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Ilya Zverev

OSM Cards is a postcrossing thing for OpenStreetMap members. You get a person's postal address, write them a few encouraging words on a postcard and add a 5-letter code. When received, they type those letters in a form, and the connection is set up.

I announced this website at SotM 2020 and got a few beautiful cards. I lived in Minsk back then and printed like 50 postcards with the city map to send out — and now idk what to do with them :)

Send me one if you like: osmcards.org/profile/bqh2on123
15 May at 12:28 | Open on en.osm.town
16 comments
Ilya Zverev replied to Ilya

You know OpenWhateverMap.

openwhatevermap.xyz/

Grant made the original version, then we lost the domain, and then I updated it with modern tiles and some interactivity: clicking on a tile reveals its name and URL.
16 May at 19:11 | Open on en.osm.town
David replied to Ilya

Very cool, I'm just missing #openseamap ⛵

17 May at 7:57 | Open on hachyderm.io
Ilya Zverev replied to Ilya

For the @sotm in Firenze I went all-out with the remote participation part. One thing I did was a Telegram bot, where people from anywhere could introduce themselves.

The idea was to put a face to hundreds of names on online channels. Because once you have a face and a voice attaches to words, it's impossible not to feel a proper conversation going when you type.

Not many people contributed, but still, was fun. The bot was disabled after the conference ended of course.
18 May at 9:08 | Open on en.osm.town
Ilya Zverev replied to Ilya

I feel like I've invented another job for myself, posting those tweets regularly. Let's do a few small things now.

Like, I love doing efficient focused tooling. GeoJSON Point Editor, while not entirely related to OSM, is exactly that. Faced with making a GeoJSON for ~100 point amenities, geojson.io was frustrating to use.

So I made this. Double click for a new point, type some words for properties (in a already focused field!), filter by keys, download the result.

zverik.github.io/point_ed/

I feel like I've invented another job for myself, posting those tweets regularly. Let's do a few small things now.

Like, I love doing efficient focused tooling. GeoJSON Point Editor, while not entirely related to OSM, is exactly that. Faced with making a GeoJSON for ~100 point amenities, geojson.io was frustrating to use.
21 May at 15:28 | Open on en.osm.town
Ilya Zverev replied to Ilya

Another one I made for my last job, and it's for annotating GeoJSON geometries: "Geometry Review".

You load a set of geometries to compare into it, and it shows a bunch of buttons for each set: "OK", "Bad" etc, your choice.

No extra clicking or studying required, you glance at the map, press a 1/2/3 key, see the next item. And export the result in the end.

Used this tool to annotate hundreds of routes and review predictions.

github.com/Zverik/geometry_rev

Geo is easy until you see it on the map.

Another one I made for my last job, and it's for annotating GeoJSON geometries: "Geometry Review".

You load a set of geometries to compare into it, and it shows a bunch of buttons for each set: "OK", "Bad" etc, your choice.

No extra clicking or studying required, you glance at the map, press a 1/2/3 key, see the next item. And export the result in the end.
21 May at 15:40 | Open on en.osm.town
Ilya Zverev replied to Ilya

For a very long time the leading repository on my github was "leaflet-grayscale" with a hundred stars.

I love @leaflet and made too many plugins for it. This one was quite simple — but I guess useful enough.

It just makes the map grayscale.

There are too few layers fit for a visualization background. Sometimes removing colors (and labels if possible) is good enough.

github.com/Zverik/leaflet-gray
21 May at 15:49 | Open on en.osm.town
watmildon replied to Ilya

@zverik @leaflet Yes! TIGERMap uses greyscale carto. Thankfully maplibre has a color saturation setting!

21 May at 18:32 | Open on en.osm.town
Robin Wilson replied to Ilya

@zverik @leaflet leaflet-grayscale is great and I use it a lot, thanks for making it!

21 May at 22:36 | Open on mastodon.me.uk
Ilya Zverev replied to Ilya

Back to OSM, here's one you'd ban if you could.

Sisyphus make a person's mapping work as pointless as rolling a stone up a mountain. It plain reverts every changeset a person uploads to OpenStreetMap.

We used it in Maps.Me for reverting edits of our QA team.

Not ideal, which Frederik noted, but it works, the map is clean, no hassle with moving data to the sandbox.

Uses simple_revert as a library, of course. That library is underrated.

github.com/Zverik/sisyphus

23 May at 16:38 | Open on en.osm.town
Ilya Zverev replied to Ilya

People usually need three things from maps: tiles, geocoding, and routing. Three things too mundane to work on.

For Maps.Me Changes Monitoring, I filtered edits by countries. For that I wrote a simple reverse geocoder: QueryAt.

It returns a country, a region, and a populated place for a given location. 3 GB database for the entire world, no configuration or query parameters.

Won't recommend using it now though: 8 years later, you could do better.

github.com/zverik/queryat

23 May at 16:46 | Open on en.osm.town
Ilya Zverev replied to Ilya

The recent discussion around "class:bicycle" tag reminded me of my "surface:grade" proposal — basically the same thing, but done 13 years earlier, with 25k usages as of now and no clear documentation.

wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Pr

Basically it's a measure of surface quality relative to roads with that surface quality. Not all roads ever, like smoothness=*.

You see a perfect gravel road? surface:quality=3. You're on a technically asphalt road and moving 1 km/h wishing they left it unpaved? Zero.

The recent discussion around "class:bicycle" tag reminded me of my "surface:grade" proposal — basically the same thing, but done 13 years earlier, with 25k usages as of now and no clear documentation.

wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Pr

Basically it's a measure of surface quality relative to roads with that surface quality. Not all roads ever, like smoothness=*.

26 May at 17:16 | Open on en.osm.town
Ilya Zverev replied to Ilya

Having tag proposals on this list feels like cheating — despite those take weeks to materialize, mostly because of research and writing and discussing in our Russian-speaking community.

For example, my turns lanes proposal took two weeks researching eight other proposals, charting examples, writing the proposal and FAQ.

wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Pr

It failed because it was hard to understand, unlike the semantically weird but simple turn:lanes schema.

Mappers need simple, not consistent.

Having tag proposals on this list feels like cheating — despite those take weeks to materialize, mostly because of research and writing and discussing in our Russian-speaking community.

For example, my turns lanes proposal took two weeks researching eight other proposals, charting examples, writing the proposal and FAQ.

26 May at 18:06 | Open on en.osm.town
Ilya Zverev replied to Ilya

When I set out to write a reverse geocoder, I had a very narrow scope in mind: basically the east coast of the US. But the longer you study something, the more edge cases you find. Got a few talks out of it:

youtube.com/watch?v=sjE6xy0BBg

Juno Reverse Geocoder is covered in tests no other geocoder would pass, and is built on SQL. I bragged that it was faster than Nominatim, but recently I've tested it and it's like 8 times slower. Still, worked fine for our company.

github.com/gojuno/jrg

When I set out to write a reverse geocoder, I had a very narrow scope in mind: basically the east coast of the US. But the longer you study something, the more edge cases you find. Got a few talks out of it:

youtube.com/watch?v=sjE6xy0BBg

Juno Reverse Geocoder is covered in tests no other geocoder would pass, and is built on SQL. I bragged that it was faster than Nominatim, but recently I've tested it and it's like 8 times slower. Still, worked fine for our company.

28 May at 12:53 | Open on en.osm.town
SK53 replied to Ilya

@zverik sounds a bit like user GeneralDreedle, although that account automatically everted edits by fantasy mappers

23 May at 20:08 | Open on en.osm.town
Rihards Olups replied to Ilya
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