PieFed.caTheir Work is Incredibly Valuable
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Sunshine (she/her)
https://media.piefed.ca/posts/bM/tD/bMtDefYfyUjEHjG.webp
https://media.piefed.ca/posts/bM/tD/bMtDefYfyUjEHjG.webp
My kind of heroes. People who seek to better the world without seeking attention while doing it.
And there's an app to help contributing to openstreetmap.
Here's a link to it on f-droid...
https://f-droid.org/packages/de.westnordost.streetcomplete/
How does this compare to OsmAnd, which is what I currently use?
Isn't OsmAnd primarily a navigation app?
StreetComplete is an app that gives you tasks to complete, like "Does the bus stop have a light? Can blind people use the cross walk? What's the house number? How many bikes can use the bike parking lot?"
It's a bit like Pokemon Go, but without a for profit company behind it and the result helps other people.
Try it out... It's free.
Can recc Street Complete as well, so much fun. I do use Osmand to add cafes or websites to places, works quite ok for that as well.
Well, I am convinced. Thanks for explaining the difference. I usually use the app for navigation and then add spots that I see are missing when I get home on the website.
StreetComplete...
Global Rank: #1567
Local Rank: #131
Days Active: 370
You're welcome ๐
Errr global rank #5770 checking in. To be fair I'm just not out a lot.
#6002 here, working on filling up my entity village with 2k pop โ Also usually fill during walks on trips
#4412 here... Damn... We could hold a community meeting on Lemmy...
Every little bit helps to improve the maps for everyone else..
@Cyber Global rank of #303 on StreetComplete. I've been doing this for years. It's a passion.
Nice!
Ok, I've been doing this for a couple of years, but I think SC just shows actual number of days something was entered
But.. #303... I've got a looong way to go
(I bet you're a delivery driver ๐)
@Cyber Nah, I just walk around alot (especially on the weekends), and I fill in a lot of maps on the OSM iD interface.
Thatโs so cool they have ranks!
Yeah, you get Quests and "unlock" things - which is mostly links to sites that use OSM data for interesting things.
It's fun for a bit, but I'm glad that after a while you don't see them anymore...
I'm happy just recording the opening times for a decent friendly restaurant... and the name of a bustop... and house numbers... and street lighting... and...
Edit: Oh and I've covered 7 countries by the look of it. Canada and EU mostly...
Global rank #4997 reporting for duty ๐ซก
#1693 here!
i spent my summer last year filling all the street names on a caribbean island i was going on holiday in december, so i could use Co-Maps offline during my trip (aka Maps.me and Organic Maps before enshitification)
osm is the best!
Wait did organic maps enshitify?
Thw open letter describes it best, but in short: shareholders doing things behind the devs' backs
I see. Deleted organic maps and installed comaps on my phones.
I think the replacement is CoMaps
Read my reply again.
I've been stuck in a loop for three hours. I only escaped because someone slapped the phone out of my hands.
Doh!
I'm glad to have seen your comment. It's unfortunate people start these good projects and get taken in by the money. Using community donations to fund a personal holiday is shameful. I won't be using Organic Maps any longer.
That's a story as old as time (or at least as old as the concept of shareholders).
It's more a feud between the founder of Organics Maps and people from the FOSS community, with the apparent inclusion of proprietary code into Organic Maps, and issues regarding to the governance of the project. Here's an article from someone who will be better at explaining all this: https://news.itsfoss.com/organic-maps-fork-comaps/ :)
You contribute to OSM to have an open source database free to all
I contribute to OSM so my local Pokemon GO scene has accurate biome mapping
We are not the same
What tags does pokemon go use to determine biomes? I occasionally contribute updates around my local area, that would be a neat thing to apply
Lots of them! Pokemon go has a few main biomes with lots of other factors to determine what spawns. Main biomes are grass, city, mountain, and water.
Then you have other tags for things like parks and paths, which give special spawn points. Parks have rotating habitats for one particular species and can have EX gyms. Paths will spawn Pokemon along them with a few unique species.
