OpenStreetMap

pnorman's Diary Comments

Diary Comments added by pnorman

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OpenStreetMap Standard Layer: Introduction

OpenStreetMap Carto has its own schema which is currently fairly similar to the osm2pgsql defaults. These are completely different than the API DB schema.

Notizen vom Treffen des OSMF-Advisory-Boards am 24.02.

How will OSMF ensure progress is made on infrastructure things that are stuck? See examples below. - Rob (OSMUK) Translations on diary posts (this was an action from last year’s OSMF Board & LC meeting). How to move the issue on? Mailing lists migration to Discourse (GH issue)

There seems to be a misunderstanding about Discourse. We’re looking at testing it out, and the first step to that is adding OAuth 2.0 support to the website. This work is in progress, not stuck.

For the translations on diary posts, I don’t know the status because it is not an infrastructure thing.

OSMF survey country results

I wouldn’t assume it’s due to the lack of a Hungarian translation. Japan, Indonesia, and Russia all had similar response rates as Hungary and Japanese, Indonesian, and Russian were all provided languages.

I have access to some other by-country usage stats and want to see the relationship between them and survey responses, but that analysis will take more time and I won’t get to it this week.

OSMF survey country results

Not quite - it’s a linear regression forced through the origin, weighted by number of responses.

OSM map a little blurry

What is your monitor, and have you zoomed your browser in or out? High DPI monitors and zooming can both cause blurriness as the image tiles need to be scaled up or down.

Calculating label points with PostGIS

I did a quick check on the short-circuiting with buildings which are more likely to be low node-count polygons. point2 took 715s and point3 took 565s. This comes at the cost of point3 potentially returning points outside the polygon for very weirdly shaped polygons with four corners, e.g. those in a v shape.

Chronicles of mapping a Canadian village

Large parts of the Canadian map have been imported from CanVec, a vector map provided by the Canadian Natural Resources organization. In the area of Beresford, the import happened back in 2012. That’s already eight years ago. And the quality of the data wasn’t particularly great. Roads are inaccurate, forests cover half the urban areas, bridges aren’t actually placed over the water, you name it.

What makes it worse is in some parts of the country, the water and forest data in CanVec were 30 years old already.

Bing Imagery Offset

Different imagery sources are better in different places. All imagery sources can have offsets, so it’s not unique to Bing.

What’s needed is someone systematically evaluating the quality of Bing, Esri, and Maxar where mapping is done and deciding which is best overall.

I’m Running for OSMF Board

You’ve indicated a connection between your OSMF candidacy and your paid work. Do you intend to ask the board permission to do OSMF work on paid time as a conflict of interest under appropriate legislation. I have always taken time off for board duties (e.g. take vacation time for in-person meetings, rearrange my work schedule for monthly meetings).

August 2019 disputed boundaries update

It’d be good to see this work on osm.org via submitting bubble wrap to be a featured tile layer. Are you interested in submitting it?

Your friendly neighborhood event calendar

It’s good to see the improvements. The calendar on the wiki is underused by some parts of the community and this should help bring up usage. With the other tools built around its data like WeeklyOSM’s, adding your event to it gets a lot of coverage.

Membership Working Group Updates

It might help for potential volunteers for the MWG to know the following: -average time to on board for membership waiver review or other MWG tasks -approximate time that would be expected 1 hour a week etc. - types of skills needed

It’s hard for me to judge that, since I’ve been in the MWG for some time and set up some of the new tools. Being experienced makes it difficult to know how much time it will take for someone else. Perhaps you, as a newer MWG member, could provide an estimate based on your experience learning the new stuff.

Membership Working Group Updates

I believe everyone in the MWG wants to be transparent about waivers, reporting overall numbers at a minimum. There are limits to this, of course - country breakdowns are tricky. It’s not as much of an issue on money transfer waivers, because anyone who requests the associate member list can get the list of members from Iran, and the inability to transfer money from there makes it obvious they’re all fee waiver members, but the financial need members could come from anywhere.

Right now we’re moving to OTRS to track inbound requests, which should make reporting easier. I had to go in and count emails to get these numbers, which isn’t sustainable.

CiviCRM has country and OSM username information, so it’s technically easy to get a breakdown of fee waiver members’ countries. We need to add fee-waiver to https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Membership/Statistics but it hit the first of the month today so we haven’t yet done it.

The most surreal and memorable OSMF board meeting yet

The most surreal and memorable OSMF board meeting yet

Ah, these youngsters.

