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

Most of you might already know that the OpenStreetMap project will celebrate its 7th Anniversary this month. Several events will take place on Saturday, 20 August 2011 at different locations around the world! You can read more about it here.

A small gift that I would like to contribute is a website which allows you to get some information about your “OSM-Age“. The functionality is similar to “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap ?“. Type in your or any other OSM username and your or the corresponding user’s OSM-Birthday will be displayed. To be more specific the website will show your OSM-Age and your rank within the OSM contributors list. Remember: Not every OSM member contributed to OSM (cf. „Nominal Members“ of OSM). So it is possible that your rank is better than you might have expected. The date of a user’s birthday was collected from each users OSM User Wiki page (“Mapper since: …”).

The following image shows an example search result:

Additionally you can find the oldest and newest contributors in the boxes below the search results. Further you can see whose birthday it is on that specific day, or within the previous or following three days.

Soooo, what is your birthday? Check it out here: http://osmbirthday.neis-one.org

Additional information: Today (Aug. 2011) the OSM project has about 143 000 contributors with at least one edit in the database. Remember that officially the project has over 446 000 registered members (cf. OpenStreetMap stats report). I will announce more about this topic here in my blog in the near future … so stay tuned! Or you can read the blog post from last year (2010): „Nominal Members“ of OSM

thx @ *Fab* for the user-interface
and thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

Maybe some of you remember that I conducted a comparison analysis between three OpenStreetMap (OSM) routing engine APIs (CloudMade, MapQuest Open and OSRM) and G**gle Maps API last week. You can find the results in my blog post here. As I mentioned in the article, I wanted to try to do a second analysis with more routing engines.

Thus, I added Bing Maps and two OSM engines (YourNavigation/YOURS and Routino/Roadeeno) to the comparison. All services have a continental coverage with the exception of OSRM. The following table shows an overview of (1) the request-response time of the service, (2) the calculated distance for the test-route and (3) the file size of the service response:

As you can see in the following diagram does the OSM routing engine (OSRM) give the fastest results. A little bit strange is that the Routino/Roadeeno service returns no valid route responses for requests which are longer than 600 km.

The same diagram in a more detailed view:

The routing engines have different ping times (round-trip time). Almost all services have a round-trip time off about 25 ms. You can see the times for each engine in the following diagram:

If you take those ping times into account and use a logarithmic transformation, the result look as shown below:

The above diagram shows in a quite impressive way the results of this comparison that allow the following conclusions: OSRM (OSM) shows the fastest results followed by G**gle Maps (Tele Atlas). Bing (Navteq), MapQuest (OSM) and CloudMade (OSM) are nearly equal in most cases. YOURS (OSM) and Routino (OSM) seem not to be the right choices at least for long route calculations (>600km). Maybe a second comparison with several routes between 10 and 500 km could be an enhancement?

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis 🙂

Currently I am working on a research paper about the OpenStreetMap evolution of Germany. For the last AGIT conference in Salzburg and the upcoming State of the Map Europe (SotM-EU) conference in Vienna I did a similar analysis about the OpenStreetMap Evolution of Austria. You can see the results in the following posters in English and German:

The OpenStreetMap Evolution of Austria (2007–2011)

Die OpenStreetMap Entwicklung in Österreich (2007–2011)

A further nice visualization of the OpenStreetMap data in Austria for the year 2010, can be found in a blog post by Max Kossatz.

Ok, you want it, you’ll get it! Maybe some of you know the nice website: www.googlefight.com. You can enter two keywords and after that it starts a funny fight between these keywords. Based on the database of “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?” I created a similar website where you can set up a “fight” between OpenStreetMap contributors. The following picture shows an example fight:

I am very sure you have some ideas for further fights, don´t you?
“Let´s get ready to rumble!” >>  http://osmfight.neis-one.org/ <<

thx @ Frederik for idea during a talk
thx @ *Fab* for the user-interface
and finally thx @, you know it: maɪˈæmɪ Dennis 🙂

In Salzburg (Österreich) fand dieses Jahr wieder vom 6. bis zum 8. Juli die AGIT statt. Die AGIT ist eine Konferenz für angewandte Geoinformatik, welche bereits seit 1989 stattfindet. Dieses Jahr dürfte sie wohl wieder einen neuen Besucherrekord erreicht haben, mit angeblich knapp 1200 Teilnehmern.