Regional spawns occur as well, with some continents or countries having one or more special species unique to it. And rather than a strict limit, some species are much more common in certain latitudes.
Beyond that are some tags that prevent spawns, like military bases or wetlands, places you aren't encouraged to just walk around.
A list of tags from Reddit
Notes on how POGO uses these:
Blocked Spawn areas http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/r42
Nest Locator http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/r43
Nests that require paths http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/r44
OSM Influences Nests and Blocked Spawns (a work in progress)
Nests
Confirmed
leisure=park
leisure=garden
leisure=golf_course
leisure=recreation_ground
boundary=physiogeographical
landuse=grass (may need secondary tag to be a nest)
Possible
landuse=recreation_ground
leisure=playground
landuse=village_green
leisure=pitch
boundary=national_park
Paths
highway=footpath
highway=path
highway=cycleway
highway= sidewalk
highway=footway
route=bicycle
route=hiking
route=foot
network
Creates Nests if Paths present
Confirmed
landuse=farmland
landuse=farmyard
natural=scrub
natural=heath
landuse=meadow
Possible
natural=moor*
natural=grassland
natural=fell
natural=bare_rock
natural=scree
natural=shingle
natural=sand
natural=mud
natural=valley
natural=rock
natural=stone
natural=arete
natural=beach
landuse=greenfield
(*Deprecated or incorrect tag)
Blocked Spawns
Blocks Spawns without Paths
Confirmed
natural=wood
landuse=forest
natural=forest*
Possible
landuse=orchard
(*Deprecated or incorrect tag)
Blocks all Spawns
Confirmed
landuse=construction
landuse=military
landuse=quarry
landuse=railway
landuse=landfill
aeroway=runway
aeroway=taxiway
amenity=school
highway=motorway
highway=trunk
highway=primary
highway=secondary
highway=tertiary
Water tags, unknown if surrounding spawns are water influenced
natural=wetland
wetland=
natural=glacier
natural=marsh*
(*Deprecated or incorrect tag)
Possible
amenity=daycare
amenity=kindergarten
Water
Effects biomes on edges. Blocks spawns away from land unless crossed by route=ferry?
Confirmed
landuse=basin
landuse=reservoir
natural=coastline
natural=spring
natural=water
water=lake
water=pond
water=reservoir
water=basin
water=canal
water=river
natural=waterway
waterway=river
waterway=riverbank
waterway=stream
waterway=canal
waterway=drain
waterway=ditch
man_made=water_tower
Possible
landuse=salt_pond
natural=bay
waterway=wadi
waterway=drystream
waterway=fairway
waterway=dock
waterway=boatyard
waterway=dam
waterway=weir
waterway=stream_end
waterway=waterfall
waterway=lock_gate
water=lagoon
water=reflecting_pool
water=fish_pass
water=oxbow
water=lock
water=moat
water=wastewater
water=stream_pool
Possibly Effects Biomes Only
natural=peak (Mt Moon biome forms around peaks)
landuse=industrial
landuse=commercial
landuse=residential
landuse=retail
Does not block spawns or create nests but otherwise unknown
landuse=cemetery
landuse=port
landuse=depot
landuse=garages
amenity=grave_yard
Boundaries
May influence all nests needing paths to spawn within that area
boundary=administrative
boundary=historic
boundary=maritime
boundary=political
boundary=postal_code
boundary=religious_administration
boundary=protected_area
boundary=national_park
boundary=physiogeographical
Unknown Effects
Area
natural=hot_spring
natural=volcano
natural=sinkhole
natural=tundra
landuse=brownfield
landuse=allotments
landuse=greenhouse_horticulture
landuse=plant_nursery
landuse=vineyard
geological=moraine
geological=outcrop
geological=palaeontological_site
Lines
natural=ridge
natural=cliff
natural=saddle
natural=tree_row
Nodes
natural=geyser
natural=tree
natural=cave_entrance
Some tag info from Reddit regarding paths and spawn blocking:
