Two Important Tagging Proposals Passed, but Nobody Knows.

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Browsing the German OSM forum today I noticed that the OSMAnd android routing app developers were asking the community for an opinion on which “lane” tagging proposal to implement. My first reaction was: well didn’t such a proposal pass just a while ago and why on earth don’t they know about it? But on reflecting a bit, I had to admit, that I probably really only happen to know that we have a fully functional lane tagging scheme by accident.

Our tagging proposal and voting procedure has often been belittled and is the target of many jokes. Myself being one of the larger offenders in that respect. It can be argued that for the typical “I need a value for tag X that doesn’t exist” situation it just leads to massive bike shedding instead of quick resolution. I have at times simply started documenting and using a tag completely ignoring the proposal process (see mofa).

However we have had two long ongoing disputes in areas that impact usability mainly for routing applications where a unilateral decision without community and developer buy in hasn’t worked: lane tagging and conditional restrictions.

While the effort to support the three or four different ways of tagging a cycleway in a style sheet  is small, expecting all routing applications to implement the 3 or 4 different lane tagging proposal was and is just unrealistic.The usual tiebreaker that the more sucessful in day to day use proposal wins (the voting with the feet principle) doesn’t seem to work in such situations. As we all know adoption and widespread usage of a tag in OSM is mainly driven by either being able to see it directly on a map or by it having direct effect on applications. Particularly with lane tagging this has led to a classical “hen and egg” situation were lanes have not been tagged because the tagging was not being utilized at all.

We now have resolution, as far as we can ever have resolution in OSM, in two significant areas of tagging. The missing piece of the puzzle seems to be simply to make our contributors aware of the change. A long time mapper that doesn’t follow the tagging list and has never mapped lanes is not going to magically look up the lane tagging guidelines the next time he adds a street, he will just carry on with his established way of mapping.

OSM lacks a method for actively getting this kind of news out to contributors. The closest we get right now is tweeting, but that only reaches a small percentage of the community and in the past hasn’t been used for such mundane news. I’ve done some thinking about extending the OSM API to include access to the users “inbox” and some kind of system wide message system  that could be used by editors to display such messages on start up. However until such a system is implemented and adopted by third party developers we will need to use Twitter and our blogs to get the message out.

 

SOTM day three: Simon Poole elected to the OSMF board

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The topic of the third and last day of SOTM was the community. For example, Peter Miller presented his very numerous speciality maps, or Bob Barr had a heart-warming talk on weather open street mappers are rather pirates or pilots. There was also a presentation on OpenStreetMap addiction and how to diagnose and treat it. I personally enjoyed Kinya Inoue’s presentation very much. He talked about his mapping of historical places in Japan (and how that suddenly brought him in a quite dangerous situation).

During lunch time, there was the annual general meeting of the OSMF, the worldwide OSM organisation. During this meeting, the OSMF board was elected, and we congratulate Simon Poole, the current president of SOSM, to his election as an OSMF board member, together with Henk Hoff and Frederik Ramm.

View from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building

And now it’s time for me to travel some more around Japan. Tokyo is huge (see picture, view from the metropolitan government building) but there are also other places to visit apart from the capital.

SOTM day two

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The swiss delegation on the night cruise
The Swiss delegation on the night cruise

The second day was focused on routing and navigation. A lot of companies are interested in this topic. Some of them requested to include auxiliary information into OSM which would not be about physical objects, e.g. identifying the extent of big junctions or whether a turn should be announced at a bifurcation. Over lunch a group picture has been taken.

The evening was spent with causal talk and drinking: We had delicious Japanese food on a night cruise. We went on the boat in Kachidoki and did a tour around the harbour to the landmark building of a TV station. During the whole cruise many different dishes were served, so we got a broad culinary overview.

SOTM 2012: ODbL planet announced

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Tokyo by night
Near studio Alta in Shinjuku

Right now the State of the Map 2012 is taking place in Tokyo. This is an impressive city, and sometimes you feel like you jumped right into the (very crowded) future. The first day of SOTM was mostly about humanitarian and crisis mapping. (There were also some talks in Japanese, though I can’t judge those.) Today, there are more technical talks.

The most important announcement for all mappers was at the opening of the conference from Michael Collinson: The next planet will be ODbL licensed. So the redaction period is finally completed!

Experimental MapProxy Service

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We have a number of sources of aerial imagery available in Switzerland that are accessible by so called WMS servers. JOSM supports such servers directly, but P2 (the editor imbedded ob the OSM map page) users and users of a number of mobile apps cannot access such data.

Additionaly in some cases the imagery is not available in the “Spherical Mercator”  projection that most OSM tools use as default.

We now have, on a test and experimental base, a MapProxy instance running that supports reading imagery from WMS servers and serving this as Google/OSM format tiles, reprojected if necessary.

Up to now we have added 2 layers:

We will consider further layers, we would however point out that in the current environment the capacity of the server is limited.

City of Uster makes Aerial Imagery and Street Data available for OSM

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The City of Uster GIS centre has made aerial imagery and street data available for use in OpenStreetMap. The imagery was captured in 2008 and has 10cm nominal resolution. Access to the data is provided via the cities WMS server.

We thank Mr Neumann from the GIS centre for the cooperation and Michael Spreng for establishing contact..

The imagery can be accessed either via the City of Uster WMS or via the experimental SOSM mapproxy server. More information can be found in the Wiki.

Welcome to SOSM

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We are happy to announce the creation of the Swiss OpenStreetMap Association during the GEOsummit 2012 in Berne today, June 20th 2012.

SOSM was created to  further the goals of the OpenStreetMap movement, to strengthen the contacts with authorities and industry, to facilitate the activities  of OSM community members in Switzerland and to represent the Swiss OSM community in other organisations.

OpenStreetMap has always been a grassroots, at sometimes anarchistic, movement. SOSM sees its role as providing some structure when needed and remaining as lightweight and as unobstrusive as possible.

The initial board is composed of Sarah Hoffmann, Stephane Henriod, Thomas Ineichen and Simon Poole.

OpenStreetMap Switzerland in Numbers

The OpenStreetMap data set for Switzerland contains

  • over 44’000 km of roads
  • over 46’000 km of agricultural and forest tracks
  • over 7’000 km of paved bicycle and foot paths
  • over 17’000 km of unpaved paths

More than 6’000 active OSM community members gathered the data and the data volume is growing over 20% per year.