I wrote about measuring my own commitment to mapping in 2019 and then again in 2020 for the years ahead. It was fun to see my objectives shift around and good for me to test myself against them. In 2020’s diary I then had to be like the Roman God Janus; to look to the previous year by way of review, and to the coming year by way of promising some targets.

My Hot Spot

Last year I undertook to have my hot spots look less like the measles and more like a large boil, and for that boil to be in Ireland. This is definitely the case now, as the graphic shows (use the slider to see the expansion of mapping in Ireland). Having achieved this I’m not concerned with continuing to make a target for this in 2021.

My Ireland Contribution Rank

Again, the target was to stay in the top 10 mappers in Ireland. It was sustained in 2020, but there was one occasion in July where I dropped out of the top 10. I am presently the 5th biggest, without too much effort. Since I technically didn’t keep this one I will go forward with it and try to stay in the top 10 in 2021.

In the past year I realised that Pascal Neis’s “Ireland” is in fact only the Republic of Ireland. A lot of my mapping is in Northern Ireland, and as a consequence shows up in the UK. This about 20% of my present mapping.

As an extra kick I’m going to try to develop a tool that shows all the mapping on the whole island of Ireland, and this itself can be a target since it would be of benefit to everyone involved in mapping Ireland.

Map on the move

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Background

The following assertion was made by a blogger around 18 months ago:

"..mappers as a whole are mapping more features (buildings, houses, libraries, schools, green spaces etc) within the wealthier areas of the Dublin region than in the poorer areas." {53degrees} 

It was made here and in a follow up here

Reading the two posts together with the twitter promotions for them it is clear that the hypothesis rests on the perception that OSM contributors, specifically those contributing to OSM around Dublin, suffer from some kind of collective unconscious bias, to the extent that they have neglected the deprived areas of Dublin and mapped the affluent areas to a higher level of completion. This assertion, if well founded, would reveal that not only does the map of Ireland, specifically Dublin have gaps, - but that these gaps are patterned in such a way as to further exclude and marginalise the residents of these areas and the second blogpost makes no doubt of this consequence.

We have a great name for the band!: "The Spurious Correlations"

The author refers to 3 or 4 examples of poor areas, sparsely mapped, compared in turn to affluent areas mapped to a higher extent using visual assessment. There is no transparent methodology or apparent logic for these comparisons other than they were what the author appears to want to choose. Perhaps they are conveniently selected to suit the conclusion.

The author repeated the claim on twitter [now deleted] on the 23rd October 2020, presenting the evidence of these three or four comparisons as conclusive proof of a “startling lack of completion of working class areas in osm, a citizen science project”. Some charts were shown, demonstrating a very selective method of counting tags. Whether this represents traces of a deeper investigation remains unclear. This needs to be tested here and now.

Transparent Method

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This is a fright that turned to fun.

In my morning walk today I travelled along Shanowen Grove, and I took StreetComplete with me, adding building levels, addresses, building types and so on. On the last section of road I discovered one of the buildings to appear on StreetComplete as a tower.

Posting in the #osmIRL Telegram group I shared the screenshot. Dónal came to my rescue It turns out the building was specified to have 21 levels. Looking at the object history on JOSM later it turns out the levels were set by Tshedy see here. However, knowing Tshedy’s level of accuracy and the likelihood that “21” is a typo that was intended to be a “2”. This is very much in keeping with a similar “small”(but big) error in Melbourne.

StreetComplete is a great tool, especially where the basic building objects have been mapped, in a slow stroll along a street one can add serious detail, and the better the initial mapping the easier it is to see which objects require further details.

OpenStreetMap in Ireland has launched a project for National Heritage Week 2020, with some preparatory work now underway by the community. A town was chosen, deliberately large to have a decent number of heritage sites, historic buildings and well documented past celebrities and people of repute, and so we arrived at Clonmel.