Wie im letzten Jahr gab es auch dieses Jahr am Mittwochnachmittag wieder ein Spezialforum für OpenStreetMap mit insgesamt drei Sessions. Sie bestanden jeweils aus drei Vorträgen über/mit oder wegen OpenStreetMap. Aber nicht nur innerhalb dieses Forums, auch in einigen anderen Sessions, wovon es teilweise insgesamt 10 parallel über die Veranstaltungstage verteilt gab, wurden OSM Daten immer wieder in unterschiedlichen Varianten verwendet. Angefangen von der Verwendung zur Erstellung von Karten, wie auch als Datengrundlage für Routenplaner, die Verwendung von GPS-Tracks zur Ermittlung des Verkehrsaufkommens oder wie in meinem Vortrag, zur Darstellung von Verkehrswarnmeldungen.

Für mich persönlich war es gerade am Mittwochnachmittag interessant zu hören, dass in Wien noch weitere amtliche Geodaten freigegeben werden und andere Ämter, zumindest in Österreich, über die Freigaben ihrer Geodaten nachdenken. Auch im Vortrag vom LVG-Bayern über die Luftbildfreigabe in Bayern, die unter anderem auch für das Abdigitaliseren für OSM verfügbar waren/sind, gab es Aussagen das gerne immer wieder neue Orthopohots freigegeben werden.

Was meiner Meinung nach vor ein paar Jahren irgendwie noch undenkbar war, wird langsam Realität: Behörden in Österreich oder auch Deutschland geben ihre Geodaten frei oder sprechen zumindest offiziell darüber sie zu veröffentlichen!

Ich sehe hier ein wirklich großes Potential gerade für OpenStreetMap im Bereich der Qualitätsvervollständigung, Qualitätsanalyse und vor allem in der immer wieder nachgefragten Qualitätssicherung. Aber nicht nur OpenStreetMap würde davon profitieren, so wie im LVG-Bayern Vortrag von offizieller Seite zu hören, haben auch die Ämter viele positive Effekte durch die Verwendung von OSM Daten bei ihrer Arbeit. Ingesamt also eine absolute Win-Win-Situation? Warten wir mal ab, was sich bis zur nächsten AGIT 2012 in Salzburg noch so alles ergibt …

This article was written in the ICE720 from Munich to Frankfurt, with a delay of 22min.
Thanks for travelling with Deutsche Bahn!

In the past blog post I wrote about the newest changes and encoding techniques that have been implemented in the Open Source Routing Project (OSRM). So I think it is time do a little comparison analysis about the request/response time of several routing APIs. The main question I wanted to answer was: “Is an OpenStreetMap direction service faster than G**gle?” I tested the following direction APIs for cars (fastest): MapQuest, CloudMade, G**gle and finally OSRM. For the analyses I wrote a small Java tool, which measured the time to get a result of a routing-service. I did all tests at home with a “regular” 12kbit/s internet connection. I tested several distance levels and the results can be seen in the following table. It shows the average times of five requests for each route with a delay of 3 seconds between each request/response. Overall I did this analysis three times.

The results are quite impressive. OSRM calculates the fastest route for all five test routes! Unfortunately we do not have any information about the server infrastructure at G**gle, MapQuest or CloudMade but the OSRM engine is running on a virtual server with limited hardware resources. It seems that the CloudMade directions service does not like Paris very much, as can be seen in the following image 😉

I will try to do a second comparison with Bing Maps, YOURS and Routino. So stay tuned …

— Update —

>> The second blog post is here: Comparison of (OSM) routing-engines – Reloaded <<

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis 🙂

One of the many bottle necks of today’s web services are network latency and bandwidth. While I was working on a research paper, I recognized that G**gle encodes some information when you calculate a route on G**gle Maps. This process reduces, besides the gzip compression, the response from the server. This means that this is a speed improvement for the server client communication besides the zoom-level-generalization. You can read more about the “Encoded Polyline Algorithm Format” and how it works here.

