Imagico.de | blog

OpenStreetMap-Carto – an update on the project | Imagico.de
▻http://blog.imagico.de/openstreetmap-carto-an-update-on-the-project

I have been contemplating writing an update on this for more than a year now, but i have been hesitant because the conclusions i am going to draw in the end are pretty dire and i had still hoped for a turn to the better. And writing a blog post here with fairly negative conclusions seemed to me to be something that could further contribute to seal the fate of the project.

Avec, comme souvent dans les billets de ce blog, des passages intéressants à propos du travail communautaire dans le libre :)

Build consensus and agreement through discussion and compromise, using a combination of the cartography guidelines and common sense.

Consensus doesn’t mean unanimity, but there shouldn’t be anything merged here against firm opposition from a maintainer.

▻https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/3951#issuecomment-546561409

Some maintainers (including myself) continue to review changes that are being suggested but releases have become very sporadic and usually contain little of substance in terms of visible changes. I try to – even when i disapprove of a change – indicate that i would be fine with the other maintainers accepting the change none the less if they agree on it, this way actively supporting a more robust form of consensus. But that is no substitute for an actual common goal and a strategic direction we agree on. And most capable style developers have stopped contributing to the project because the lack of a clear overall direction does not provide for a supportive environment to work on good map design .

However, in moderation (meaning in particular to mitigate the imbalance resulting from the loud voices appearing to represent the popular opinion) popular involvement is an essential component both for evaluating design and for recruiting talented and qualified people in development, in particular in case of a cooperative community project like OSM-Carto.

#gouvernance #openstreetmap #osm

Why it is essential for the #OpenStreetMap community to actively pursue #map #design #innovation | Imagico.de
▻http://blog.imagico.de/why-it-is-essential-for-the-openstreetmap-community-to-actively-pursue-

If the OpenStreetMap community wants to stay avant-garde in cartographic data collection and actively shape the future of that domain rather than swimming with the stream and becoming a mere data provider serving the cartographic data needs of data users with big pockets, it needs to be able to shape the map design depicting and presenting the data the mapper community collects.
...
What is important is the realization that there is a need to act here and that an own and diverse innovative map design capability from within the OSM community that is not just piggy-bagged on the work of third parties outside the project but that is capable and willing to guide and shape design in its own direction, is essential for the long term success of OpenStreetMap. And that the technical foundations for this in the form of software that enables such innovative map design with flexibility, likewise need to be developed and shaped from within the project and can equally not just be attached to external endeavors which follow completely different economic goals.
...
What OpenStreetMap is good at and where the proprietary competition has no chance against it is producing a map based on local knowledge, by the people, for the people – both in the data collection and mapping part and in the actual map design and production.

On group #communication channels | Imagico.de
▻http://blog.imagico.de/on-group-communication-channels

What is interesting is of course to look at what the future might bring. Will there be platforms and channels that can compete with the old school techniques (NNTP and mailing lists) that came out as winners in my analysis regarding the criteria i looked at? At the moment nothing is visible in that direction i think. Focus in development in group communication technology has for quite a few years been in the real time synchronous domain but as i tried to explain above this is of relatively little importance for highly multicultural use cases like we have them in OpenStreetMap.

À propos des moyens de communication dans la communauté #openstreetmap => @spip pourrait partager avec cette communauté l’expérience de la bascule de ses listes vers discourse :)

Testing client side #map renderers on #polygons | Imagico.de
▻http://blog.imagico.de/testing-client-side-map-renderers-on-polygons

http://blog.imagico.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/overzoom_discretization_65536.png

In terms of the quality criteria i looked at here, that is primarily precision, resolution and aliasing artefacts in polygon rendering, the tested client side renderers perform somewhere between so-and-so and badly. Openlayers shows the overall best performance. Tangram is on the second place, primarily because of much more noisy results due to aliasing artefacts. Maplibre GL makes the bottom end with a massive bias expanding polygons beyond their actual shape essentially rendering many of the tests useless and making any kind of precision rendering impossible – while being subject to similar levels of aliasing as Tangram.

Do i have a recommendation based on these results? Not really. It would be a bit unrealistic to make an overall recommendation based on a very selective analysis like this. Based on my results i would definitely like to see more examples of practical cartography based on the Openlayers vector tiles rendering engine.

If i should really give a recommendation to people looking to start a map design project and wondering what renderer to choose for that it would be a big warning if you have any kind of ambition regarding cartographic and visual quality of the results to think hard about choosing any of the client side renderers discussed here.

Comparatif de rendu des polygones avec #MaplibreGL #Tangram & #Openlayers qui s’en sort le mieux.

Un peu en lien avec ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/932812

#tiles #vector

The OSMF – changes during the past year and what they mean for the coming years – part 2 | Imagico.de
▻http://blog.imagico.de/the-osmf-changes-during-the-past-year-and-what-they-mean-for-the-coming

Corporate takeover – it has already happened

...

Some will likely reject my idea that the corporate takeover of the OSMF has already happened. They will argue that if that was true, corporations would push much more aggressively for their interests. I don’t think that is the case though. As explained, the primary interest large corporations have in the OSMF is not positively accomplishing something, it is preventing things negative for their interests from happening.

...

Centralization of the OSMF

...

The effect the establishment of such committees would have is a massive shift in power within the OSMF from the working groups towards the board. Currently the board is essentially limited in what they can do by their numbers. Board members are not able to delegate their formal powers to others.

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Decreasing diversity and brain drain

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Parts of the OSMF (working groups, committees) will become increasingly dominated by culturally narrow circles of people with shared interests (like their careers or shared interests of outside organizations they are affiliated with) – interests which are distinct from the funadamental goals and values of OpenStreetMap.

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Seeking influence on OpenStreetMapCommunity

...

Community communication channels : One prevailing narrative from within the OSMF more recently has been that “fragmentation of communication” in the OSM community is a big problem that needs to be addressed. That terminology is in itself interesting by the way – the same thing, when considered positively, is called diversity, when deemed negatively it is framed fragmentation.

...

Mapping and tagging: As i have explained above, a secondary interest the financiers of the OSMF have is steering the craft mapper community into a direction beneficial for their data uses.

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Conclusions

...

As i wrote in part 1 of this post, i present my prediction for the direction in which the OSMF is headed here to be proven either right or wrong by what will actually happen. And i would be happy to be proven wrong

#osm #openstreetmap #gouvernance

OpenStreetMap is Having a Moment. The Billion Dollar Dataset Next Door | by Joe Morrison | Nov, 2020 | Medium
▻https://joemorrison.medium.com/openstreetmap-is-having-a-moment-dcc7eef1bb01

The Billion Dollar Dataset Next Door

Conservatism, progressive and regressive change – framing in #OpenStreetMap politics
▻http://blog.imagico.de/conservatism-progressive-and-regressive-change-framing-in-openstreetmap

A bit more than half a year ago i analyzed the political structure of the OpenStreetMap Foundation in the aftermath of the previous board elections. I identified two main factions within the OSMF membership – the craft mapping supporters and the corporate and professional interest faction. In terms of power balance these dominate the OSMF membership about 2:1. That is not representative for the OSM community obviously and as i pointed out back in the election analysis there are likely distinct other factions within the overall OSM community that are not adequately represented in the OSMF membership. Still, these two large factions are also present in the OSM community overall and their diverging views manifest frequently in policy related and other discussions.

I also pointed out that the craft mapping supporters are largely defined by a common set of values while the corporate and professional interest faction is defined through common interests. That is something to keep in mind in the following.

The reason why i revisit this topic now is that a new narrative has come up and is being communicated in the past months in OSMF politics – that is the need for change for OpenStreetMap and of conservative opposition from craft mappers against it. This narrative is largely coming out of the corporate interest faction and is framing the craft mapping supporters as conservative and opposed to any kind of change in principle and themselves as being the advocates of urgently necessary change. An OSMF board member has in public communication recently indicated to being inclined to adopt this narrative. I will get to that in more detail later.

What i did not discuss in my election analysis was how the factions i identified came into being historically. To get a realistic impression on the nature and the motivation of the different political movements in OpenStreetMap understanding the history of the project is paramount.

TL;DR: The framing of craft mapping supporters in OpenStreetMap as conservatives opposed to change is inappropriate given the historic context and present day work of craft mappers all over the world towards progressive change. It has been created by regressive, revisionist interests that would like to roll back the ongoing democratization of geographic knowledge and its collection OpenStreetMap stands for in pursuit of short sighted economic goals.

#grosse_fatigue

SotM 2020 – a few thoughts on the experiment | Imagico.de
▻http://blog.imagico.de/sotm-2020-a-few-thoughts-on-the-experiment

The #pads for collecting questions and comments on talks worked great. This is definitely a concept that could play a central role in future #distributed #conferences.

None the less what also became clear to me during the conference is that the willingness of people to engage in communication was very clearly in the order written conversation > audio communication > video. I think this is an observation to consider for any audio or video conversation in the OSM context. Video meetings might be very convenient for heavily engaged extroverted community members with a pre-existing prominence but for many people this can be a source of discomfort. And cultural and language barriers can be strongly emphasized by use of real time #audio and especially #video communication.