highway=footwaythat also carry the tagbridge=yesdo not generate additional spawn points. Critically, this encompasses all boardwalks, which are correctly taggedbridge=boardwalk.highway=footwaydo not provide a spawn point exception through the area blocked bynatural=wetlandas they do fornatural=wood. It's possible that this is an extension of the issue withbridge=yesโ I have no local examples without both tags.landuse=basinblock all spawn points, despite being used correctly to tag the contemporary practice of building a stormwater retention system beneath a city park. These areas are rendered as water in-game, but do not seem to influence Water spawns, although more data would be helpful in determining this. (OSM also has issues rendering basins.)leisure=nature_reservedo not nest. Could be intent, could be oversight, but seems like an odd exception, as the distinction between a park and a preserve is fluid โ at least in the US. The same is true for areas taggedlanduse=winter_sports, the correct tag to describe a ski resort, and areas taggedleisure=dog_park.amenity=prisondo not block all spawn points. Since this is the correct way to tag a prison or jail โ which is to say, a high-security facility where people probably shouldn't be chasing Pokรฉmon โ this seems wrong.waterway=river,waterway=stream, andwaterway=ditchare not rendered on the map despite influencing Water spawns in nearby spawn points. The same is true for areas taggednatural=wetlandand points taggedamenity=fountain.power=lineandpower=minor_linedo not influence Electric spawns in the way that streams do with Water Pokรฉmon. More of a missed opportunity than anything. You could say the same withrailway=railand Steel or any of the more specific OSM building tags the game references to seemingly no effect:leisure=stadium,amenity=cinema,tourism=hotel, and so on.highway=trackshow up visually as paths, despite being intended to represent vehicle tracks that fall short of the qualifications for being an unpaved road. They do not generate additional spawn points, so this is assumed to be an error with the in-game renderer.highway=serviceandservice=drivewayrender as roads on the map, which are not to scale. This is especially glaring if houses and garages are mapped. Ideally, there probably should be a thinner style of road for all service roads, tracks, living streets, or any other highway designation where vehicles are likely to encounter pedestrians.Waouh. Gather such knowledge is some dedication to a game. Congrats!
The Silph Road community goes hard lol
The Pokรฉmon community in general goes hard, and I absolutely love that part about it!
(to clarify: not the modern games, but the community)
I totally forgot to start doing this again. Just moved from the US to a tiny town in Sweden, I'll play my part!
Iโm glad you made it to safety!
Thank you me too! And I'm only a week in but so far I'm crushing it at school. Been having a great time here everyone is so kind and I don't have to worry about things like getting killed for using public bathrooms!
@Sunshine I've been helping with Open Street Map for years. I contribute to it all the time. Currently I'm #303 globally.
Deleted by moderator
976 here, #22 in my country!
I have no idea why but I love contributing to OSM. it's relaxing to me while also being productive.
I absolutely agree. To me it feels like putting together a puzzle where each piece I grab fits om the first try.
Great way of explaining it. And seeing the progress after doing an area is so satisfying
As a resident of Salt Lake City, host of the 2034 winter Olympics, I want to wow the Europeans that visit. We will not be limited by our national politics. I will continue to throw my time into OSM because I believe it will change the world beyond it's ambitions. I'm stuck on the idea of a community map.
I hate to break it to you, but nobody is going to come lol
What is desperately needed by all the open source navigation apps on Android is traffic info. You just can't plan a half decent route without it. Speed limits info is not enough to know the time a route will take. You need the actural average speed of the roads. Especially on old European roads.
But how to do that reliably and with up-to-date info if not invading the privacy of people?
Legally forced sharing from all platforms with onion routing and no ID?
Government road data fed by all those cameras?
Seams a solvable problem if done with privacy in mind not as yet another opportunity for mass surveillance.
Can people not scrape other platforms and train their
AIopenstreetmaps on publicly available informationDoubt it. OSM doesn't allow contributors to rip from Google and alike, scraping would be included in that presumably. Google has the copyright here.
How would Google realistically prevent it from happening slowly organically from real people who happen to look it up
If incorrect data gets copied thats quite a good indicator that we are copying google.
