I'm Waldir Pimenta, a mapper currently based in Braga, Portugal, but originally from Sal, Cape Verde. Those two are the areas I tend to edit the most on OSM. The type of mapping I'm most interested in is micromapping for 3D visualization, and adding rich information to support bicycle and stroller routing (the latter mostly proxied via wheelchair routing). See my OSM profile for a more personal background and motivation.
I was a Wikipedia editor before I discovered OSM, so I'm quite fond of this wiki for discussion and documentation, although I occasionally participate in Discourse forum and in the OSM Portugal Telegram chat.
I used to be an armchair mapper for most of my early years in the project, almost exclusively using the browser (first with Potlatch 1, then Potlatch 2, then with iD). Later I started doing some surveying with Mapillary. I did try Vespucci for mobile editing but never got comfortable with the interface. Then, when StreetComplete came out (and later Every Door), with more user-friendly interfaces, I finally started doing some more survey-based mapping. For a summary of my OSM contributions, see Pascal Neis' tools:
Useful links
Assorted links
- How to map a
- Map features
{{Free screenshot|license={{MIT}}}} or {{Free screenshot|template=MIT}} — for tagging screenshots of free software- Taginfo projects (on-wiki documentation)
- Compare map styles (base layers)
- WikiProject Cape Verde
- Key:access#List of possible values
- Subkeys of
access=* for specific modes of transportation: foot=*, vehicle=* (in particular motor_vehicle=*, bicycle=*, motorcycle=*), etc.
- Values:
yes, designated, permissive, destination, customers, private, no
- Structured data on the OSM wiki (powered by Wikibase)
- The Wikibase item connected to a page can be found via the "Data item" entry in the sidebar
- Special:PagesWithProp/wikibase_item — Pages connected to a Wikibase item
- Special:AllPages/Item: (doesn't seem to have a way to increase the page size, nor to filter entries by item name — results are sorted by item ID)
- It doesn't seem to be possible to search items by their title...
- {{Ambox}} — versatile message box template
Tile layers
- There are two common ways of serving up map data:
- TMS (Tile Map Service). [1] explains a bit the URL format
- Simpler, based on static tiles that are fetched via zoom (z), latitude (y) and longitude (x) coordinates.
- WMS (Web Map Service). [2] describes the URL format and parameters
- More flexible, based on parameters like bbox, width and height
- Apparently it's possible to use a tile proxy like MapProxy to convert between the two formats, but there doesn't seem to be a public hosted tile proxy instance that anyone can use.
- Useful links
3D visualization
- Data insertion
- Simple 3D Buildings#Building outline: how to properly tag buildings for 3D rendering
- OSM-4D/3D building: more advanced possibilities for the future
- OSM-4D/Roof table: yet more extensions to the basic 3D tagging
- 3D tagging: more info & links
- Visualization of buildings with height tags -- all of Murdeira (Fase 1) done
- TODO: add roof types and colors in all buildings of Murdeira (Fase 1)
- TODO: add 3D details (height, wall & roof color, other geometry) in Quinta da Naia:
- Elevation data
- F4Map supports toggling ground elevations, and attempts to place buildings smartly (probably the lowest point of the building matching the lowest point of the ground around it)
- See Altitude for theoretical background, and the
ele=* key for practical modeling.
ele=* refers to the elevation over the actual irregular mean sea level (geoid), which depends on the local crust density and other factors; ele:wgs84=* is used for elevation over the idealized reference ellipsoid- Both of these are absolute elevation measurements. There doesn't seem to be any support for relative elevation modeling, related to the ground around the feature (I don't know if there could be an unambiguous and stable way to specify that, anyway)
- There are quite a few uses of
elevation_from_road=*, but which road, and from what height of the road, if it's not level?
- Visualization of the 3D data:
- Existing third-party tools:
- General information:
- 3D#Viewing
- StackOverflow questions: [3] and [4] contain potentially interesting links.
