Like clockwork, on July first, the monsoon began here in the Korean Peninsula. It has rained for two days straight.

Regarding the June challenge: I didn’t do great, but I will consider that I did the best I could. You can read my updates at my “bliki.”

I’d love to see results of other people’s work on this challenge - post a comment, a diary entry, or get creative in the wiki to show your progress.

Luciano’s Mapper’s Challenge #4 - July, 2016 - LET’S DO SOMETHING BLUE

This challenge is based on a suggestion from Ūdilugbulgidħū.

Some of our “blue,” free-to-map, community territories are doing pretty well. Gobrassanya is an excellent example. On the other hand, many of the “blue” territories are depressingly messed up.

It would be great to see some focused effort on the part of LOTS OF COMPETENT USERS to add something to a community territory, or to help clean up badly conceived objects or “newbie-messes.” This can take many forms. Some suggestions:

• adding some new administrative division, town or neighborhood
• cleaning up some specific feature across a broader area (rivers, roads, railroads, admin divisions, natural landcovers, etc.)
• setting up wiki articles or wiki Talk: pages to help the community more easily collaborate on community territories - the Gobras City collaboration page is an excellent example of a “blue” territory collaboration page.

The mapper’s challenge:

• Easy - spend 25% of your July OGF time in somewhere “blue”
• Medium - spend 50% of your July OGF time in somewhere “blue”
• Hard - spend 100% of your July OGF time in somewhere “blue”

… See full entry

I have been experimenting with an extension to the wiki for about a month now, and I’m ready to present some results.

This extension makes it possible to show tabular information in the wiki which is sourced DIRECTLY from the OGF database. If you set things up correctly, you don’t ever have to maintain a seperate wiki table of objects in the OGF database - you can add objects on the map, “enroll” them in the correct collection, then they will simply “appear” in the table in the wiki.

If you set up the “collection” relation (discussed HERE), and copy the manner of enrolling locations in the collection, with appropriate tags on the locations, you can list locations of any business, organization or agency you want.

It’s quite complicated, and not really for beginners. However, if you’re feeling brave, I welcome people to try it out. I present Ardisphere’s international discount retailing chain Martímart as a working example, HERE.

You can open the wiki page for edit and study the wikicode. You can download a few of the Martímart locations and study them. Please try not to break anything - just look at how it’s put together, but don’t edit them until you’re sure you understand. But then you can copy the way it is all set up and make your own.

One note: for it to work properly, no tags included in the table list are optional - thus in the Martímart example, in order for my “ldata:note” to work and show up in the table, I have to provide a value for each tag for each location. Hence “¡Discuentos impossibles!” as a note at each location.

Oh, and by the way… If you want to add Martímart locations to your country, PLEASE DO - NO PERMISSION NEEDED. Let’s see if we can watch the chain grow without ever having to edit the wiki.

Happy mapping.

This diary entry started as comment on Yuanls’s recent Commonia diary entry, but I decided to give it its own diary spot, to see what kind of comments it attracts. I think the conversation on that diary entry is very productive and valuable, but I wanted to approach the issues raised there in a slightly different way.

The point of entry for this discussion is: how can we better support new users in a way that leads to higher-quality mapping and less inadvertent vandalism? Just this morning, I had to send admin messages to two new users who clearly did not understand where it is OK to start mapping.

Anyway, I think the thing we need to remember is that not all new users are the same. Some have a vision clear in their minds, and the blank spaces in Commonia are what they need - a place to try to realize their vision. With time, they can learn the tools and do a great job creating a new place out of whole cloth, while a place like Gobrassanya feels restrictive. Other new mappers, however, clearly prefer or need a more detailed framework.

When I arrived at OGF, the blue territories existed but there was no waiting period for a new territory. Thus my first mapping was in my first territory. If forced to, I would have contribued first not to Gobrassanya but in trying to build a completely new town in a “blank” place such as Commonia.

I have frequently thought that returning to a “no waiting period” system might actually work out better. The reason the waiting period was adopted was because it was a lot of work for for admin to assign territories to users who by and large would map a few motorways-to-nowhere and then promptly disappear. But… if we could develop an automated system for assigning free territories… OK, I’m just daydreaming. But I’d like to encourage thinking “out of the box” about what I think of as the “newbie problem.”

… See full entry

This is just a short announcement. Last week I made a new “Power User’s Dashboard” on the wiki. I was trying to create an alternative homepage for “experienced users.” I have been very pleased with it. It’s now my home landing page for OGF when I log on.

Give it a try.

http://opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/OGF:Dashboard

Let me know what you think. Is it useful? Any suggestions for additions or changes (keeping in mind what’s technically feasible)?

Regarding the May challenge: I believe I failed - mostly due to lack of time. Nevertheless, I feel much happier with Tárrases now than I felt before - I have a better idea how it will finally look. You can read my updates at my “bliki.”

Others have made better progress. Comment below or at your own diary entry or wiki sandbox (as Sarepava or BMSOUZA have done) about your results for May.

Luciano’s Mapper’s Challenge #3 - June, 2016

My new challenge is a focus on administrative divisions.

In fact, I’ve already done a lot of work on this, but I’d like to take it further, toward completion.

So first, an intro-level discussion of the administrative divisions of countries.

Most countries have administrative divisions - of many different names, levels, and functions. The list is very long: states, provinces, counties, municipalities, etc.

It’s best to think in terms of levels:

• 1st level: states (US, Mexico), provinces (Canada, South Korea), federal subjects (Russia)…
• 2nd level: counties/parishes/boroughs (US), municipalities (Mexico), counties/cities (South Korea) …
• 3rd level: cities/townships (US), districts and townships (South Korea) …

In the OSM tagging system, these are indicated by the admin_level tag. Each country uses the admin_level tag differently, both in the real world and in OGF (see here for the way some people have deployed admin_level in OGF).

The best practice is to set up relations for each administrative division. I have set up almost 500 administrative divisions in Mahhal for 1st and 2nd levels, and almost that number in the Ardisphere.

1st level divisions are complete in both countries, and not likely to change much. 2nd level divisions are mostly complete, too. What I really want to focus on is the 3rd level divisions, especially in the Ardisphere.

… See full entry

Hi Geoficticians!

I hope everyone is having a great Northern-Hemisphere-Spring-Southern-Hemisphere-Fall.

Last year, I created our wikipedia-style Main Page for our wiki, with its “featured” sections. At first, I updated each of the featured sections every week, and later I transitioned to doing so once a month.

Recently, I have been neglecting this aspect of my work on OGF, and I think it is time to say I would like to focus on other projects and priorities in OGF.

So I am hoping we can find one or more volunteers to take over the curatorial responsibility for the four “featured” sections of the Main Page. You don’t need “admin” privileges on the wiki to do this job - I created the new Main Page before I joined the admin team.

The main things that are needed are:

• 1) A basic-level understanding of the concepts behind markup (i.e. HTML and wiki-markup)
• 2) A willingness to learn how to do the updates - your first update might take a few hours, since you’ll be learning the process.
• 3) A willingness to commit about an hour of your time for each subsequent update - if you update once a month, that’s one hour a month.
• 4) A willingness to try to be diverse, fair and objective in choosing materials to feature
• 5) A desire to contribute to the OGF community and make a great “gateway” for new visitors
• 6) In the event that we have more than one volunteer, you need to be willing to work well with each other (i.e. share responsibilities, etc.)

I have already created some very detailed documentation for how to update the “Featured Article” section. I will try to add documentation for the other sections when I have time, but I think it is less necessary, since all the “featured” sections follow the same pattern as the “Featured Article” section - so once you understand how to update the “Featured Article,” understanding how to do the other sections is fairly easy.

Here is the documentation for how to update the “Featured Article.”

… See full entry

Sorry that this new challenge is a little bit late. I have been very busy offline, and have set a new record, this past week: I haven’t opened JOSM for 6 days straight. That seems like a record for me, since discovering OGF.

