[Talk-ee] SviMik_import is back to life

[SviMik via Talk-ee]

And it needs your help!
There's many new buildings that were built during the last 5 years. Let's bring the map up to date.

- To import brand new buildings, visit this page:
http://osm.svimik.com/btrace_verify.php
Just click OK making sure there's no building in OSM already by looking at the map in the middle.

- Some buildings were drawn by other users, but they didn't put an address. Visit this page to help add addresses to existing buildings:
http://osm.svimik.com/xgis2osm.php?lang=en
Just enter the house numbers from the pictures like a captcha solving.

- Like to map roads? The 'Missing roads' validator is back to life too!
http://osm.svimik.com/noroad.php
It shows all the places where a building exists, but there's no roads around to get there.
_______________________________________________
Talk-ee mailing list
Tal...@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ee

[Jaak Laineste]

Hi,

About first 2 tools:

1. what they do as result exactly? add data to OSM database? If yes, then under which username? I don’t see any auth here, is feels like “anonymous editor”, but OSM does not allow anonymous edits.

2. about second one - map view is too much zoomed in, usually I don’t see any streets to see the context, so it is really like filling random captchas without any real check.

In general I miss here location filters, I want only work with my home city/village what I know about. Generally “guerilla mapping” where you jump in to a random place you really know nothing about is not generating good map quality in long term at all, and this not suggested. If you map something, then you will be responsible for the data and you need to be sure that it will be also up-to-date in years to come. Especially if you do random map copy, in principle here we just copy maa-amet map which does not give much value, everyone could just use maaamet vector map data, this is openly shared also. Remote mapping is suggested only for exceptional cases, e.g. in emergencies (HOT actions) where you need quickly map and cannot go to the place.

But the tools can be very useful - I would use them for my known, usually quite small specific regions like city or village. I can do ground work and will maintain my edits later, and I cannot do it if mapping area is whole country.

Jaak

[SviMik via Talk-ee]

For everyone who is new here, this is exactly the same import we did 5 years ago, just updating it with new data.

The import is briefly described on the wiki page:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Maa-amet#Import

1. The account for the imports is:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SviMik_import/history

2. Why do you need streets? I'm just asking to confirm putting that address on that outline. All you need to do is just make sure they match.

Воскресенье, 4 августа 2019, 13:16 +03:00 от "Jaak Laineste" <ja...@nutiteq.com>:

--
Svjatoslav Mikhailov

[Jaak Laineste]

Your tools are really cool from technical perspective, but have you ever discussed it fully with the local community, so the stategy is agreed? I see link in the wiki page to some forum, but this is not a local community forum, it is Russian forum and it is even in a language what a lot of younger generation does not understand. It is just as absurd as if we would start to discuss in Estonian how to map say New York, agree some strategies and then assume that it is ok to garbage the map there. I really hope you don't consider Estonia somehow as a part of Russia.

My position is that in early years of OSM automatic imports of map for regions what you don’t know made some sense, but now they do more harm - create map data what is not maintained and not maintainable. Kind of digital garbage. Is is much better map less, more carefully, and avoid senseless copy of other map data. Again, if someone needs Maaamet maps then they should take the latest version from them anytime. There is no need to copy if over to OSM at all. OSM is never meant to be collection of different geo datasets, even if they are really nice, it is human-created original global map database.

Now if you decide to do it, then the editors must be identified. There is process on agreeing on legal contributor terms of edits, including right to take back the agreement. If you put all edits under your own name, then anyone can claim that you did not do the edits, and can request to just undo all of them. It looks like complete legal mess there from IP perspective. Also there is no way to ask comments/clarifications about specific edits. Therefore proper way to do it would be like with editors like ID, JOSM etc - every user is identified with OSM username, takes responsibility for his/her edits, so it is clear who to contact and who is responsible for this.

I did several mass-imports in early OSM days myself, after discussions with local and international community. They looked nice at once, but in longer term maybe it was even bad idea, there would be more motivated contributors, and the map would be more useful and interesting without them. There is still “dead” data what noone can update (from Corine for example), and I would be more happy if someone would create a tool to automatically delete it now.

Jaak

[SviMik via Talk-ee]

First, I'd really like you to stop being so aggressive. You could spend that energy to actually do something to improve OSM rather than ranting about not being able to understand other languages. Keep in mind that I was respectful enough to start this discussion in English, so literally everyone could understand me. And you was disrespectful enough to say that people who speak Russian are not part of the local community, even when they physically live in Estonia. Don't be racist, OSM is not about the race or the language we speak, okay? International projects are supposed to bring people together. Where does this hatred come from?

Now, here are my points:

1) It was discussed in talk-ee mailing list 30.03.2013.

2) After the 2013 import was done, I even made a short presentation during SotM Baltics 2013 explaining this import and the tools we used.

3) You’re talking about maintaining the data, but that's exactly what I'm doing right now.

4) I'm really sorry for you if your import was a crap. Mine wasn't. Even looking at my import 5 years later I can still say that it was a complete success and the right thing to do.

