10th January 2015
I love reading other peoples reading lists, I think they are a great way for sharing content and finding new sources such as blogs. This is my first reading list I publishing so you will find some of 2014 best content as well.
Geo/Maps
Web Development/Programming
Other Advanced, Cool Stuff
The plan for today was MTB Orienteering, now the plan is skiing :-)
7th January 2015
My Christmas holiday started with me becoming sick, a terrible thing for the planned orienteering and workouts. So I decided to go for a little bigger holiday project the usually.
I have for a long time wanted to build something real with the K-samsök(SOCH) API, a API containing more then 5.6 million historical/archeology objects, including 2.3 million images and 1.6 million geo referenced objects.
Earlier last year I started working on a PHP library for the API, you will find the latest version at Github and Packagist. It’s written in PHP because I think more people will use it. You find some basic documentation in the README, some features such as object(), extending, and optional parameters is missing. I aim to publish 1.0 when the documentation is complete.
Until this holiday it has been very unstable and has been missing some key functionality. The best solution to make a library stable is to build something with it, so that’s what I have been doing.
169 000 of the images in K-Samsök are geo referenced the other ones is not. Many of the other images is photos. I have written a web app that allows you to search after photos thats isn’t geo referenced and simply geo reference using a location picker. A screenshot can be seen below.
The screenshot lies, it’s a week old but it’s still just as nice!
Most of the work is done, but some features is still missing:
- The own API for getting the user generated data.
- Scaling, the UI is powered by a lot of JS and its needs work.
- It should be more accessible to screen reader/keyboard users, the JS breaks it right now.
The aim was to “finish” it until the end of this holiday, but school begins tomorrow. The new aim is to finish it and 1.0 of K-samsök-PHP before the Wiki Loves Maps Hackathon in February!
Here is the source for the K-Samsök statics.
5th January 2015
When I first got involved in OpenStreetMap all my mapping was done in the iD editor, a great user experience for new users easy to work with and tagging made easy. My first experience with iD and OSM was terrible. It was because of a old low quality forest import that covers a huge area, shown below.
Most of the import is two massive multipolygons with tons of relations. In iD it was impossible to merge other areas into the multipolygons and the forests had to be heavily remapped. The result of other mappers ways to deal deal with this has lead to two massive multipolygons with broken relations, resulting in rendering issues. First image below shows the quality of the import, the second shows a rendering issue in iD as a result of broken relations(Not related to the reverse inner bug).
Below is two screenshots from Overpass Turbo, showing how the imported data looks like in the OSM database. The first image shows both ways and relations, the second just shows relations(multipolygons).
The imported multipolygons has become a issue to the OSM ecosystem. It makes it hard for developers and designers to use the data because applications such as Tilemill and Mapbox Studio having rendering issues with the data. It becomes a issue for new mappers that has to remap major areas(in iD this means dragging nodes), that can’t merge smaller areas such as lakes and has to deal with relations.
I’m looking into solutions for splitting the two major multipolygons into pieces along major roads(they should be it anyway) or in a worst case scenario delete them. If anyone has a idea about how we should deal with this please share your knowledge.
There is other imports like this one in Sweden some of them also from EEA Corine Land Cover 06(Link to latest version of the dataset) but I haven’t looked into them as much. I think that we need forest imports at least here but we need to be able to work with them from or usual tools such as JSOM and iD.
Any thoughts?
Link to related changesets