Today is Open Data Day 2013. I did’t have much time to hack, but I made a few tweaks to my ‘just for fun’ osm-reporter project to provide average, min and max counts per active day for each user. I also did a bunch of code cleanups under the hood which probably nobody except me... Read more »

This weekend I implemented a new feature for my ‘just for fun’ project osm-reporter. The feature implements timeline reporting for Open Street Map contributors. Its probably easiest to explain with a screenshot:     Here is another one showing a few charts together:   I added the feature because I wanted to see how many... Read more »

This weekend I implemented a new feature for my 'just for fun' project osm-reporter. The feature implements timeline reporting for Open Street Map contributors. Its probably easiest to explain with a screenshot:

Here is another one showing a few charts together:

I added the feature because I wanted to see how many person days were involved in data gathering for a particular area and feature type. It does have some limitations - it ignores deletion and ownership transfer of features. It does however provide a nice quick overview of effort. Try it on your own neighbourhood and see how much work went into the OSM coverage for your area!

I've also had some really awesome contributions from Yohan Bonifiace (added leaflet support, feature type switching, extent urls) and Sun Ning (added heatmap support). Its really great making a small, simple and limited scope project and seeing it grow with random hacks of kindness from strangers! Here is a little screenshot of the heatmap feature:

I hope you all enjoy the new version, and look forward to more improvements and suggestions from the community. Its all freely available from my github repository. You can test out the current version of the software by visiting http://osm.linfiniti.com.

Here is a little update to my last post. I quickly whipped up a web app for the little stats script I wrote. It is available at http://osm.linfiniti.com. The stats only update once per hour so as not to hammer the osm export server. The code is all open source (https://github.com/timlinux/osm-reporter), written in python and... Read more »

If you even visited my lovely home town of Swellendam in the Western Cape of South Africa onhttp://openstreetmap.org, you might have noticed that the building footprints for the town are almost non-existent. Building footprints provide a valuable way to understand impacts of flood and other natural hazards, as well as being a valuable source of context information when browsing the town map. It's Christmas holiday season here in South Africa, schools have finished exams and students have time on their hands.

This year Linfiniti Consulting is sponsoring 3 students (from left to right: Jaocoline, Barbara and Nico in the image below) to capture all of the building footprints in Swellendam. Of course I was inspired by seeing the awesome work done by  AIFDR, GFDRR, ACCESS and BNPB and the HOT team in Indonesia.

As well as building footprints they will also capture the building:levels and building:walls attributes so that we can in the future create a nice 3D extruded model of the towns buildings. The students are new to the OpenStreetMap project and have a lot to learn about capturing data fast and accurately, so it should be a great holiday challenge for them!

If you want to grab the current dataset for the area they are going to be working on, you can get it here (in osm format). I wrote a quick and dirty script to get the osm dump from our area and calculate how many ways each person has captured. The script is a simple python flask app. I will probably flesh it out a little as time goes by to make some pretty graphs and reports. In the mean time it just produces something like this: