Last week Stephan released the neat “Where Did You Edit?” webpage. A world map indicates where in the world you have been editing OpenStreetMap (OSM) nodes. Unfortunately it is based on a full history OSM planet dump which is nearly two months old. Also, the map does not include any tools to zoom into or drag the map. However, Stephan mentioned that he is working on these functions. Keep up the good work, Stephan!
Based on my OSM changeset table of “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap ?” I created a slightly different webpage and used a different approach. I used the weekly OSM changeset files and I presented the results in an OpenStreetMap including zoom and drag functions. Your contributions are indicated by a “Heat-Map-Overlay”. For this overlay I am using Bjoern’s OpenLayers addon. For better performance I generalized the total changesets of each OSM contributor. This means that it is possible that not every little contribution from a member is taken into account and displayed in the map. Anyway, I think the results are quite impressive, aren’t they?
The following picture shows the heat map of Harry’s OSM contributions. Really nice! But honestly: Harry, did you visit all places in person? 🙂
I think you will find other incredible OSM Contributors Heat Map stories?! You can find “Your OSM Heat Map” (aka Where did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?) here: http://yosmhm.neis-one.org . I can update this website every week if you like …
thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis
Comments
29 responses to ““Your OSM Heat Map” (aka Where did you contribute?)”
Wow! That’s really impressive!
thx!
Is it also possible to turn this off for specific users? Not everybody wants to have one’s edits traceable in such a way. This could produce data protection issues when edits reflect a person’s movements.
@ALE!
Thx for your comment. Well in a certain way I would agree but OpenStreetMap is an Open project in the end. You can find the same data that I used in the maps in your OSM wiki page. Did you know this? Here you can see an example taken from my profile: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/pitscheplatsch/edits
So in my opinion it is not really a “new” visualization of the movements of OSM contributors, but ok: If you really want it, I can delete your username from my database. It is up to you. But pls, think about the other nice websites which use “your” OSM data …
Hi Pascal,
great work! 🙂 I just wonder what you mean by “generalization of total changesets”. How exactly does your algorithm decide upon which contribution to consider and which not?
@SB79
Thx! Some OSM contributors have more then 10 000 or 20 000 changesets. Rendering these changesets as heat map points would cause performance issues in the web browser, thus I “generalized” the changesets. This means that I only used changesets whose size varied between roughly 1 and 30 km for the first version of this website. I didn’t want to visualize the work of an import/bot or very small edits, but wanted to focus on the visualization of the area of an OSM contributor. Up to now, this works fine in a first version. For the next version I will try to expand the changeset sizes a little bit.
Yes, this is exactly what I was hoping for! Very cool! And yes, please keep the service alive. If you can’t keep it going, please consider releasing the source code for this, as it is very valuable!
Thx for your comment. Ok, I will try to update the service every two weeks. I think this is enough 🙂
Ale,
By submitting data to OpenStreetMap, anyone can download the data and see where you submitted data to OpenStreetMap. Though, it is not immediately updated once you have been there (you have to make the edit to OSM first), so this can’t be used to follow anyone. Also, the stalker has to know your OSM user name to look up your heat map.
Hi,
This is a fantastic visualisation.
Would it be possible for the map to have a permalink so that I can link to a specific point on the map?
Shaun
Shaun,
thank you for your comment! I created a permalink additionally in the lower right corner for a specific part of the contributors HeatMap.
Check it out:
http://yosmhm.neis-one.org/?zoom=11&lat=51.45199&lon=-0.05198&layers=BT&u=smsm1
Cheers,
Pascal
[…] shows your or other OSM member’s contributions in a Heat Map. You can find his blog post here, and the webpage […]
[…] shows your or other OSM member’s contributions in a Heat Map. You can find his blog post here, and the webpage […]
[…] shows your or other OSM member’s contributions in a Heat Map. You can find his blog post here, and the webpage […]
Hi Pascal, somehow the webpage seems to be malfunctioning at the moment. It does not find the users any more. It’s the same whether I enter an username or use the button at the bottom of “HDYC”.
thx, has been fixed.
Also, you wrote somewhere that there is a limit to the size of the changesets that are being looked at. Would it be possible to increase that limit?
yes, the next version will have an increased limit.
Hi
Your insightful map gives me new vigor to work on OSM.
My home page shows a map with “mappers around you” markers. This is pretty useless, because most of them have never edited OSM. Can you create a better infographic that highlights only active contributors, with more graded colors to show their relative strength?
Such a display will encourage networking and collaboration between such active mappers.
Hi Nagesh, thank you very much for your comment.
Did you see in the layerswitcher in the upper right corner?
It contains several layers that only display active contributors of the last 6 months …
http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/oooc
Hope that it helps you.
All the best,
Pascal
Hello, Pascal. How does your tool handle users that change their usernames? Does it update some kind of cache regularly?
I have changed my username to the one a old account of mine was using, but I can see only the edits for the old account. The new name of the old account is not found by the tool and the old name of my active account is not found too. My real edits ended up in some kind of limbo 😛
Hola Jucá,
when you change your username, all your contributor information should be available under your new name. This process needs sometime several days. I think after one week it should be done.
Hmm… It’s been almost two months now. Maybe it will work if my old account is deleted?
What is your current and what was your old OSM username? Maybe do you know the UIDs of your accounts?
My current account is virgilinojuca, with UID 2709441. The old one was changed to contaantigadovirgilinojuca and the UID is 124258. I hope I got the UIDs right.
thx, have been fixed, see http://hdyc.neis-one.org/?virgilinojuca
http://yosmhm.neis-one.org/?virgilinojuca
Wow, thanks, Pascal!
My OSM name “little brother” cannot be found in the heat map?
case sensitive? I guess this is your OSM name: “Little Brother”
HDYC: http://hdyc.neis-one.org/?Little%20Brother
Heat Map: http://yosmhm.neis-one.org/?Little%20Brother