Hello everyone, I’ve been working on a website called urbanistmap.org that shows all the OSM ways that have the proposed, planned and construction tags. OpenRailwayMap covers the rail part brilliantly, but when it comes to roads and buildings I couldn’t find anything equivalent. I’m a new contributor but it seems like there are entire proposed highways that I didn’t even know existed!
Users can also submit projects directly to the website by drawing shapes or by adding georeferenced image overlays for the project area. I’m still a bit conflicted about user submissions since they don’t contribute back to OSM, but on the other hand proposed projects seem discouraged in OSM so I’m curious what you think. Hopefully contributors from all countries will see this post, I really want to hear your opinions on what’s good and what’s bad about the website.
Are you talking about OpenMapTiles? because i’m using the OpenFreeMap API, I think they just use OpenMapTiles style but without directly financing them it seems like
sorry, I just saw the googlish UI and there was stuff from google.com loaded and didn’t have a deeper look, on closer inspection it is only the font from google, the rest is finest OSM
Please accept my sincere apologies.
thanks! I didn’t know OSM could provide that, cool idea. But since contributions made on urbanistmap aren’t sent back to OpenStreetMap, I don’t think OSM contributors should use my website to do so, unless they have some aerial images of projects to share
Awesome, I’m excited to see that! I will update the website in a few days then. and I will give more space to images in the sidemenu, currently they get burried by the OSM import each day
Leni great idea & initiative !
It is helpful for many ways:
Great map overview of once started construction:
site project not checked years later if project is not under construction any more…
As project info: gathering info as detailed as possible so anyone can check within own time & within each specialist-‘field’ detailing info in OSM even more within specific construction-project using the note droplets in blue instead of red.
Why use preliminary droplets first instead of e.g. planned prefix first?
Well, sometimes before any construction has taken place the funding has definitely stopped for this project (for variety of reasons on:
** investing firm side
** construction contractor side
What is simpler than deleting the single project droplet instead of deleting multiple planned constructions which were part of planned project ?
If for any reason a project has suffered delay you can within the droplet make a remark about that so you can seperate dead projects from delayed ones…
If a project really has started visible on the ground (‘ground-truth’ visible activity on project location) you can use the blue-droplet info (e.g. project blueprints for the entire project area usually divided in multiple project-phase numbering if it involves a big project) to use planned prefixes for the parts not being build yet.
If project then is being preliminary stopped you can add abandoned prefixes instead for the allready built bits depicting ground-truth & delete the bits which were at that moment being planned but did not reached finished status yet..
Would be nice if your project-initiative could be tested thoroughly first to make a seperate map-layer called projects later on within OSM.
In the Netherlands I tried to start up a similar simpler initiative (interpretted as misuse of red note droplets) several years back on a more modest scale within the Netherlands boundary but saw that time was at that moment not yet ripe for that initiative.
The note droplet- method has proven that it is a very valuable tool to update an project area thorough & in 1 go in a ‘just in time’- manner.
Thanks a lot! I don’t quite understand part of your message, are these the droplets you mentioned? But yeah I agree, mapping proposed and planned stuff can be “risky” in regards to OSM correctness
Also, do you have any recommandations or features that you want to see on the website? I would be glad to implement and discuss them! Note that there is a “planned” tag on the website, but yeah it’s not used a lot on OpenStreetMap.
For now I’m not sure a standalone map-layer could work, since I feel like we need interactivity when hovering and clicking on projects (to see their name and details). Also I’m filtering out some very small polygons (houses) as well as tags like powerlines. We can easily change that, but it may make tile generation slower (it’s done on the fly). Tons of things to figure out!
Yes in fact it are upside down droplets if visible as blue projects would be awesome to have a separation to ‘normal’-notes.
Planned status is not used for the reason I have mentioned in former reaction.
Construction either for buildings or roads: very welcome !
I’m still quite confused about what you are asking exactly and I have many questions.
It would be a brand new note system, not using existing OpenStreetMap ones, right?