A few further ideas on what possibilities a virtual conference format could offer beyond what has been tried this year:

In a distributed conference the hurdle to submit a talk proposal would be much lower because it does not require a commitment to make an expensive travel to the conference location. I can already imagine people fearing the program committee might be drowned in submissions. The solution to that is to not think of this in terms of a physical conference. You don’t actually need to make a pre-selection of talks based on abstracts submitted, you can let people simply submit their pre-recorded talks. That would require more effort on the side of a presenter than submitting a bloomy abstract which would filter out any non-serious submissions. And assessing a talk based on scrolling through the video for a few minutes is much fairer than doing so based on just an abstract. So having the program committee select talks rather than abstracts is likely the better and fairer option for a virtual conference. Alternatively you could skip the selection of talks altogether and simply make all submissions accessible to the conference visitors. After all a virtual conference is not subject to the physical limitation of available rooms. That you might not necessarily be able to offer a moderated live Q&A for all talks is clear – but there are options to solve that with some creativity.

The other idea is that a virtual distributed conference might be set up not only removing the constraint to a specific place but also spread out the conference in the time domain. Time zone differences are a serious issue with an international real time online conference – this could be observed at SotM 2020 quite well. So why not forego squeezing the conference into two days but instead spreading it across something like one or two weeks. A few days before the beginning of the actual real time part of the conference you make available the pre-recorded videos for everyone to watch at a time of their choosing. And they have the option to comment and ask questions asynchronously then. The speakers of the talks then have also some time to consider the questions and comments carefully before there is a moderated real time video session where the written feedback is discussed and further real time discussion is possible. The whole thing could be wrapped up by an integrated mechanism to allow speakers to provide some followup to the discussion in the days afterwards.

With Allan’s keynote we had already a demonstration during this conference giving a bit of a glimpse on how this might work. There was no Q&A immediately after the talk but there was a longer Q&A later in the evening in form of a self organized session. Conference visitors in addition to asking questions during the talk streaming could afterwards for several hours re-watch the talk using the re-live feature and ask further questions and make comments. It was a bit unfortunate that Allan did not have more time to more carefully read the questions and prepare more elaborate answers which could have been the basis for a more interesting live discussion or later followup comments. But overall i think it was already visible how a more slowly paced dialog between presenters and visitors of the conference could facilitate a more productive and meaningful discourse.

Explication du fonctionnement sur le site du SOTM 2020 :

How is my talk presented?

There will be an introduction session shortly before the conference for all speakers and session hosts. We will use the following workflow during your talk: 10 minutes before the talk the speaker and the session host test their equipment and connectivity with the video team. The talk takes place in a Jitsi session which will be streamed publicly. In the first 2-3 minutes the session hosts gives a short introduction about the speaker and the talk. Then the pre-recorded video is broadcast. During the broadcasting of the video the audience has the opportunity to ask questions on the Q&A pad of the talk. After the video the session host and the speaker go through the questions of the talk. We have allocated about 20 minutes for that.

How can I participate it the Question & Answer session of my talk?

You have to join the Jitsi session of your talk and talk with the session host about the questions from the audience. You can watch all incoming questions in the Q&A pad (hackpad) linked in the detail page of your talk. It is the task of the session host to make a kind of pre-selection of the questions, sorting them and leaving out those that are inappropriate.

▻https://2020.stateofthemap.org/faq

Les vidéos de l’événement ont été prises en charge par les gens du CCC (Chaos Computer Club) ▻https://c3voc.de

Quelques liens au sujet des confs vidéos :

▻https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/State_of_the_Map_2020/Tutorial_Pre-Recorded_Talk : Tutorial Pre-Recorded Talk
▻https://c3voc.de/wiki/start : Working group in the Chaos Computer Club on event recording and streaming
▻https://gitlab.com/billowconf/billowconf : BillowConf is an online platform for virtual conferences. It supports different rooms that people can join and interact with. Presenters give talks and can enagage with the audience in real time through text (IRC) and video.

Risks for and resilience of the #OpenStreetMap project
▻http://blog.imagico.de/risks-for-and-resilience-of-the-openstreetmap-project

There is currently a public brainstorming session going on in the OpenStreetMap Wiki in the format of a SWOT analysis, initiated by Allan Mustard, newly elected member of the board of the OpenStreetMap foundation. This has resulted in an interesting and still growing collection of view, ideas, wishes and to some extent also complaints about the project from a lot of different perspectives and i encourage anyone to read this and possibly contribute your own ideas.

