North River Geographic Systems Inc

Spatial Problem Solving

Open Street Map

OSM in Chattanooga

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So my back and forth with OSM continues these days. Overall I enjoy it If I stay out of the way and map. I’m also tired of mapping mostly by myself – there are a few here that help and the High School chips in when they have time.

Probably 4 or 5 years ago I started a facebook page for OSM (because that was as organized as I had planned on making this). We are kickstarting the group again. So there will be a small meetup at the Tap House tomorrow at 6:30 EST

I’d love to get more of the “new” part of the River Walk finalized in OSM. Someone GPS’d it – now I’d like to fill out the amenities such as bathrooms and bike “stuff”.

If you are in town Swing by – if you’re interested in more meetups add yourself to the group. See you tomorrow.

Fidget Spinning and OpenStreetMap

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Yeah – It’s been a while since I’ve talked about OSM. I’ve been busier than normal – and it’s a good thing. I don’t have a lot of time to “learn” or “play” with much of anything. I’ve helped a bit with the MapLesotho  and I’ve done a few other special projects but I’ve more or less just been hands off with OpenStreetMap.

So with what little bit of free time I’ve had I’ve popped open JOSM and started moving roads to their “close enough to right” location using the BING imagery in East Tennessee. It’s fun work if I get a spare 30 minutes and can make some quick edits. I call it my fidget spinning for a mapping guy.

It’s amazing how bad the roads are…and the major water bodies. There are some major roads which have been corrected. About all the residential roads haven’t. I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to name a lot of the roads. It’s slowly getting fixed. Overall East TN is much improved but it needs more improvement.

In all of this I’ve had a couple of people want to get involved – so I’m slowly dragging them into the OSM world. I’m a bit torn as I’m hesitant to say “join the mailing lists”. As I haven’t and won’t.

The big thing I did notice – Digital Globe Imagery. In JOSM/ID you have access to it. It’s newer in many cases than the bing imagery – although the resolution isn’t as good. Except – I can live with that because I’m finding new building construction. I’m finding new road construction. So my edits will be more current.

Bing

Digital Globe

Of course I need to get back into some form of community involvement. At one time I had a blurb on my business website on OSM and how to get involved locally. At some point we started a Facebook group that has fallen into 3 years of no posts. Soooo – it’s starting back up as a place to post information. Maybe at some point I’ll also find that wiki page I started and add to it.

Updating Roads in Chattanooga TN in OSM

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I’ve been attempting to get better with PostGIS. I’ve also been trying to take baby steps back into the world of OpenStreetMap. I’ve also been trying to take baby steps back into my City’s Open Data Initiative.

Why? I’ve been away for long enough – plus – never quit learning.

I’ve only so many hours in a day. To be honest with my attempts at getting back outdoors and doing things that interest me, I’ve more or less stopped a lot of side projects. With the weather currently being disagreeable to most things outdoors I’ve decided to start diving back into a few things I’ve left hanging.

The OpenStreetMap group here in town is a bit hit or miss. We have a high school that maps. We have a few people diving in here and there. There’s no coordination to the madness and I tried, as did a few of us, to coordinate some of it. I finally gave up. So I do a *few* things in OpenStreetMap here locally but not much.

I made a decision to:

  • Map as many Churches as I can (more on that later).
  • Fix the Roads

Fixing roads is a bit of a chore. I hate touching interstates because I don’t understand the relations involved. There’s probably some “OSM Roads” email list but I just don’t want to get that committed. I’m happier working by myself for a bit or in smaller groups. I’ve also never took a look at the road names in OSM – I’ve worried with alignment but never “names”.  About the time I was moving back into Chattanooga mom called, “They changed two road names in the neighborhood!”. I actually think road names had been changing for a while in the county as the County GIS department did their best to clean up confusing road names for 911 purposes. I *think* this data is then fed to the city or maybe the city is changing road names at the same time. Whatever the case – names are changing and it’s already fixed in Google Maps.

Chattanooga has an open data portal.  I’ve been randomly mucking around looking at data and found the Chattanooga city addresses. I also found that they’ve already been donated to the openaddresses project. I downloaded them and loaded them into PostGIS. There are 102761 points. Each has a street address. I grabbed the roads from OSM and the city boundary from the open data portal. Through  series of maneuvers in SQL that would horrify the more well educated – I actually compared the two and built some foreign keys and other things to make joins easier. Through that my favorite color scheme in the world – Red Green. Green is right as far as I can tell and Red isn’t.