- It would be nice to use dynamic image processing filters to produce handmade-like results, such as this
- Some day a tool similar to Buildify (which can procedurally generate buildings based on OSM data) may exist in the browser!
- See also City Building with OSM Data using Houdini
History/Changeset visualization
- OSM.org's native history viewer — example
- Pretty bare-bones: doesn't show the tag diff; doesn't show the actual elements changed in the map (only a bounding box)
- Changeset by Comparison Visualization — example
- Shows three drag+zoom-synced maps: one for deleted elements, another for added ones, and a third map for modified ones.
- Good for visualizing the geometry that's added/removed/modified, but not so much the diff in tags when nodes don't move
- Map elements are interactive, and clicking on them pops up a tag diff table
- Color highlight in tag diff table doesn't make it immediately clear what was added or removed (OSM History Viewer does this better IMO)
- There's a bug? In the "State before the changeset" layer, relation 14614998 (which was introduced in the edit) is included rather than way 1011564190 (which was added to the relation). In fact, the relation shouldn't appear in the "modified" map at all (even with the "Current contribution" layer selected), since it didn't exist before.
- Overall, the "State before the changeset" and "Current contribution" layers are unintuitively named
- Color coding in the modified map is also not very intuitive (orange is used for elements where both geometry and tags changed, blue for elements where just the tags changed, and yellow elements where for just the geometry changed)
- Node reshuffling (which nodes belong in each ways) is represented as a geometry change, even if the nodes don't move (so the ways don't move either)
- Clicking on an element doesn't highlight it, so its unclear where its boundaries are if it touches other elements with the same types of changes
- I have the bookmarklet installed in my browser, so I can open it from the OSM changeset page
OSM History Viewer (OSMHV) — example (discontinued as of March 2025)
- Good for seeing the diff in tags (via color-coded tables), but the geometry visualization isn't very useful: added/deleted/modified elements can be toggled on/off, but they aren't color-coded, and not interactive (nor clicking an element in the list above highlights the element in the map)
- It's the only one that shows all the tag additions/changes/removals at once, not requiring hovering or clicking the map elements. However, it does not show the map of each changed element (before/after) next to the corresponding tags table. There's only a single map at the end, and as mentioned above, it's not very interactive.
- Also, it's pretty hard to navigate due to the tag diff tables automatically expanding when hovering the element names, and the map zoom via mouse scroll interfering with the regular page scroll (which is further complicated by the jumps due to the hover-triggeded content expansion). This was reported as early as 2011 (bug report copied to GitHub).
- It would probably work better if they used
<details> elements. The code to be changed is here and here
- Not sure why
* html .changed-object-tags-note is set to display:none in the line below; maybe it's to hide the hovering note when the page is embedded?
- Maybe also make the map require ctrl+scroll to zoom, or not capture a scroll event that started outside the bounds of the map (i.e. was scrolling the page), or simply add padding around the map to allow scrolling around it? See info about possible solutions.
- Open source but requires a Java running in a server. I wonder if this could be implemented fully client-side and hosted on GitHub pages or similar.
I have the bookmarklet installed in my browser, so I can open it from the OSM changeset page- The creator has discontinued this tool in favor of similar functionality incorporated in their more recent tool, FacilMap. It's not really the same, though. Compare:
- Achavi — example
- Good visualization of both edited tags and edited geometry, complete with timestamp and author of the before and after states.
- Colors are less pleasant/intuitive though (especially in the map background which is very dark, and the diff colors in the tables.
- I have the bookmarklet installed in my browser, so I can open it from the OSM changeset page
- OSM Lab Changeset-map — example
- Good interface (stable, responds well to mouse scroll, elements in the map are interactive, filters are always visible, table of changed tags uses intuitive colors, etc.)
- Similar to OSMCha, but less overwhelming (focuses on a single changeset)
- I have the bookmarklet installed in my browser, so I can open it from the OSM changeset page
Querying