+1

The most surreal and memorable OSMF board meeting yet

Regarding your description of the closed part of the meeting - you don’t mention any discussion or decision whether the CoI of Mikel and Martijn disqualifies them from participating in the discussion (which considering the “CoI demonstration” by Mikel in the public meeting i described is an obvious question from the perspective of the outside observer).

Having a CoI does not require someone recuse themselves from discussion, just voting. We have been advised on this by a lawyer, and it is supported by other documents I have read about the UK’s companies act. The OSMF could adopt a stricter CoI policy.

To take an example that isn’t over organized editing, I have a CoI with contracting out the GDPR-related backend development work on the API.1 By law, I am allowed to listen to and speak in board discussions on it. I choose not to, and only listen to public discussions.

I cannot vote on matters related to this contracting out. If the other members of the board were to vote to authorize me under s. 175 (4)(b), I could then vote. I have not asked for a vote, and if I did, it would appear in the minutes.

Similarly, if Mikel or Martijn had asked for a vote, we would have held it and the results would be in the minutes. They didn’t ask for a vote.


Did i understand you correctly that in internal discussion Mikel and Martijn were against voting on the policy in this meeting? For Mikel this seems pretty obvious but Martijn did not say a word in the public discussion so it would be significant to know.

If we do a circular and Loomio fails to send notifications properly, does it count as a circular? If it is, then holding a vote is automatic. If not, a board member would need to request a vote. Since we held a vote, it’s a moot point. We just need to make sure that circular notifications get done correctly in the future.


The interview was held because not all of us are familiar enough with their business interests to understand if they had a CoI or not. It was agreed that they didn’t, so there was no need for a vote.

I also gave a brief statement that none of my recent contracts nor job applications have involved companies doing any organized editing that would be impacted by the policy we voted on, or any other policy others had suggested. I do not do paid editing myself. I cannot foresee the future, so this could change.


https://twitter.com/Anonymaps/status/1063845660879962112

Unfortunately two days too late - Anonymaps running for board, that would have been something.

Does the MWG have Anonymaps registered as a member? Would Anonymaps be eligible for a fee waiver because Paypal is not available on Null Island?

They’d have to be a normal member, which requires the full address. One on null island would be invalid. So they should run, then we’ll know exactly who it is!

No more broken multipolygons in the standard style on openstreetmap.org

Long story short: That the standard map rendering should not try to be most tolerant about multipolygon validity but rather be more strict about it to give mappers better feedback about their mapping has been a demand of many people for a long time. This has now finally happened.

The change is about not recovering broken geometries, which applies regardless of if they’re from multipolygons. It’s just much easier to make mistakes with a complex multipolygon relation than a simple closed way.

More work on Bolder

In your sample rendering the drawing order of the roads looks odd, kind of random.

It is in fact random, because Tegola is trying to do some things it shouldn’t with queries which makes ORDER BY hard to use in queries. This is similar to how a bad Mapnik query can result in a sequential scan on start-up. Because Tangram is a lot more flexible with ordering than Mapnik thanks to its GL origins, I could avoid needing to ORDER BY within a layer by including a z ordering within the query output, but I don’t like this technique as much.

Road ordering is important for using the map, but doesn’t impact designing the cartography of the rest of the features, so I’m leaving the issue aside until it becomes more important or the Tegola bug is resolved.

I find it easier to express cartographic design once I have a baseline to work on. A few things I want to experiment with are bringing back stronger road colours, stronger casings, and how much I want to vary road thickness by classification.

Not Yours, OpenStreetMap

But now it’s obvious that nobody knows where to go next. Well, Paul Norman gives talks exactly about this for two years.

Please don’t use my name this in support of your views, which my talks do not support.

Peru’s response to redaction

Shocking loss of work. There has to be a better way to revert than just deleting the work of everyone.

Not to diminish the work you all did, just horrible that DWG couldn’t save any of it, such as at least the tags that have been added over the years (not in the original import). There has to be a less ham-fisted approach to reverting data.

The redaction code saved as much as was possible. The problem is that there wasn’t much that could be saved.

Motorway Junction Node Placement

I’d much prefer option 2, since it more accurately represents what exists on the ground. Options 1 and 3 start introducing angles and corners (“Warning! Sharp bend ahead!”) that don’t exist.

Option 2 is the best approximation of the route that a fully informed driver will take, namely a straight line from the point of lane departure to the exit. Imagine instead that drivers follow option 3 - 45 degree turns just before the gore? I don’t think that would be right.

This echos what I’ve found - if someone were systematically creating 45 degree angles for offramps locally, I’d ask them to stop.