Luciano’s Mapper’s Challenge #2 - May, 2016

Some mappers are very good at focusing on a specific area and mapping it to an extremely complete level of detail. This challenge will probably be useless for those kinds of mappers. But for me, and I know for many others, it can be hard to find “focus” and hard to really, truly complete a given area. It’s too easy to flit around the map, working on various things, and never really reach a sense of completion with a given area.

Arguably, the ONLY time I’ve really, truly completed an area is with my little Ardispherian exclave of Sarangdo. And that was more than a year ago, now, and further, it still could use more work.

So the challenge for the month of May is to try to concentrate on mapping on a single area. I would say maybe a maximum of 100km²(which is the size of a compact city)

The challenge has two levels.

• Advanced Challenge: for the month of May, ONLY map in your chosen, focused area. There is always more to map. If streets feel complete, work on buildings. If land covers feel complete, work on naming things. If building outlines are complete, work on putting detailed information about shops, banks, schools, etc. You can go into micromapping, adding housenumbers or sidewalks or traffic lights and turn lanes.
• Easy Challenge: for the month of May, chose some smallish area that you consider well-mapped and more-or-less complete in a way that you like, and try to reach that same level of completeness for your working area.

… See full entry

Well, I’m a little bit late closing this out. I ended up extremely busy this past weekend, and spent a new record minimum amount of time on my OGF hobby - less than an hour.

Let’s hear the results!

I know BMSOUZA kept a record of his challenge progress here - a very inspiring idea:

http://opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/User:BMSOUZA/Sandbox/Mapper_Challenge

Seeing his idea, I “blikied” my work on the challenge here:

http://opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/User:Luciano/Bliki

I achieved the advanced challenge, I think, with only two “highway” tags the whole month, and both were “highway=pedestrian” so I don’t feel too guilty.

Everyone else, post your results, thoughts, achievements, etc., in comments.

Coming soon: May challenge!

A draft of contours for my city-state of Tárrases (off the coast of Mahhal) has gone “live.” There are some small artefacts of the conversion process, but overall the result is quite pleasing. More contours for Mahhal coming soon!

http://opengeofiction.net/#map=12/-64.0216/98.3949&layers=T

Happy mapping.

Several users have asked about contours, and there have been discussions before.

I have made a “contours discussion” page in my sandbox, which users may consult.

http://opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/User:Luciano/Sandbox/Contours

For a while now, I have had this idea of creating a “Monthly Mapper’s Challenge.” I think it could be a way to challenge ourselves and develop our map-making skills in OGF.

So I have decided to give a try at creating one.

Luciano’s Mapper’s Challenge #1 - April, 2016

Many people would agree, OGF has too many roads. I don’t mean in absolute terms - clearly, the real world, as seen in OSM, has even more roads than OGF. What I mean is that the proportion of roads to other objects is too high. Much of our world has almost ONLY roads. So I decided to make my first OGF mapping challenge about roads - or rather, anti-roads.

The challenge is simple. For the month of April, try to concentrate on mapping things other than roads.

By roads, I mean any use of the “highway” tag, (except perhaps highway=pedestrian, highway=path, highway=footway, or other non-automotive uses of the tag).

The challenge has three levels.

• Advanced Challenge: for the month of April, create NO new roads in your territory; focus on other objects: rivers, lakes, coastlines, land cover, building, schools, churches, anything you want.
• Medium Challenge: for the month of April, for each road you create, also create some other non-road object. You don’t have to keep exact count, just try to emphasize other objects.
• Easy Challenge: for the month of April, create at least one interesting feature for your territory that has no roads; examples could be a nature reserve or conservation area, an island or neighborhood that bans automobiles, a botanic garden or zoo, etc.

This challenge is on the “honor system” - no one is going to check the accuracy of your claim. If you are interested in trying this challenge, just leave a note below, in the next few days. At the end of the month, we can make another diary post to see how poeple did. If there is a lot of interest, we could do “challenges” every month, and maybe make a wiki page to record results.

