State of the Map is one of the biggest OpenStreetMap conference where people who know about OpenStreetMap and want to learn about OpenStreetMap come together. Being part of SOTM-Asia conference in the Philippines with the community and talking to them in person was amazing. It was a great exposure for me to learn how community together built an amazing map of their country/town/village and know the stories behind them.

Sessions/Talks

This was my first State of the Map Asia conference and OpenStreetMap community from more than 10 countries, not just Asian but other parts of the world had also gathered to share their experiences and learnings with fellow community members. The conference exhibited 8 state of the country talks (Japan, India, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Nepal and Bangladesh) which presented great insights on how community is coming together to contribute in different countries and various challenges faced by them. The keynote address by Kate Chapman, Nama Budhathoki, Taichi Furuhashi and Dr. Mahar Lagmay were all very inspiring and encouraging.

Along with these, overall 25 diverse talks were presented highlighting different mapping/geospatial efforts in many countries and few hands-on workshop on various tools like Mapbox Studio, InaSAFE and Mapillary. The talks in the 2 days conference shed lights on different aspects of contributing geospatial data, building a community around keeping this data fresh and use the data in right places for various causes. Interacting with speakers during and post-session helped me in understanding these tools better. There were some great talk where people are building different portals, tools and data which will be helpful in different post-crisis and humanitarian efforts.

Running your own Taginfo instance - Slide Deck

My talk covered on how one can configure Taginfo for a country extract and few of my learnings in maintaining the Taginfo instance for India. Very less Asian counties have good coverage of OpenStreetMap. To gauge and understand the coverage of data in a country, taginfo can be a handy place to check it. As the main site covers and gives the overview of tag coverage for the entire world, the Taginfo application can be used for any specific country to get the similar tagging statistics. Interacted with the OSM Philippines community post talk and planned to set up the Philippines Taginfo instance(temporary URL).

Talking to community is a great way to share the experience, start conversations and get answers to questions. These were the best part of the conference.

Thanks to VISIONS Asia Forum and CrisisMappersJapan for supporting me to be part of this incredible State of the Map.

For the past two years, I’ve been mostly mapping some of the rural areas in Karnataka, mainly connecting village roads/major district roads to State/National Highways. Thanks to some of the experienced mappers like docaneesh, indigomc and others who have been mapping this region since the inception when the entire region was blank, Karnataka, now has a fairly mapped road network in India OSM.

This can’t happen overnight and its interesting to see how this is being done over time by the OSM community. Below is a simple animated GIF that I created using Mapolution showing the evolution of OSM Map(only roads) in Karnataka.

If you’re interested to create a simple animation like the above one and if you’re on Ubuntu GNU/Linux, here’s the small how-to:

• Mapolution uses Libosmium library, Gdal and its dependencies. Get them all by running-
  sudo apt-get install git cmake cmake-curses-gui make libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler libosmpbf-dev libexpat1-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev libsparsehash-dev libboost-dev libboost-program-options-dev libgdal1-dev libgeos++-dev libproj-dev doxygen graphviz libgdal-dev gdal-bin libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-program-options-dev osmctools

• Build and compile the Mapolution binary -
  git clone https://github.com/osmcode/libosmium
git clone https://github.com/osmcode/osmium-contrib
cd osmium-contrib/mapolution
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

• Get the OSM full history dump extract from here. Make sure the area isn’t too large and extract smaller area using Osmconvert/osmosis if necessary. For example, this will extract Karnataka from India OSM history dump -
  osmconvert india.osh.pbf -B=karnataka.poly -o=karnataka.osh.pbf
  where karnataka.poly can be downloaded from http://polygons.openstreetmap.fr/ by providing the relation id of Karnataka.

• Run the Mapolution with the OSM history file to get the animation -
  ./mapolution -S 120 karnataka.osh.pbf
./rasterize.sh

This will create shapefiles in out directory for every 4 months(120days) and save the animated gif in a file called anim.gif with the result. And to add month-year to the gif, you can edit it in Gimp.

Thanks to Jochen Topf for helping out with an issue while running the Mapolution.