▻https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_SWOT

What i will try to use this approach for here is looking at the OpenStreetMap project in terms of the risks it faces and its resilience regarding possible harm the project might face in the future. The OSMF has in the past largely neglected to have a systematic look at this and it is really time this changes. I am not sure this is actually what the OSMF board intends to do with these ideas or if they want to in a way use it for some classical business optimization ideas – that remains to be seen.

Outsiders often have a bit of difficulty with that because they often in analogy to other projects perceive OpenStreetMap to be an organization in itself. But it is not. OpenStreetMap is loosely connected social project of people working together for the common goal of cooperatively mapping the world from local knowledge in the form of an open database. The OpenStreetMap Foundation is an organization created for the purpose of supporting this social project with infrastructure and other support. But the OSMF has no mandate to either lead or control the OpenStreetMap project.

http://blog.imagico.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/osm_swot.png

Compared to the OpenStreetMap project itself the OSMF is the more promising target for attempts of corporations of exercising influence because the OpenStreetMap project due to its decentralized nature provides a fairly small and elusive surface of attack for such endeavors. For corporations it is hard to deal in any way with a project without a centralized structure – which is both a disadvantage for constructive and positive interaction but at the same time a huge advantage regarding malevolent activities.

...especially in terms of attracting new volunteers for the project. Key when doing that however needs to be actively communicating the values and basic principles of the project – something that has in the past unfortunately often been neglected in the desire to be welcoming to a diverse number of people.

Some thoughts on the roles and responsibilities of developers and project maintainers in the OpenStreetMap community | Imagico.de
▻http://blog.imagico.de/some-thoughts-on-the-roles-and-responsibilities-of-developers-and-proje

Les problèmes de gouvernance d’un projet open-source : exemple de l’éditeur « par défaut » d’OpenStreetMap
Voir aussi (le bien plus énervé) ►https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/woodpeck/diary/391175

signalé par @b_b

#iD #OpenStreetMap #gouvernance #open-source

On the discussion on OSMF supported #vector #tiles maps
▻http://blog.imagico.de/on-the-discussion-on-osmf-supported-vector-tiles-maps

But trying to address this problem now by crawling under the wings of Mapbox or other big corporations and making OSMs public image fully dependent on technology developed and controlled by corporate players would in my opinion be a big mistake. Open Source or not – the past experience with Mapnik and Carto has quite well demonstrated i think that OSM currently lacks the resources and expertise to develop or to organize development of a map rendering framework for the specific needs of the project independent of either the big corporate #OSM users or the broader FOSS community.

On imitated problem solving
▻http://blog.imagico.de/on-imitated-problem-solving

As many of you know for a few years now we have a new trend in remote sensing and cartography that is called Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning.
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Those in decision making positions at companies like Facebook and Mapbox who try to push AI or Machine Learning into cartography (see here and here) are largely aware of these limitations. If they truly believed that AIs can replace human intelligence in mapping they would not try to push such methods into OSM, they would simply build their own geo-database using these methods free of the inconvenient rules and constraints of OSM. The reason why they push this into OSM is because on their own these methods are pretty useless for cartographic purposes. As illustrated above for principal reasons they produce pretty blatant and stupid errors and even if the error rate is low that usually ruins things for most application. What would you think of a map where one percent of the buildings are in the middle of a road or river or similar? Would you trust a self driving car that uses a road database where 0.1 percent of the roads lead into a lake or wall?
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What Facebook & Co. hope for is that by pushing AI methods into OSM they can get the OSM community to clean up the errors their trained mechanical kids inevitably produce and thereby turn the practically pretty useless AI results into something of practical value – or, to put it more bluntly, to change OSM from being a map by the people for the people into a project of crowd sourced slave work for the corporate AI overlords.
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Computers should perform work for humans, not the other way round.
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In other words: You should do exactly the opposite of what Facebook and Mapbox are doing in this field.