… See full entry

I won’t take up a lot of room here, but I have posted a technical discussion of JOSM, osmconvert, and “polygon format files” at the wiki:

http://opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/User:Luciano/Sandbox/Help:Polygon_files

Happy mapping.

Since I had the day off for the Lunar New Year holiday (Year of the Monkey), I decided to complete the creation of Commonia’s 1st level political divisions. Commonia now has 75 “constituent regions” - I conceptualize the country as having a kind of “assymetric federalism” in the style of the Russian Federation.

Since the main map doesn’t update often at low zooms, I made one of my “polygon overlay maps” so people can take a look:

http://opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/User:Luciano/Sandbox/Polygons/CO-adminlevel4

Since Commonia is a “blue” territory open to all, none of these choices are written in stone. If you don’t like something, you are free to change it. However, please don’t change things “just because” - try to have a well-thought-out reason, or some interest in the territory in question.

Hopefully these relations can be maintained despite newbies working the territory - everyone is invited to help out if you notice something amiss.

I made up almost none of the names. I would surf across the map and choose names from towns or other mapped objects placed by various users, and apply them to the regions. The borders in many areas are completely made up, however - and in several areas I added some major rivers to give some shape and reason territories.

Only in a few areas did I find substantial “legacy” boundaries to work with, but in those cases, I tried very hard to respect them.

Only in some blank areas did I make up names. I tried to give the country a wide cultural diversity. To commemorate the start of the “Year of the Monkey” I named a fairly empty southwestern state “Annosimia” - Latin for “Year of the Monkey.”

Happy mapping!

Can geofiction cure cancer? Probably not. But it makes surviving it more enjoyable, maybe.

Two years ago, on this day (Jan 31), I joined Opengeofiction. I had just finished a major cancer treatment a few months before. In surviving my cancer, I am thankful to five main groups of people:

• 1. My friends and family, in their many different countries - for supporting me emotionally
• 1. My colleagues, coworkers and my generous boss - for making it possible for me to undergo treatment without losing my job
• 1. The amazingly efficient Korean healthcare system and the kind doctors and staff at the National Cancer Center - world-class care, and cheap, too
• 1. My students - for keeping me intellectually and socially engaged and demonstrating the promise of humanity
• 1. OGF - for providing an escape from dull hours and discomfort, with its endless distraction in imaginary places

I’m posting this here because of number 5.

In June, 2013, I had been diagnosed with stage three cancer. I had undergone major surgery, a month-long hospitalization, and two months of radiation treatments. I was weak, I had lost 40 kg, and my chances of survival were still only 50%. I had returned to work only part-time, and was unable to be as mobile or as active as I had been before - I didn’t have the same stamina to go hiking every weekend. I had a lot of chronic pain and a lot of time to kill. I needed a new hobby.

OGF rescued me. In my teenage years I spent my time drawing many, many maps, all on paper, of imaginary cities, countries and planets. All sorts of worlds, from fantasy to sci fi to “parallel Earth” styles. I decided to try to “recover” one of these old maps in this new, digital environment.

… See full entry

Lately, I have seen a lot of people worrying about coastline edits “not showing up on the map.”

Both the “admin” account and my personal account see a few messages every day, lately, asking “where are my coastline edits!?”

So rather than trying to keep answering those messages, I will post a reminder here.

The “render” - the program that makes what you edit show up on the map - is divided into parts. The “coastline render” is a separate part from other parts. As a result, if you make an edit involving the coastline - for example, you build a new little seaside town, on some new islands - the result can be temporarily strange, if the main render and the coastline render run at different times. You will see your new island town, but sitting in the water, because the coastline hasn’t rendered yet.

Recently, the coastline render has been very slow. This is due to the large amount of work the coastline program has to do, and admin’s efforts to make the best use of limited server resources. As a result, the coastline update can take a long time - even several days. Once I waited a week for a coastline edit to show up on the main map.

Also, it can look strange, because each “zoom level” of the map might render at a different time. So you might see your new island at zoom 15, but not at zoom 14, etc., for a while. And it makes our continental “floods” (when someone breaks the coastline) weird (only flooded at some zoom levels, for example) and harder to fix (because the coastline render is delayed, so a “flood” might be the result of some mistake someone made many days ago).

All of this is nobody’s fault - it’s just the situation with the server, right now.

Please be patient.

… See full entry

Earlier today we had some down-time… I’m not sure why but it seems to have recovered.

Since I had planned on working on OGF during that time, I started messing around with my most recent downloaded backup file (dated 12/31).

There are some interesting utilities that can be used to manage OSM data offline, in order to get manageable data sets in OSM format (or other formats). The two tools I use all the time are osmconvert and osmfilter.

OSM format files can be edited in JOSM and uploaded later, but these utilities have other abilities too.

Out of curiosity, today, I decided to get some statistics on our current OGF map, and make comparisons with my country, Ardisphere (abbreviated FA). I made two OSM files - one was for the entire OGF planet and the other was using my FA polygon file (.poly) which gives me a .osm file limited to my country’s borders (roughly).

I found that the OGF planet file (uncompacted .osm) is currently about 4.05 GB, while the Ardisphere, alone, is 618MB.

“Wow,” I thought. That looks like the Ardisphere, a relatively tiny country (about the size of Uruguay) on the world map, accounts for 15% of OGF’s data volume. I guess I’ve drawn a lot of nodes! I’m nowhere close to finished, either.

As a point of comparison, OGF’s entire Western Hemisphere, where only vandals and admins dare map, is approximately 65MB.

As another point of comparison, the REAL WORLD .osm file is 46 GB, so our imaginary world has less than 10% of the data. Meanwhile, Uruguay’s .osm is 342MB, and Switzerland’s is 3.6GB. Hmm. Ardisphere has twice the data as its real-world counterpart, while tinier but well-mapped Switzerland is almost the size of the entire OGF planet.

Both of the files I made, OGF.osm and FA.osm, are much too large to edit in JOSM - my desktop computer will crash on .osm files larger than about 100MB. I have other polygon files of smaller areas for if I’m making an extract for editing.

… See full entry

I’m really bad at finishing things. I tend to map an area up to a certain level and then move on to some other project. Thus there is very little that I consider “complete” in my countries.

I surprised myself over the weekend by completing a major theme park in Palmeras Grises, DS, Ardisphere, to a very high level of detail. It’s sort of based on the US “Sea World” locations, but I made sure to make it different from those parks in layout and detail, too.

Anyway I’m quite pleased with it.

MundoMar!

Happy mapping.

no subject

I have created a first draft consolidated Geolympiad Games Bid page.

Now anyone can bid for any given games, winter or summer, in one place. We can “close” bidding and voting after some minimum number of bids and/or votes are received. I am tentatively recommending 2 minimum bids, and 20 minimum votes total, or 10 minimum votes for a single city.

Feedback and comments are welcome - either down below or on the new page’s Talk page. This is meant to be a community project, so other people’s ideas are welcome.

I have created a link to a bid for Tarott, 2008 because joschi81 mentioned he intended to do this. I will probably have my city Villa Constitución do a bid for the 1970s - that seems to fit the developmental arc of the city.

Keep in mind as we develop bids that the games will “rotate” to different continents and regions (to prevent a single region monopolizing the games), so as the tables and bids get “filled in” other possibilities will be constrained. Think about this as you decide when you want to date your city’s bid. For example, since Quentinsburgh, Tarephia, has won the 2016 bid, Tarephian cities should not bid for 2012 nor for 2020.

Después de diálogo con usuario Kalh79, he decidido crear una organización internacional de países de habla “castellanesa” (o sea, española). Cualquier país esté bienvenido a este grupo - visite la nueva página e inscríbese sin perjuicio. Sé que hay muchos hispanohablantes en OGF - ¡trabajemos juntos!

After discussion with user Kalh79, I have decided to create an international organization of “Castellanese-speaking” countries (that is to say, Spanish-speaking). Any country is welcome to join - you can visit the new page and sign up freely. I know there are a lot of Spanish speakers in OGF - let’s work together!

Happy mapping!