5) The source of the data is Maa-amet. I'm not offering any editor tools nor any way to alter the data. My tools are only to confirm or reject the objects to be imported, thus there is no editors per se that needs to be identified.

6) This is not a blind import - people see every single change that is going to happen, and free to confirm or reject every one of them.

Воскресенье, 4 августа 2019, 19:41 +03:00 от "Jaak Laineste" <ja...@nutiteq.com>:

[Mihkel Rämmel]

Hi,
Some notes from my side:

The building import from 6 years ago had small issues with 2 things:
non-square buildings and adjoining buildings.
First one should be easy to solve by not squaring buildings where
corners are not around 90 degrees. Or has this been already solved?
Currently buildings do not use same nodes despite sharing a wall. It
would be hard or impossible to fix it programmatically without faults,
even if all data is imported once after post processing the accepted
data. A tool to assist going through such cases afterwards would not
hurt. This would assist in finding and fixing what came with import +
what has been drawn by users but might also need fixing.
Otherwise no other issues that I can remember of.

About import vs manual mapping - If there would be more mappers I
would prefer manual mapping of buildings (as more details get mapped
at the same region). But as there are few active mappers and some
passive mappers (including myself), I'm happy with import. With
current going there is no hope in foreseeable future of manually
mapping all significant buildings. There are regions that are well
mapped and there are regions where practically no mapping has happened
over the past years.

Regards,
Mihkel R
osm: RM87

On Sun, Aug 4, 2019 at 11:41 PM SviMik via Talk-ee

[Mihkel Oviir]

Hi,

Svimik, or who ever You are behind this name, couple of points You missed what Jaak talks about:

1) At first, You should really use Your name, if You make a discussion with others.

2) Jaak pointed out, that You haven't start discussion about should we really need another import or how to do that. Good approach is, that after consensus, You create wiki page with enough information to everybody understand how this work and what will be outcome. Some unknown russian forum is not documantation to list it up. I assume we have separate space for that. Accusing Jaak for being racist is quite... racist. I know that russians like to bring that up every single time they do not like something, but You are not getting anywhere with this attitude. If You want to be respectful enough, You really should learn estonian. Writing in english is not considered favor by any means. It is just very common practice.

3) This is not data maintaining. This is another and new import. No one validates or maintains previously imported buildings. If You want to consider it as maintaining, You should ask all ETAK building changes from 2013 and build Your tool up to that. This data is not freely available, as I know.

3) I don't consider corine import as crap. I know what are issues with it and that we still suffer with that, but I think it was right thing to do. Without that, our Estonian map would be quite empty even now. But generally, imports from another data-source is not a good way to improve osm. This is not what osm is about. And because of that, we should really discuss that before creating any new imports. I'm sure, that nowdays ETAK building data is good enough to import 1:1, but last time import added big amount rubbish buildings into osm.

4) I'm agree with Mihkel, that our human resources are quite limited, so there is no possibility to cover all buildings in normal way. But do we have to? More than buildings, I concern rural areas addresses. Because geocoding/routing services are in trouble to find addresses in rural areas. If I look Latvian rural areas, then there is almost every household (even abonded) marked with place=isolated_twelling, but usually no mapped buildings yet. Just building do not give us much information. And in rendered map point-of-view, landuse=residential over households are equaly important.

5) I would prefer tool, that actually finds unmapped buildings and then open editor with that location, so user can map building under own account. Svimik, if You can, add link also to ID-editor with Maa-amet orthophoto basemap.

6) For what this nickname used for? Just for statistics?

7) As Jaak also pointed out, buildings in Your tool appear in quite random order. For example, if I mark one as accepted, I saw that there is also several missing buildings. I would assume, that next building is one of them, but it wasn't. Adding a distance ordering from first building user marked to pick next one would be great, as You already are familiar with surroundings. Also picking a location where to start should be trivial.

I'm not against this import. It is not blind mass-import, there is some kind on human filter between. Having related with ETAK data production in the past, I'm quite sure, that ETAK buildings are far better shape than they were before. They still are not up to date in some areas, but it is common issue for all datasets.

w.r.

Mihkel Oviir

[Jaak Laineste]

The forum /topic referred in the wiki page is titled Russia>Estonia, also it seemed to be not in local language, so it just does not look like local community, but a foreign community mapping Estonia. It is fine as such, many foreign communities map other countries. But they should avoid bug things like imports by thenselves. So if you add there fully local links also (talk-ee etc) then this should be ok.

About tech tools- as they are now they still look like blind copy to me, one sample is that you just show random buildings without context, so there is no way to validate what is real street name, what is city, is the building still there etc. It is stupid (for me) just to repeat dumb numbers like in google captcha, I want to be sure that the reault is correct. Two things would fix this aspect to me - make the area specific (I can work with my city, area of interest), not random, so I know what I do. And make it as editor, with user auth, so I can be responsible for my edits. Maybe some small additional tweaks.

Now if you think of it as mass-import then why all this raster-based OCR-work, why not take vector data and use change detections? I dont like massimports in principle, dont want to repeat the reasons, but thats just me, maybe community as whole has different idea.