What I did find:

  • my join was a bit sloppier than I wanted but overall I can pick out the problems between the Chattanooga’s address data and the OSM data.
  • I spent more time than I should have reading the FGDC Address standard – BUT – it helped (plus SQL examples).
  • There aren’t a lot of errors but enough. In some cases there was a completely new name applied by the city to a street. In many cases the road in misspelled in OSM (which is probably a holdover from the days of TIGER Data).  Some are from the high school. They are great at editing but not so much at cleaning up. I need to work on that.
  • The cities address data extends into the county by about 1000 feet. Which means when I clipped my roads I lost some data I need and will need to fill back in. Thanks to the power of scripts and me being anal retentive – not that big of a deal and I’ll deal with it as it becomes an issue.

Of course the big question is “Is the cities address data correct?”. As a GIS person I say Yes. As a guy that has worked in GIS for 25 years now I’ll say “probably because I’ve talked to no one over addressing”. So I’ve making a list and print it out and over the coarse of the next few months I’m going to inspect many of the things I’m seeing as wrong. There are three on the way to my parent’s house. I’ll probably even hassle the city/county a bit for information. I’d like to get them more involved if at all possible.

Why fix it? Why not. OSM is enough of a force that it should get fixed – BUT – as GIS people our attention is diverted by what the clients use. You never hear someone say “Well I was using OSM to find my way to the mall…..” it’s usually “Google It” or “what does Google/Waze/Something else say”. It’s not that hard to fix problems once you have a list.

Anyway – more on this as the months progress. This will most likely occur “as time permits”.

GIS Day – 2016

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It’s the worst Holiday ever.

So where am I going to be:

and what will I be doing? Well at UTK I’m going to be my usual charming self and discuss all things that are ‘alternative medicine’ in the GIS world. At the other I’m going to discuss LIDAR and GRASS…and annoy whoever I can whenever I can. Track me down – I’ll have info, stickers, and general insanity to spread around.

I’m going to be missing my people at MAGS in Atlanta for their event. So if you’re close to Kennesaw go there and enjoy.

GIS Day Social

Wednesday, Nov 16, 2016, 6:30 PM

Burnt Hickory Brewery
2260 Moon Station Ct NW # 210 Kennesaw, GA

10 Members Attending

This month, we’re moving to Wednesday and taking the long journey to Kennesaw to join in KSU’s GIS Day activities at Burnt Hickory Brewery.There will be various presentations, activities and giveaways by the hosts.

Check out this Meetup →

 

FOSS4GNA 2016 Program

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Emails are flying so I wanted to throw something up here

Selection_004

Confession: I’m on the conference committee. The final count came down to these numbers: 93 full talks, 36 half talks, 10 workshops, and 3 keynotes. You may look at this and go “OMG they are going to be talking about how to github a geojson raster into the cloud using geojava.node.whatmacallit and this is going to be nothing but confusing”

To randomly pick 5 talks:

Hiroshima Archive: The goal of the “Hiroshima Archive” is to ensure that future generations will be able to learn the true cost of atomic warfare. Using Cesium, the archive is able to provide a personalized experience. A user could be viewing a 1945 map while browsing survivors’ accounts and photos. They could then choose to switch to modern aerial photography to see how the location has changed since.

Processing Raster Data for Online Use: Have you seen georeferenced historical maps online that just look…fuzzy? That’s what we started with at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, and we would like to share the steps we’ve found to get clear, legible, zoomable map overlays.

Cartography with InkScape: Sometimes your map needs a little extra polish. In this talk, I will outline my workflow for bringing maps from QGIS into Inkscape and exporting to commonly used formats to produces a finished professional-quality map. It will include “do’s” and “don’ts” to help you develop your own workflow and avoid common pitfalls, as well as some features unique to Inkscape such as filters.

PostGIS Spatial Tricks: This talk will showcase spatial feats you can do with PostGIS Special focus will be given to features new in PostGIS 2.2 and upcoming PostGIS 2.3.

Precision Ag and Open Spatial Technologies: Autonomous Vehicles, Drones and Data Driven decisions happening on a sub inch level. A city of the future? No, a farm today. Come find out the current Precision Agricultural techniques for data collection, analysis and dissimulation and where FOSS4G tech plays a key role. From harvesting millions of data points generated from every vehicle on the farm, to the corporate dashboard and reports, FOSS4G plays a role.

State of QGIS: State of QGIS reviews new and noteworthy features for the QGIS project. This talk will cover both Desktop and Server components from version 2.14 just released by the community.

So if you’ve never been to one of these things – that’s some of the crazy good talks you’ll see. Even if you’re all ESRI all Day this is good information. I know we are going up against the old ESRI SERUG conference – but I think as far as pushing the envelope of technical talks have everyone else beat.

Good People Come to Raleigh!

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