If it's one person, maybe google doesn't care, but frankly I think we should want to get the data in such a way that google doesn't even get to make a noise about it.
Traffic isn't like that. Sure there are patterns and constants, but there is accidents and road closures, etc.
To be fair, we all did just fine before Waze existed.
Nope. I was frequently late when using any number of open sat navs without traffic info. I end up reverting to close Waze or Google Maps.
Yeah, it's hard to overstate what a big deal real-time traffic data was/is. And I have to wonder, how many traffic jams are prevented - or at least reduced - by it. How did we manage before Waze et al.? We were just late a lot more.
I (and i suspect most people who cared to know) listened to a local radio station who reported on traffic during high (or abnormal) traffic periods of the day.
As far as I know HERE WeGo app is based on OSM and also includes life traffic info
Question: how does one not doxx them selves when mapping their local area? Or is it not an issue because you don't really provide any info past that?
To properly link your mapping to your identity, someone would both need to be able to link whatever online username you're using to the one in street complete. Which could be either easy or very hard depending on how correlated they are (same username maybe?)
And even then the accuracy will probably not be great, maybe up to the city. Any more specific than that will be hard unless the edits are very obviously centered around a street.
TLDR: probably not too bad of an issue
You can disable auto-upload. I collect 50 or 100 tasks and upload them at once. So, it's at least not possible to know where I currently am, just where I was a few days or weeks ago.
I kind of completed tasks in a larger area. But which city I'm living in is kind of obvious if you look at my OSM account.
Some OSM edits add the date of the survey though, so it's possible to know when you were at a place and e.g. confirmed its opening hours. But honestly no one's gonna doxx you or whatever lol
Best thing: map little bits of any area you're in and then you're not pin pointing yourself.
But as someone else pointed out, you don't have to upload at the time you're doing the clarifications, so it's very low risk of someone working out where you are.
I just use a unique username for it
You can just search me up and get my city easily, so my open street contribution won't help that much in narrowing it down. Honestly the public records are enough that people can just follow me around from work, probably.
I find OSM is better than Google maps as Google are missing some paths
Yes, OSM is by far superior when on foot or bike basically everywhere I have been to.
It reaaaaaaally depends on how active people are in the area
You can have one city with every pavement stone mapped and the town over just be "yup, there's a street here"
I swear this thing isn't as popular here in south east asia but somehow someone manage to mark every single road bump in the area near my workplace.
UK also has ordnance survey maps that are just the best maps. Found out our local library has a shit load of them too. But it probably helps OSM a lot more too if you used them as a source.
Lots of communities use official mappings, actually. But some places put them under a license that can't be used for OSM
Germany had a case somewhat recently where a bunch of stuff had to be reverted, because the licence wasn't clear enough
Can someone please TLDR/ELI5 how one contributes to this and what the end 'service' looks like?
Contribution? Start here:
https://f-droid.org/packages/de.westnordost.streetcomplete/
-or-
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.westnordost.streetcomplete
Navi here:
https://f-droid.org/packages/app.comaps.fdroid/
-or-
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.comaps.google
I'd suggest EveryDoor instead of streetcomplete as it focuses more on points of intrests
It's also much higher quality than Google Maps.
How does OSM handle conflict resolution? Different info, multiple listings, spam, etc.
There are folks who review the changelogs, and when there are mistakes users can make pins on the maps.
I'm checking out Street Complete, but I can't seem to modify or contribute info for the apartment I'm living in. I don't want random quests, I want to be and to key in and / or verify info for places I'm familiar with. What app should I be using?
Edit: Google says Vespucci, gonna give that a try
I use Every Door. It allows to add information to various types of features (shops, buildings and more) and I find it easy to use.
Vespucci is great but it has a high learning curve and some awful default settings. Stay with it and tweak the settings!
Unlike Street Complete, you can actually see and edit the tags directly.
Really โ๏ธwishโ๏ธ *comaps was available on accrescent* instead of organicmaps
If you need a good navigation app take a look at magic earth
It's proprietary, though.
