Category: community

OpenStreetCam plugin becomes KartaView and integrates new visualisation feature

OpenStreetCam plugin becomes KartaView

Following OpenStreetCam’s transition to KartaView at the end of last year, we’re writing to announce that our plugin component will undeniably mirror these changes. The latest version integrates a new name and a matching set of icons and colors which we hope you’ll find not only aesthetically pleasing, but also convenient to work with.

Let’s not stop here, though!

Wrapped 360° photo visualisation

The current KartaView plugin is about to bring to the community some new features related to photo visualisation. Recently, the team has integrated in the tool the support for displaying wrapped 360° images and the possibility to switch between these two available formats.

Map representation and design updates 

The wrapped photos integration has been visually enhanced with the following features:

  • the purple dots represent the location of the photos, which now offer the option of visualising both photo types (wrapped and front-facing)
  • the blue dots mark the location where only front-facing imagery can be found

Moreover, this fresh plugin version now uses a cool new set of icons for illustrating the actions found in the panel in a more intuitive way.

Switch options and photo display

You can choose a favoured photo format from the preference panel by selecting it from the available options – this will have a general impact on the actions from the tool (e.g. seeing the photos of a loaded track or loading previous/next photo).

Another switching option is pressing the 360o button from the panel. It is an extremely useful feature for changing the format of the currently shown photo. As seen in the attached picture, all the previously implemented features are available on both formats, including the rendering of the corresponding detections.

This being said, we’re eager to find out how you are going to use this fresh, interesting feature. You can get in touch with us any time at geo.kartaview@grabtaxi.com and let us know what projects you’re working on – we’re always psyched to share with the world what our talented community is up to.

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Hello, KartaView!

After 5 years of serving the mapping community through OpenStreetCam and over 7.6 million kilometers recorded by contributors all around the world, we’re now happy to announce a new product identity: KartaView.

As maintainers and developers of KartaView, it’s been an honor so we’re taking this opportunity to share more on what we’ve been up to recently and what contributors can expect in the near future.

But first… Why the new name?

In 2018, the OSM Foundation (OSMF) adopted a Trademark Policy discouraging names like OpenStreet-Thing. This was brought to our attention this year. In support of our good friends, we chose to embrace the name change.

Despite changing names a couple times (anyone remember OpenStreetView?) our mission has stayed consistent since the early beginning: we want to make OSM better by providing an open, collaborative repository of street imagery for the mapping community. So the imagery license, terms & conditions and privacy policy remain unchanged – we have no intention to be less open.

KartaView at Grab

As you probably know, in December 2019 the team and the project transitioned to Grab – the super-app of Southeast Asia and top contributor to OSM in the region. 

Since then, besides supporting the global mapping community we’ve been increasingly active in driving imagery collection in Southeast Asia. The region is still an under-mapped region of the world despite a population of over 650 million and we’re on a mission to improve that.

Earlier this year we partnered with local Grab drivers across 20 cities in Indonesia and Malaysia, recording a staggering 880,000 km of imagery in the span of a few months. All this data is publicly available on KartaView for everyone to use.

On the engineering side, we’ve been busy this year with significant infrastructure and pipeline improvements to support the growing platform, and while improving some things… others broke. Apologies to our active users.

Kuala Lumpur coverage, all contributed by Grab drivers

Things are starting to look better and the engineering team is active on more future-proofing, which will be rolling-out in the coming months.

What to expect now?

First, kartaview.org will be the new home for the project. In the next few days, the other pieces like the mobile apps, JOSM plugin, Github repos will be updated as well. Some external projects integrating KartaView will probably need a bit more time to update the name, so most likely we’ll spot OpenStreetCam in tools and other corners of the internet for a while.

The name change will not break any existing integration (API end-point will be maintained) and changes to the legal terms and conditions are limited to reflecting the new name.

The Road Ahead

So now you know why we have to change our name and that our mission remains the same. There’s just so much around us that is unmapped, and we’ll always be at the forefront of this community-driven mission – to make OSM richer and better through imagery.

Thank you for being a part of the journey.

KartaView team
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OpenStreetCam and ImproveOSM are moving to Grab

Following Telenav’s strategic partnership with Grab, we’re announcing that the OpenStreetCam and ImproveOSM platforms are moving to Grab! The goal of contributing to the OSM project by supporting the community with tools and data remains unchanged, and users will continue to benefit from those platforms.

  • Data and applications: The data is available to the OSM community just as before, with better latency for many.
  • Open Source: Good news, the code license is changing from LGPL to the more permissive MIT license. The imagery license will remain the same, CC BY-SA version 4.
  • Policies: The Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy were updated to reflect the project’s transition to Grab, other than that similar to the previous OpenStreetCam policies.
  • OpenStreetCam apps: The iOS and Android apps will now be published under the Grab AppStore / Google Play account – that makes no difference in contributing awesome imagery to the community! You can download and use the apps as usual.
  • Waylens: You can keep using your Waylens dashcams to contribute imagery to OpenStreetCam.

