A rookie’s learning pathway to geo-mapping with OpenStreetMap
Towards the beginning of this year, I was putting together a list of resolutions (which I seldom commit to, I must admit). One of my personal goals for this year is to learn geo-mapping. This was inspired by my love for everything tech and data, and also by the amazing work of many people in this space I have come to know and befriend over the last couple of years.
So, around 2 months back, I finally began the first leg of this journey — starting small, learning one thing at a time and striving for continuous progress. This blog is a culmination of the resources that I found incredibly useful throughout this learning process. I have listed them in the order of successive learning progressions, and this learning pathway is just one of the many that might work for different people.
https://mapgive.state.gov/ : This was the first website I landed on. If you want to understand why open map data is important and how it can make a difference in the world around us, this is a great website to start with. It also has a number of great resources on geo-mapping for beginners.
https://mapswipe.org/ : Now, getting started with geo-mapping may seem to be a bit overwhelming, which was definitely the case for me. Thankfully, someone from the Missing Maps team (if I correctly remember, his name is Sam Colchester) based out of London introduced me to this really cool mobile app called MapSwipe. This is a great first step towards understanding maps. Familiarity with technology is no barrier here with this app. It presents to you mini-snapshots of aerial imagery of different areas, divided into small blocks and all you have to do is to select the blocks in which you can spot a building or a road, depending on the requirement. This then provides a way for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team to extract areas from massive satellite imagery data that need to be specifically looked into for various geographical structures of interest. You can download this data for offline mapping as well. For a couple of days, this became my favorite passtime. I was basically using this app every time I got a couple of minutes to kill. It’s a really simple application and whether you come from a technical background or not, you can very easily get started with it.
http://www.missingmaps.org/ : When you want to take your mapping skills a notch higher, this probably is the best place to start from. There are multiple tutorials right from the beginner’s level to make it super-easy for you to start mapping. The Missing Maps community’s work worldwide is super-inspiring and they host various map-a-thons every month, which makes it even more fun to sit together with a lot of other passionate folks and learn from them.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page : Now, Missing Maps did provide me a solid start to mapping. I felt some of the resources on the OpenStreetMap’s wiki really augmented that learning and helped me in understanding more technical specifications.
http://tasks.hotosm.org/: If you want to get your hands dirty with mapping, while helping the humanitarian teams in their work, this is the place to be. I started with the in-browser iD editor which is super-simple to work with and I was so excited that think I ended up adding close to 3000 edits during my first night of mapping. The tasking manager has various tasks with varying degrees of urgency levels and complexities, and you can pick up the one that best suits your interest and capabilities. I started with the rather simpler ones where only buildings were to be mapped, and once I got comfortable I moved on to mapping roads, waterways, etc.
http://learnosm.org/en/josm/: While the iD editor is simple, it’s capabilities are also limited. A more advanced alternative is JOSM, or Java OpenStreetMap editor. It can be a little bit overwhelming and requires a bit of tech-savviness, which I why I kept working with the iD editor until I was sure that I can pick up the new challenge of working with JOSM. The LearnOSM website gave me a really good start to editing in JOSM. If you want to understand the difference between iD editor and JOSM, you can refer to this page from OpenStreetMap’s wiki or this help-page.
https://www.mapbox.com/mapping/ : This is a yet another great website to learn some advanced mapping concepts. It has some really useful guides for specific aspects of geo-mapping with OpenStreetMap.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb9506_-6FMHULD9iDUAh-4qpxKdVspnD : Just last week, I came across this playlist by HOTOSM on learning to map. I have gone through a couple of videos already. The videos are small, specific to a topic and very easy to follow.
This is how far I have gone, and I do not intend on stopping anytime soon. Mapping is fun, and I would love to learn as much as I can!
Just to brag a bit, here’s a snapshot from my Missing Maps’s profile. Those badges definitely motivate you to keep going (talk about incentives for techies!)
There are a couple of more resources which I found useful during the process of learning:
- http://blog.cartong.org/2016/10/05/josm-first-steps/
- http://maptime.io/lessons-resources/
- https://hi.stamen.com/openstreetmap-past-s-openstreetmap-future-s-cafddc2a4736
- http://fieldpapers.org/about.php
In terms of future progression, besides honing my mapping skills, here’s a list of topics that I want to learn going forward:
- How to map using Android smartphone
- How to map using Fieldpapers
- Validation/invalidation in OpenStreetMap
- Maps and computer vision https://www.mapillary.com/
- Writing OpenStreetMap services https://medium.com/@duizendnegen/writing-a-custom-openstreetmaps-service-with-docker-468a4498fb6e
- Learning about OpenMapKit http://openmapkit.org/
- Get source data through OpenStreetMap https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog585/node/739
I was interested in knowing if there are any specific curriculums or syllabi that have been designed around geo-mapping and I found some interesting ones listed below. Though I haven’t gone through these in detail, it was quite exciting to know that there are well-defined learning structures around geo-mapping. I would like to dig deep into these in the near future.