We integrated this nice feature into the code of the Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) project. The following table shows a few results for some sample routes comparing the old and the new file sizes (@ zoomlevel 18):

And if you are not a numbers person, let us put this in perspective: The fast routes just got faster! And that’s not all. As a second new feature the web frontend of the OSRM has shortlinks for the calculated route now. You can find the link of your route at the route summary. Try it out here: http://map.project-osrm.org/

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis 🙂

First of all, I really like the following blog post and the idea behind it: “Yes! It is possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub”

It shows the power of crowd sourced geodata (OpenStreetMap) and the skills of some individuals. In the following steps I am going to show you a different way to get to the same result.

The website OpenRouteService.org offers the same functionality to calculate a route. You can avoid certain areas by defining them (just simply draw them) on the map. However, your first step would be to “Search for Points of Interest (POI)” (PUBS), for example in Dublin within a distance of 10 km. The following picture shows the result:

After that you can create several polygons around your pubs resulting in a map with several, “red” areas:

And finally you can calculate a route from almost any point in Dublin. The last image show such a route without crossing a red area or Pub:

However, the original blog post is brilliant !
Or do you want it the opposite way: Search all pubs *along* my route? 😉

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis 🙂

On Saturday, May 28th members of the OpenStreetMap (OSM) community and employees of the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (in German “Bundesamt für Bevölkerungsschutz und Katastrophenhilfe (BBK)”) met for a workshop at Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler.

Source: Haiti Crisis Map - OpenStreetMap NL (http://haiti.openstreetmap.nl/)

The main goal of this event, taking place at the Academy for Crisis Management Emergency Planning and Civil Protection (in German “Akademie für Krisenmanagement, Notfallplanung und Zivilschutz (AKNZ)”), was to inform active contributors of the OpenStreetMap community and employees of AKNZ and BBK about OpenStreetMap and crisis mapping.

During the devastating earthquake in Haiti (2010) OSM proved to be a valuable source of up-to-date geodata and partner for international relief organizations. Crisis-Mapping includes but is not limited to e.g. the determination of infrastructure, collapsed buildings, spontaneous camps and more in crisis areas, which can be an important contribution to the orientation of rescue workers on-site. This has also been documented in specific reports by the mass media.

The workshop had 20 participants and started with a reception and short introduction about the AKNZ by Dieter Franke. Subsequently Dr. Michael Judex (BBK) explained the specific tasks of the BBK and highlighted the importance of geoinformation for the protection of citizens or during crisis management.

Stephan Bialonski started the OSM-part during this event with his presentation. Next to some basic information (Main goal of the OSM project, data model, tagging, license) he also introduced the participants to the way the OSM community thinks and works, since these factors differ highly from the working processes of regular administrative and governmental agencies. He specifically mentioned to the participants from the BBK that voluntary active contributors can be best included in their projects as long as the goal of the project is also a goal of the OSM-community.

During the following presentation Werner Kathe introduced the participants to the Humanitarian OSM Team (H.O.T.). “It is a new initiative to apply the principals and activities of Open Source and free data on humanitarian purposes and economic growth”

Special attention had been given to the presentation by Pascal Neis who explained how the operation sequence and processes during two well known OSM-relief operations (Haiti 2010 and Japan 2011) took place. Certain advantages and disadvantages considering the usage of OSM-data during these specific catastrophes were mentioned during this presentation. The participation of the OSM-community, the data collection increase in different crisis areas and several applications based on OSM-data were demonstrated. At the end Pascal showed with an example application how OSM can also be used for preventive crisis planning and organization of rescue forces.

After a lunch break including some intense conversations the employees of the BBK and AKNZ were introduced to OSM-procedures on-site. A practical workshop organized by Bernd Weigelt, Edbert van Eimeren and John Bergenholtz lead through an area of debris on the AKNZ-compound that is being used by the rescue forces for training purposes. The participants collected data about destroyed buildings and ways which shortly after have been imported to the OSM database. This way the participants were able to learn how to add GPS data, fotos taken by digital cameras and areal images to OSM using crisis-mapping specific tags in the OSM-Editors.

Trümmerstraße - Quelle: http://strdbn.posterous.com/osm-community-bonn-trifft-bbk-im-aknz-bilder

The entire event lasted for about six hours and the participants gave a very positive feedback. The open and informal atmosphere during the event allowed for several questions by the participants and showed mutual interests. We would like to thank everyone involved for the successful event.

This is a translation from the German blog post @ blog.openstreetmap.de by Stephan Bialonski & Pascal Neis. Translation provided by maɪˈæmɪ Dennis 🙂