Jaak
(Sent from mobile)

[SviMik via Talk-ee]

Hi Mihkel Oviir (upd: and Mihkel Rämmel too!),

I'm glad to see more people here, even if some of them sound like they had a really bad morning. I had already jumped to conclusion that Jaak is the last person in talk-ee, which makes the community essentially dead since there is no one I can discuss anything with. I checked the mailing list history a week ago, and found that this year is completely empty (only Jessica's messages in February about HOT Microgrants, but she's not from the local community).

To Mihkel Oviir:

1) I'm using my OSM name and I find it adequate. I wish others would do the same, so I could make a connection between the person who speaks to me and his OSM profile. But I need to point out that "I wish" doesn't mean "I'm asking you to do that" unlike you just have done. It's completely normal to choose a nickname in the Internet, we're not some government organization to be that formal. Again, you're just provoking further conflicts with such an attitude, let's cease that.

2) I want to apologize to Jaak, I went too far with my accusation. Let's just not exclude people who live in Estonia from the local community just because they speak a different language.

3) You have a point. It's another import. But I just wish to point out that I do maintain my previous imports too. For example, I do update addresses on the buildings I imported in 2013. Of course, only if no one else touched that building or any tags on it after that.

3) Honestly, me neither. I just mocked Jaak a bit (sorry, Jaak!)

4) I think buildings and addresses are tightly connected. Sure you can import the address nodes without importing the buildings, but even I would be against that kind of import (at least, if there is a way to avoid doing that). A landuse import is even more questionable thing to do (and closer to "if you need Maa-amet — you have Maa-amet").

5) All my tools had JOSM buttons from the very beginning. I'm sorry I didn't include ID though, I'll see if I can do that. As a workaround you can use a link to open that place in OSM map and click the Edit button from there.

6) I didn't quite get what nickname you are talking about. If SviMik_import - that's a separate account made just for imports. It's a good practice in OSM to do the imports using a dedicated account so it would be easier to control, verify and monitor it, as well as to fix things if something goes wrong.

7) It was the easiest way to do it. Also, I was thinking that all places equally deserve the attention, so I didn't see any problem with that. Also, I think if I give a choice, most people would just select Tallinn, but it's the last place that needs any imports. It was more intended for rural areas, and people are unlikely to have any preferences between villages they don't know anyway, so that would be a useless option. The idea of sorting the tasks looks great at the first glance, but it will increase the risk that if two people bump into each other, they may get stuck mapping the same things for the entire session. I'll have to invent some algorithm to prevent it, and I think it's an overcomplication for a system with such a simple task.

Oh horseapples, Mihkel Rämmel got into my spam folder for some reason. Now he probably thinks I'm ignoring people. Let's fix that.

>non-square buildings
Since non-square buildings are like <1% of all the buildings I decided not to import them (if someone clicked OK in the validator, I'm really sorry for that. There's a clear instruction to decline the import if the outlines do not match).

>Currently buildings do not use same nodes despite sharing a wall.

Yes, I'm aware of that. Almost impossible to do anything with that, especially if another outline was created by a human. Not to mention there's a chance that that person not gonna be happy with that. Imagine if that would be a Jaak's building :D

>A tool to assist going through such cases afterwards would not hurt.

If by tool you mean a list with errors that just says "open these places in your editor and fix them" then it's quite possible to do. Though I already have a bunch of them, an nobody gives a buck.

For example, missing roads:
http://osm.svimik.com/noroad.php
- this page shows all places where a building was imported, but a road still needs to be mapped by a human.

Missing streets:
http://osm.svimik.com/nostreet.php
- that's a bit more challenging. You need to open Maa-amet and figure out why there's no match between building addresses and the street names. Either a street must be (re)named, or the buildings need to be fixed.

To Jaak:
>without context
I'm having hard time to imagine what kind of context do you need. When I map something in JOSM - I just trace everything that catch my attention, the knowledge of what city it is wouldn't change how I do it. Maybe I'm just a bad mapper and there's something I haven't learned?

>so there is no way to validate what is real street name

The addresses are from this database:
http://xgis.maaamet.ee/adsavalik/ads
I'm not sure why you need to validate it.

>And make it as editor, with user auth

I don't know, it would be impossible to find these changesets later if someone decide to do it. That sounds more like a way to hide an import actually rather doing a legitimate one. Also, a bit too late for such a large request. Maybe for next tools, if I gonna make any.

>Maybe some small additional tweaks.

The only tweak I can think of is to open JOSM and map that manually. Literally no idea what you could tweak there.

>why not take vector data and use change detections?

I was not aware that the vector data exists at the moment of creation of these tools. I only had the address database from Maa-amet that I mentioned earlier. Actually, I still can't find where I can download the vector data.

>It is stupid (for me) just to repeat dumb numbers like in google captcha

Well, most people find it fun. Also, they feel less apprehensive about the import when they see what's going on.
From Telegram:
"This is way more fun than I anticipated. I use it as a thing to occupy myself with when my project at work is building :D" (c) Kuba Orlik, @OpenStreetMapOrg

Четверг, 8 августа 2019, 17:07 +03:00 от "Mihkel Oviir" <mihkel...@gmail.com>: