Beyond the seventh mountain, beyond the seventh river - Openstreetmap as a base map in geographical research

Room: Tsavo Hall

Sunday, 15:30
Duration: 20 minutes (plus Q&A)

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  • Paweł Struś

Openstreet map has for a long time been treated as a road map, enabling you to find a route between two points, as well as an information map, gathering various points of interests. Together with students of the UKEN University from Krakow, we decided to look at the use of OSM as a environmental map also showing the transformation of space by humans.

The speech is the result of exercises conducted by employees of the Geoinformation Research Team and students of the UKEN University in Krakow, Poland. The basic assumption we made is that OpenStreetMap can be sufficient as a data provider for various geographical works - as a base map for field exercises, as an almost complete environmental database for some compact area (such as an island or a national park). After reviewing the list of tags describing the geographic environment in OSM, we knew this would be possible. We have selected several research polygons, which we call cartographic polygons. These include the Peljesac Peninsula in Croatia, the Aegean Coast near Thessaloniki in Greece, the area around Lake Inari, the Lemenjoki National Park in Finland, and the wild Bieszczady Mountains in Poland. We selected the training fields so that they were both places with nature close to natural conditions and places significantly transformed by human activity. Usually, these were also important places for some key reasons - for example, on the Peljesac Peninsula, a bridge was built to facilitate communication between the two parts of Dalmatia. Not all places were visited, but we have collected cartographic material for all of them. Before each trip, we trained a group of participants on how to use and supplement OSM. Each participant set up their own user account. Field work consisted of completing the content of OpenstreetMap as accurately as possible - groups of two people were sent into the field and, using the OSMAND or EveryDoor applications, they inserted all interesting objects on the map. The rest is small-scale work - tedious verification and editing of the map in the JOSM editor. Each stage of work was also preceded by a thorough analysis of official OSM tags - which constitute information about all elements of the natural environment. It was found that the best represented features were those related to relief, land cover and hydrology. In particular, the content regarding land cover (down to a single tree and bush), and the richness of descriptions of relief forms (OSM WIKI, Glossary of landforms) allow the creation of appropriate thematic maps - landcover maps and geomorphological maps.

The principle adopted in JOSM is that we complete the map to the highest degree of accuracy possible using available data and processing capacity. For example, we supplement the terrain coverage for Poland from the available official orthophotomap from the national geoportal with a terrain resolution of 5 cm. The distinction between land cover types is made by students of higher years of geography, so there should not be too many interpretation errors. What information is completed on the map? As for the relief of the land - valleys and valley types, rock walls, erosion undercuts, landslides and landslide niches. When it comes to hydrological elements, using scientific publications, we entered the exact location of the sources (along with a description of water chemistry and name, if this data was available). An additional module of our work is urban micromapping - We check how accurately we can supplement field data so that they can serve two purposes - for students and spatial planning specialists in the analysis and inventory of urban space, and for people with disabilities as a base for accessibility maps used in applications, e.g. blind . For this purpose, we carried out tests of terrain mapping using a geodetic GPS receiver (STONEX 900A). We chose the area on the campus of our university due to the presence of the remains of an old water bed supplying water to mills and a city moat - a lot of unevenness, steps, suddenly ending sidewalks, etc. Additionally, we have also started work on old housing estates in Krakow’s Nowa Huta district - inhabited mainly by older people, and therefore often beneficiaries of all programs regarding the availability of public facilities and apartments. Approximately one thousand points were measured in the above locations with an accuracy of 2 mm - 1 cm. In further stages, they will serve as the basis for the point cloud made during unmanned aerial vehicle raids. A number of additional works were also carried out as part of the project, e.g. wild waste dumps in the Ojców National Park were mapped and marked (we will most likely use the tag amenity=waste_dump_site)

All work on the project resulted not only in a significant improvement in the quality of the OSM map, but also in the training of a large team who, in their free time, complete OSM data in their area. Both the intimate and field parts of the work are still in progress. We will complete the work by the time of the presentation in Nairobi. This is our beginning in the work of OpenstreetMap, but we would like to use our previous experience in completing OSM data in various places around the world in many task programs, e.g. for UN Mappers and HOT OSM. Best regards form Poland.