As always, we look forward to collaborating with the community members and improving OSM.

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A fresh Cygnus+ version

Cygnus is a tool that helps the community improve the OSM map by comparing it with an external (local) map, and detecting differences between the two maps. The differences detected include road geometry and certain tags of interest (e.g.: ‘name’, ‘oneway’, ‘ref’, ‘maxspeed’) that are missing or have different value from OSM.

In this latest version of Cygnus, we have introduced new features and made a few overall improvements.

New Features

Minimum Way Length Distance

A new setting was added in this latest version: the minimum distance by which a way’s length in the OSM map may be extended using the external map.

Conflation setting which is defaulted to 15%. Maximum can be 50%

Extending a way’s length can be very useful where section of a road may be missing or a new road needs to be added. Existing ways will be extended when the local map has a significantly longer way (as defined by the maximum connect distance). If it is possible to connect the extended way to any new ways, this will be done automatically.

New Grouped Settings and Checkboxes

We have grouped settings for ease of use into conflation, way-related and tag-related groups.

New checkboxes were also created for adding/extending ways (to allow more refined usage), adding/changing tags and specifying a minimum lexical difference.

Conflation Results

The conflation zip file now contains a narration log detailing each change that is proposed by the conflation archive. The Cygnus+ output explains in the ‘telenav:action’ tag exactly what action was taken on each way (this same output goes into the narration log).

Improvements

The conflation algorithm was improved and also the readability of parameters on jobs in the queue.

We hope you benefit from those changes, and let us know if you have any questions or ideas for further improvements.

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US metro OpenStreetCam competition

We decided to celebrate summer and the great driving weather that comes alongside it by launching a new OpenStreetCam competition! If you live in or happen to be nearby Miami, Los Angeles, Houston or Chicago, this is your chance to participate!

The kick-off date is June 12. Buckle up!


Competition guidelines

  • Download the free / open source OpenStreetCam app for Android or iOS.
  • Collect as many OpenStreetCam points as you can until August 12, 23:59 Eastern time. Every image uploaded gets you points, with more points awarded for roads that are being covered for the first time or that have been surveyed infrequently.
  • We will announce the winners on the 13th of August.
  • The top contributors will win an OpenStreetCam enhanced Waylens Horizon dashcam.
  • We will give out one dashcam per city to our top contributors.
  • Two runner ups will receive a $100 Amazon gift card.
  • You need to gather at least 500K points to be eligible to win the dash cam.
  • It costs nothing to compete.
  • Only the points collected between June 12 – August 12 are taken into account.
  • Points collected with Waylens dashcams are not eligible.

If you’re looking for additional insight, refer to the FAQ below:

  • How will I know my rank in the leaderboards?

We will post weekly updates on Facebook and Twitter. Make sure you check them once in while.

  • How can I earn more points?

Go to https://openstreetcam.org and check out where the magenta lines are missing. Those areas will guarantee the highest return. 

  • I’m getting errors trying to install the app, record or upload.

Send us an e-mail at hello@openstreetcam.org and we’ll provide support and troubleshooting ASAP.

  • Does your app provide routing?

No.

  • Can I use an OBD-II dongle?

You sure can, if you have one to spare. It’s going to enable the 2X multiplier per each kilometer collected.

  • Can I record with a dashcam?

Of course, you have our full support, as long as the data is under the form of geotagged JPEGs. You can upload the data collected via our script.

  • I signed up via OSM, how will you contact me?

Please send us a message on Facebook or drop an e-mail at hello@openstreetcam.org.

We reserve the right to disqualify contributors for cheating by uploading useless / blurry / dark images or duplicating existing data from multiple devices on the same account.

Contenders will need to opt in and supply an e-mail address in order for us to contact the winners.

Drive safe!

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Announcing the Second OpenStreetCam Australia and New Zealand Competition

The Telenav OSM team is excited to announce a new OpenStreetCam imagery collection competition for Australia and New Zealand! This second edition will kick-off on the 15th of March and will last until the 15th of April. Buckle up!

How to compete

  • Download the free / open source OpenStreetCam app for Android or iOS.
  • Collect as many OpenStreetCam points as you can until April 15, 23:59 UTC+10. Every image uploaded gets you points, with more points awarded for roads that are being covered for the first time or that have been surveyed infrequently.
  • We will announce the winners on the 16th of April.
  • The top contributors will win a Waylens Horizon dashcam.
  • We will give out one dashcam per country to our top contributors.
  • The runners up will receive a $100 Amazon gift card.
  • You need to gather at least 250K points to be eligible to win the dash cam.
  • Points collected with Waylens dashcams are not eligible.
  • It costs nothing to compete.

About OpenStreetCam

For those who don’t know OpenStreetCam, it is a free and open platform that uploads street-level imagery captured by your smartphone and detects salient features from the uploaded images such as signs, lanes and road curvature to improve OpenStreetMap. The images are collected by mappers for mappers and can be used in iD or JOSM to improve OpenStreetMap.

We have a ‘Getting Started’ guide on our blog!

FAQ

  • How will I know my rank in the leaderboards?

We will post weekly updates on Facebook and Twitter. Make sure you check them once in while.

  • How can I earn more points?

Go to https://openstreetcam.org and check out where the magenta lines are missing. Those areas will guarantee the highest return. 

  • I’m getting errors trying to install the app, record or upload.

Send us an e-mail at hello@openstreetcam.org and we’ll provide support and troubleshooting ASAP.

  • Does your app provide routing?

No.

  • Can I use an OBD-II dongle?

You sure can, if you have one to spare. It’s going to enable the 2X multiplier per each kilometer collected.

  • Can I record with a dashcam?

Of course, you have our full support, as long as the data is under the form of geotagged JPEGs. You can upload the data collected via our script.

  • I signed up via OSM, how will you contact me?

Please send us a message on Facebook or drop an e-mail at hello@openstreetcam.org.

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Summer Dispatch From The Telenav Map Team

It has been an exciting summer! Besides our regular work, there was the annual State of the Map conference that we were all really looking forward to. We launched a new ImproveOSM web site. OpenStreetCam dash-cams are distributed to OSM US members. And more. Read all about it in our Summer Dispatch below!

State of the Map

Quite a few of us got to go to State of the Map in Milan, Italy! Our team hosted four presentations at the conference, and we are really happy with the interest and feedback we received. We made a lot of new map friends as well!

All SOTM presentations were recorded and posted on YouTube, so if you missed any of us, you can watch the presentations at your leisure:

Alina and Bogdan presenting our Machine Learning stack at SOTM 2018

We also had a booth at the conference where we talked about ImproveOSM and OpenStreetCam, and where 6 lucky winners received a Waylens OpenStreetCam dashboard camera!

Excited crowd right before one of the Waylens cameras is being given away!

Mapping

We continue to map in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. As always you can track our work on GitHub. We have been focusing a lot on adding missing road names for the larger metropolitan areas in the US. Our typical workflow is to identify local government road centerline data sources, verify the license, process them with Cygnus to find changed / new names, and manually add the names if we can verify them.

Local road centerline data the team identified in Colorado

We are excited that the US community is looking to build an overview of available road centerline databases from (local) governments. We hope the ones we identified can help bootstrap this initiative.

We also published some MapRoulette challenges around this topic. 

ImproveOSM

Right on time for State of the Map, we launched a complete redesign of improveosm.org, our portal for everything Telenav❤️OSM. The new site gives you quick access to our OSM initiatives, data and tools. Check it out!We also released more than 20 thousand new missing roads locations. These are added to the existing database of currently more than 2.4 million missing road locations. An easy way to start editing based on these locations is to download the ImproveOSM plugin for JOSM.

Locations of the new Missing Roads locations

OpenStreetCam

The steady growth of OpenStreetCam continues. Almost 4.5 million kilometers of trips are in the OSC database. This amounts to about 165 million images!

We started a collaboration with OpenStreetMap US to run a Camera Lending program. Through the program, OSM US members can apply to borrow a custom Waylens Horizon camera for up to three months. The camera captures high resolution images for OSC and uploads them automatically. Almost 20 mappers have a camera already, and they have driven about 30 thousand kilometers in the past couple of months!

The passenger’s seat of our Camera Man ToeBee, as he gets ready to dispatch a bunch of Waylens cameras

That’s a wrap for our summer dispatch folks! Thanks for reading and keep an eye on the blog for more from the Telenav Map Team. Be sure to follow us on Twitter as well @improveOSM and @openstreetcam. 👋🏼

 

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Map Metrics for OSM are now available

Telenav’s OSM team just released a portal where you can view different metrics on OSM.

Unlike other metrics views that are already available, this new tool for the OSM community is focused especially on navigation attributes like length of navigable roads, the number of turn restrictions, signposts, and many more, in total 22 of such metrics are available. You can check it out at https://metrics.improveosm.org

About the data

Metrics are computed weekly and should be available on the portal at the end of each week. Metrics are generated for the whole world using as input the planet pbf downloaded from the official mirrors made available by the OSM community

Metrics are available starting with 8th February 2016. In the top left corner, you can choose to see them by week, by month, or by quarter. We also have a nice feature for all OSM enthusiasts! For each metric in the left menu, you have a small info button where you see exactly what the metric means: complete description and the rules we applied when computing them, which tags were used if we counted ways, nodes or relations, etc.

How do we do it?

The platform was built using Apache Spark. Using big data technologies enabled us to have metrics for the whole world: on countries, states, counties, and a few metropolitan areas (metros are available only in North America for now). In order to use Apache Spark, we had to convert pbf to parquet first, so we achieved this using a packetizer that is open source and can be found here.  After we have the parquets, using Spark’s DataFrame API we managed to have these metrics available in just a couple of hours.

We have also made the latest parquet files available for general use here.

If you have any suggestions or feedback, please do not hesitate to contact us. You can find details in the About section.

Happy mapping!Facebooktwitter

Cygnus – conflation at your fingertips!

This is a follow-up blog post after the State Of the Map US 2017 conference held in Denver.

The process of conflation in GIS is defined as the act of merging two data layers to create one layer containing the features and attributes of both original layers.

Cygnus is a tool that compares external data with OSM, giving you a result file in JOSM XML format with all the changes. The comparison is made in a non-destructive way, so no OSM ways are ever deleted or degraded.

Workflow

NOTE – The license compatibility between the local data file and OSM has to be taken into account before adding anything in OSM. Also, please follow the OSM import procedures if you are planning to add external data to OSM.

First of all, you need to have a shapefile with local data in WGS84 spatial reference. This shapefile has to be filtered in different ways, depending on the tags you want to compare. For example, if you want to compare oneways, make sure to have a flow-direction/oneway/etc. attribute in the shapefile.

Translation

The first thing that has to be taken care of is to assure a proper attribute translation. I created a simple example for this exercise. I don’t want to get neck-deep in too many technical details so the main focus remains the process as a whole. I kept the attribute information for this example straightforward:

In order to create an OSM file from this data, I wrote a simple translation file that will be used together with ogr2osm.

Next, run the below command to obtain the OSM file.

python ogr2osm.py simple_streets.shp -t simple_translation.py -o simple_output.osm

Finally, I converted the OSM file to PBF using osmosis, because Cygnus requires a PBF file as input.

Cygnus goes to work!

Now that you have gone through the pre-processing of the local data file, we can offer it to Cygnus for processing. Note that your upload needs to be small-ish – the spatial extent needs to be smaller than 50×50 km and the file needs to be 20MB or smaller in size.

The interface of the Cygnus service is very simple – there are just two pages:

  • the home page where you add new jobs
  • the job queue page where you can see your progress and download the result

If your input file was uploaded successfully, Cygnus will go to work. Your job will be added to the back of the queue. When it’s your turn, Cygnus will read your PBF file, and download the OSM data for the same extent, using Overpass API. It will then compare your upload with the existing OSM data and produce the output file that you can download from the job queue.

NOTE – Everyone’s jobs are listed here, so be careful not to touch other users’ stuff.

Process the output in JOSM

Once Cygnus gives us the output, we can open it in JOSM and inspect it. This is by far the most important, and time consuming, step. Even though Cygnus does a best effort to connect ways where needed, it acts conservatively so it will not snap ways together that do not belong together.

Here are a few ways that got properly connected to the existing highway=secondary:

But there are situations where the distance was too far so Cygnus did not snap:

In this case, you need to manually connect the ways if that is appropriate.

When you are finally satisfied with your manually post-processed conflation result, you can go ahead and merge it with the OSM data and upload it!Facebooktwitter

OSMTime in Cluj featuring MapRoulette

OSMTime is a monthly OSM mapping event organized by Telenav colleague Beata Jancso. Telenav hosts the events in the Cluj-Napoca office and sponsors with pizza. Usually, Bea chooses a theme and sometimes there will also be a speaker with an interesting OSM-related topic.

While visiting the Telenav Romania office in Cluj last week, I was lucky to also catch an OSMTime event. The theme of the evening was ‘Mapping Roundabouts using MapRoulette’. Being the person behind MapRoulette, Bea asked me to do a quick introduction. Colleague Bogdan Gliga also presented the methodology he used to detect missing roundabouts from massive amounts of probe data. (He wrote about that topic here as well.)

OSMTime Cluj with Bogdan presenting
OSMTime Cluj with Bogdan presenting

After the presentations and pizza, the 25 or so mappers logged on to MapRoulette to start with the new Missing Roundabouts challenge. Most people had not used MapRoulette before, so I was glad that everyone was getting the hang of it quickly. Most of the problems and questions were not about MapRoulette but about what is a roundabout exactly, and what is the difference between a roundabout and a mini_roundabout and a traffic_circle. (The OSM wiki helps out a little here.)

At the end of the evening, the mappers in the room already made a good dent in the challenge, which has more than 4500 tasks total.

I had a great time, thanks to Bea for organizing the OSMTime events every month and spreading the word. If you are in the Cluj-Napoca area, you may want to subscribe to the OSMTime meetup so you know when the next one takes place. Or look for an OpenStreetMap meetup in your area and meet local mappers!Facebooktwitter