Would all proposed and planned projects have it?
If not, under what condition would those blue notes be created? a user on the website just adds one and write stuff?
What would be written in these notes? How would they be used by other people?
Would those notes always be visible? only to logged-in user?
I need to understand the end goal of the feature, I find it hard to project myself at the moment. Like is it about correctness of the OSM database? or about correctness of the additional projects made by users on the website (independently of OSM) ?
Yes, with same functionality as the OSM-notes now but which can be projected on the OSM-map with the same upside-down droplets in blue
The usage is multiple:
Near future projects as project gathering infopoint with blueprint info of future project-object(s) & estimated project start.
Seemingly abandoned projects which if you read the info in the note is either:
A. not abandoned with info why not or
B. is really a abandoned project based on info in the note so it justifies to change partly build objects in the project as abandoned objects.
In all cases the info gathered can either be gathered as eyewitness groundtruth info and/or checked official documents like blueprints of objects within the project.
For each purpose i added a note link as live example, hence the blue links.
Very intersting! I’m debating whether we should implement this right now, it seems like urbanistmap.org is more of a browsing tool rather than a tool for mapper. I’m afraid that those notes wouldn’t be seen by the vast majority of OSM contributors. And unfortunately I don’t think my website is big enough that multiple people would make use of the note someone else wrote.
But in the future it could prove useful if the site gets a lot of usage
Tips and details would be very welcome, maybe i’m missing something. But I still don’t believe making a note system that very few people know about is the right call at the moment. There needs to be a large amount of contributors to make it work.
The closest thing urbanistmap provides is a filter by OSM’s last modified date, which can be useful to see outdated projects, which may be less obvious than a note system but works for all projects
Could there be an option to merch multiple nodes/ways/relations into one project?
After uploading some images to one way, I have also merched all landuses for this project into one multipolygon. But now the same project is listed twice. It would be nice if it could be marked as the same project.
Sure, I can make it work. I’m thinking of two options to do it (will probably implement only one for now)
Either being able to assign any image from a project to another. like change parent/ownership of any given image.
Or merging from an “origin” project to a “destination” project
By the way I love what you added, and I used to live right here on KanaalStraat! (though i’m not Dutch). I have a few questions:
Do you have any other suggestions on things to improve/fix?
Do you think images are highlighted/findable enough on the map?
Should we be able to add information to projects imported from OSM (other than images)? currently we can because I forgot to disable it, but it means the project becomes “detached”/desynced from the OSM way to avoid the daily import from overwritting the changes. However, OSM doesn’t allow multiple tags (like higway+bike+tram), city, dates with days and months, etc. so it’s compelling to keep it
I think it would be best to create unique projects in your database, which are on your side linked to OSM objects with the state proposed, planned, or construction (or maybe something else?). When a object won’t have that state anymore it could be auto removed from the project.
Thankss!! Nice to hear. They just (in the past 1,5-2 years) rebuild the whole Damstraat+Kanaalstraat. Soo just too late for this website. But it looks really nice now.
I would like (but don’t know if it’s feasible) to be able to import the images/map as background layer in an OSM editor (like ID). Sometimes I already know part of a project is finished, but the aerial image is outdated. It would help with alignment if the project map could be displayed behind.
Another I thought about: it would be nice if in edit mode the background doesn’t show the 3D on buildings. They are quite useful to align the images, but with the 3D effect it becomes harder because of the shifting perspective.
EDIT: Some kind of pdf importer would be nice as well. Since lot’s of plans are published that way. It would also be nice if images could be cropped.
Yes, maybe when looking for a specific project it would be nice to search. But if you know where it is, it’s easy to just navigate to that place. Images are shown instantly, which is really nice.
Maybe when available stuff like websites, opening dates, check dates? It could be synced when an object is changed in OSM in a later stage than on Urbanist map. In the future it could be the other way around where some fields will be synched to an OSM object (but that needs a lot of thinking how).
if visible as blue projects would be awesome to have a separation to ‘normal’-notes.