#osm #ai #machine_learning & #mapbox as usual :p

On basic small scale landcover rendering
▻http://blog.imagico.de/on-basic-small-scale-landcover-rendering

Many #OSM based #maps show #landuse areas at the high zoom levels in either a plain #color or using #patterns. At smaller scales landcover depiction is also useful in particular to delineate urban and rural areas and to allow the map user to identify different landscapes in particular if there is no relief depiction in the map. At small scales it is usually not the specific shape of individual landcover areas that needs to be shown but the overall distribution of the different landcover types. And due to the variable scale of the mercator projection certain needs for landcover depiction occur at different zoom levels depending on where on earth you look.

http://blog.imagico.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/landcover-colors.png http://blog.imagico.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/lc_lz.png http://blog.imagico.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/lc_lz3.png http://blog.imagico.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/lc_lzf.png

démos : ▻http://maps.imagico.de/#map=5/45.089/43.813&lang=en&r=osmlz&o=1aa&ui=2

Mapping coasts and the tidal zone

▻http://blog.imagico.de/mapping-coasts-and-the-tidal-zone

Mapping #coasts and the #tidal zone in #OpenStreetMap is not that difficult, here the basics:

– the coastline tagged with natural=coastline is placed at the top of the tidal range.
– the tidal zone is usually mapped as as natural=wetland, with wetland=tidalflat if it is bare mud or sand, other wetland types (like wetland=saltmarsh or wetland=mangrove) apply if it is vegetated.
– shallow, elevated areas permanently under water can be mapped as natural=reef.
– sand- and gravel bars in the tidal range or raising above can be mapped as natural=shoal.
– non-vegetated coastal stretches of sand, gravel or pebbles that are formed by waves can be mapped as natural=beach – preferrably with a surface tag indicating the material.
– rocky coasts can be tagged natural=bare_rock, coastal cliffs can be mapped with natural=cliff.
– for coastal dunes you can use natural=sand, individual dunes can also be mapped with natural=dune.

You can find some more details on coastal mapping in another blog post about beaches and reefs ▻http://blog.imagico.de/reefs-and-beaches-in-the-openstreetmap-standard-style

#osm #reef #mer

Beyond Mercator | Imagico.de

▻http://blog.imagico.de/beyond-mercator

Many people showed interest in the Peirce quincuncial projection

proj.4 implementation on github : ▻https://github.com/imagico/proj.4/tree/pq
demo : ▻http://maps.imagico.de/#pq

#map #projection

ping @fil :)

Peter Selinger : Potrace
▻http://potrace.sourceforge.net

Potrace is a tool for tracing a #bitmap, which means, transforming a bitmap into a smooth, scalable image. The input is a bitmap (PBM, PGM, PPM, or BMP format), and the default output is an encapsulated PostScript file (EPS). A typical use is to create EPS files from scanned data, such as company or university logos, handwritten notes, etc. The resulting image is not “jaggy” like a bitmap, but smooth. It can then be rendered at any resolution. Potrace can currently produce the following output formats: EPS, PostScript, PDF, #svg (scalable #vector graphics), DXF, #geojson, PGM (for easy antialiasing of pixel-based #images), Gimppath, and XFig. Additional backends might be added in the future.

via ▻http://blog.thematicmapping.org/2015/12/mapping-real-time-snow-cover.html

#shell

Rendering boundaries | Imagico.de
▻http://blog.imagico.de/rendering-boundaries

The vast majority of boundaries of the world, no matter on what administrative level, are defined in one of the following ways: 1) Defined through a number of points with coordinates and straight lines between them 2) Defined by some physical geography feature, in most cases rivers or mountain ridges 3) Defined by a mathematical formula on basis of a physical geography feature, in most cases related to the distance from the coast

http://blog.imagico.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/boundaries_980.png

▻http://www.imagico.de/map/boundaries_download_en.php

#map #data #frontières #osm

30 meter resolution SRTM-2 dataset will be released with worldwide coverage… All rejoice - goodbye 90 meter resolution ! Data for Africa will come first.
▻https://www1.nga.mil/MediaRoom/LeadingStories/Pages/NGAreleaseshigh-resolutionelevationdatatopublic.aspx
#SRTM #NGA #NASA #maps #cartes #cartographie #cartography

How random should it be - on patterns in maps | Imagico.de
▻http://blog.imagico.de/how-random-should-it-be-on-patterns-in-maps-2

I have made available a small tool that can generate this kind of #pattern with periodic boundary conditions for use in #map rendering. This runs in the web browser and generates SVG files. The source code is also available on github for anyone interested to modify. Here some examples for results from this:

http://blog.imagico.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/dotpattern.png

▻https://github.com/imagico/jsdotpattern

#design

Global #data for settlement generalization | Imagico.de
▻http://blog.imagico.de/global-data-for-settlement-generalization

When i wrote about the rendering of human settlement areas based on OpenStreetMap data i provided a small sample data set covering central Europe to demonstrate the technique. I have now streamlined the data processing involved and generated those settlement polygons for the whole planet. You can find this data for download and use in your own maps (under CC license). Generalization is done for use at zoom levels 8-10.

http://blog.imagico.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/builtup_gen_global.png

www.imagico.de/map/osm_builtup_en.php

#map #opensource