Whatโs the easiest way to do this on iPhone? Iโve got maps.me on there but didnโt have much joy with editing anything in terms of UXโฆ
maps[dot]me was great at the beginning, but they went hard on monetizing lots of stuff and have become unreliable/actively bad
there's a fork named Organic Maps, but the people who lead that project are unwilling to cooperate with the open source community, even though the project should be FOSS
so now there's a new fork called Co-Maps which tries to live by the principles of free open source software and that's what i'm using currently: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/CoMaps
I think EveryDoor and GoMap!! (in which switching off several less-relevant types of โquestsโ might be useful).
More theme-based MapComplete can be used as well, but that can only through your browser, no special app)
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/IOS
Looks like there are two avaible "go map!" And "Every door"
Depends on what you want to map. Every door is for node only(shops, benches, entrances, โฆ) but go map can also edit ways (streets, buildings, โฆ)
Try both and see what you like. If you have question go ask them in !openstreetmap@lemmy.ml
I don't get how a map can be copyrighted.
Like if two people happens to draw the same exact map, then what? Who gets to sue who? First come first serve? Literally does not make sense.
"Intellectual Property" doesn't make sense for something like a map, like... its not a manuscript/draft of a book where its secret and hidden, the streets are literally public for anyone to draw, like wtf is a copyright for?!?
(I wanna just "pirate" all of Google's Maps lol)
Mapping accurately is an incredibly time-intensive process.
A person or company that puts in the time and effort to accurately map an area, and sell the resulting product, deserves to get compensated for that time spent, in my opinion. And if someone comes in to take their work, copy it and sell it as their own, then that could justifiably be called copyright infringement or theft.
Just like how a painting of a church can be copyrighted (while the building is not), or how a dictionary can be copyrighted (while the words are not), a map can be copyrighted while the features that it depicts are not.
The copyright is for the time and effort spent to accurately map a region.
If they drew it independently, then there is no copyright infringement since there was no copying.
But it is worth noting that the odds that two people independently drawing the exact same map independently are in reality very slim. It is highly suspicious if someone starts selling what is effectively a copy of your map.
In practice such cases of copyright infringement will have to be taken to court, where the person having their copyright infringed needs to prove beyond reasonable doubt that their copyright was in fact infringed.
This is often difficult to do with maps.
Copying maps costs AA ยฃ20m.
'Fingerprints' in Ordnance Survey sources used as proof
Think of it like this: what happens if two artists paint the same sunset? It's the results of their efforts that is protected, not the inspiration.
In many cases intention matters. Two people can take the same picture and that would be fine, but if the intention was to copy someone's work, then this is bad.
Also, in this case often the person accused of copying someone, needs to proof that they didn't, which inverts the burden of proof. Copyright as it works right now, serves more the wealthy then the little men, as it is with so many laws under the current system.
Copyright itself needs to be reorganized fundamentally.
I'm not sure that that claim is accurate.
To my knowledge it is not usually the case that someone who is sued for copyright infringement needs to prove their innocence before the court. Normally it is the accuser who needs to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the copyright infringement took place.
Could it be that you might be conflating it with YouTube and their ContentID system?
That system is not strictly a legal requirement, but rather YouTube covering their ass so they don't get sued into oblivion for the many cases of copyright infringement that people upload to that platform on the regular
Edit: However, I do agree that the copyright system needs a pretty significant overhaul to better suit the digital age.
The DMCA takedowns work like that, AFAIK.
Under the DMCA a copyright holder can send out a take-down notice.
This is essentially the copyright holder telling you that they believe you to be in violation of their copyright. They are requesting you take down the content they believe to be infringing on their copyright, backed up by the threat of legal action.
The take-down notice is not forcing you to take down the allegedly infringing work. You have the option to send back a counter-notice, saying that you believe no copyright infringement took place. However, then the copyright holder might take you to court to determine whether this is a case of copyright infringement or not.
When the case is taken to court it is still up to the copyright holder to prove beyond reasonable doubt that this is a case of copyright infringement.
(I'm not a lawyer, but this is my understanding of how the DMCA works)
Also check out Pure Maps for Linux phones!