There is a bit of a plan in place, set out here on the project wiki. The first step was to set down a base map, with the roads, street layouts, landuses and as many buildings as possible traced off Bing. This got done here with 176 squares mapped and validated in just 3 days by the community! The Power of the crowd……

The next part was to do some mapillary, to harvest as much about missing streetnames, building names and details as possible. This was done on a joint visit with Annekaro a.k.a b-unicycling. Admitedly what was captured is about 20% to 30% of the area of the town. So perhaps more is needed and hopefully Waterford Dave’s tweet will rescue a few more of the missing details ;)

The next phases are probably a more advanced population of building detail, and way more pin mapping. It is hoped that by liaising with locals on the ground we can activate more new users and make the project more visible, especially the benefits #OpenStreetMap offer to community based heritage mapping.

View Larger Map

In my professional life I have been on radio a whole bunch of times, and on TV a couple of times. My mother used to say I had a face for radio ;) .. but I am experienced enough at this point to handle most media. For the first time ever I was involved in a podcast, and I was super glad that it was the new osm related podcast, “ways and nodes” which is done by Austin Bell who is known as itsamap! and maps a whole lot around South Carolina, in the USA.

The podcast is right here so listen and enjoy.

I learned a lot observing and listening to Austin. He hangs out beforehand and develops his questions by talking to you, and it was great that we mapped together beforehand looking at the same stuff on the map of Ireland. There was a bit of a theme about migration. By the end of the podcast he was determined to map based on his own family’s historical origins in Scotland.

You can get in touch with Austin by simply mailing him austin@nodesandways.com and look at this mapping account here I think it is important that osm has a regular podcast, and Austin gives up a lot of time he could use mapping to make these episodes.

This is a about what I have learned most recently by being involved as a contributor to, and organiser of the “mapping sprint” or “mapathon” called #StayHomeAndMapIRL.This is written in my own voice as an individual mapper.

The mapping sprint was a week long, and really grew out of a spontaneous confluence of two things:

• The mapping campaign #osmIRL_buildings for which we use a task manager

• The necessity of everyone in Ireland to stay home, as part of the Covid-19 emergency

By combining these two we were creating an immediacy and dot-joining exercise between something people were all experiencing, and something useful to do with the time at home.

Our community agreed at the 2019 AGM to have a mapping task, one where participation was voluntary like always, but it would be the “common ground” for mappers. Some deep thought went into choosing buildings as the focus, not least being that openstreetmap for Ireland seems to lag behind in the completeness of the buildings. Typically, a large Irish town or city could have a small number of buildings mapped, even in the town centres, almost as if buildings were not a significant human feature and not a major part of the detail of any map at the end-user scale. Of course the wider point is that working at this scale adding a feature like buildings allows our community to scale up and down, and by that I mean add useful end user things like details about the buildings, or scale up and create better de facto landuses - ultimately to increase the completeness and usefulness of the map.

The week through insights taught me the following things:

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My Promised Targets

Last year I set down my mapping new years’ resolutions well before January. So wouldn’t it be fun, and also embarressing :) to review these and see if I had the year I hoped to have. My diary entry a year ago is here. Set out the various targets.

My Hot-Spot

I wanted my heat map to shift to Ireland. While it is true that I developed a number of heatmap centres in Ireland, I achieved these by following the dispersed regional community initiatives (remote tasks and face to face meetups) set by #osmIRL. This meant that I didn’t have a particular area into which the aggregate effect of highly intense mapping could be channeled. So my big heatmap remains in Lesotho, and because it built up over 4 years it may stay that way for a while. However, considering I wouldn’t have made my largest hot-spot shift anyway, I regard the case of measles I have caused on the linked map to be a success.

My Ireland Rank

Next, I want to maintain a top 10 place in the Ireland 2 monthly contributor list. I was able to do this exept for twice, as in June I fell to 20th and in August I was 25th. This was caused by a lovely summer where I went outdoors a bit more plus my old trusty laptop had some issues and I couldn’t afford to replace it immediately. I have learned that to stay on top (top10) in Ireland one can have 2 week breaks, but no longer. In 2020 I will not have breaks longer than 2 weeks.

Map on the move

I wanted to hit the Mapillary millionare status by the end of January, and then I wanted my total in Ireland to hit 1 million by the end of June. I comfortably made it with both these, and my Mapillary is now 1,292,702, and I don’t want to set more targets here, except to capture images where osmIRL needs them most of all.

Mapping Gaps

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