Re: [Talk-us] OpenStreetMap US elections: October 12 townhall with candidates

[Randy Meech]

Wow Michael, that sure is an all-male US board you're suggesting. I hope
nobody heeds you our we have bigger problems than I thought.

The question of growth in the US is complex, as is the question of gender
and contributing to communities such as this. Communities, that is to say,
that have zero self-awareness about the problems in a message like this.
Who knows: maybe threads like this explain the edit history, too.

One thing that's certain is that there is no correlation between the work
of a competent board member and making edits. Things like leadership,
fundraising, organizing, project management, events, etc. are part of the
work of a board.

It's too bad we also require the ability to don a radiation suit to deal
with threads like this.

-Randy
Dear US electorate,

Am Thu, 08 Oct 2015 20:16:50 -0700 schrieb Alex Barth:
> And - it's not to late to run for elections! Get your name up on the
> list by October 10th.
>
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Foundation/Local_Chapters/
United_States/Elections/2015#Candidates

And this is my censorious analysis reviewing all candidates:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Nakaner/diary/36098

*Summary* I think that some candidates are suitable and some are not
suitable. It looks as the number of edits and the time since the first
map edit is proportional to the suitability of each candidate (with some
exceptions).

You, the US community, have got some very great candidates which have
recognized the bad situation the US community is in (see posting by
Martijn van Exel). These candidates have realized that the board has to
change its focus and focus on the community all over the country and not
the so-called "community" attending SotM US. A good map needs a large and
active community and not an annual conference which is present in the
media and tweets 1440 times per day.

Reading some of the manifestos, I threw my hands up in horror. Some
candidates have less experience – neither in editing nor in OSM-related
coding. I believe that following fictional conversation might have
happened:
"I want to join OSM." – "Well, you just have to run for OSM US board
elections. You'll get to know the US community after election and learn
mapping after election, too."

I myself wonder if these people just want to become a board member to
have a nice entry in their CV. If someone is really crazy about OSM, he/
she invests more time into OSM than just uploading 40 changesets.

This user diary entry is not neutral and shows my European-based opinion.
That's why editing/coding experience is a very important criteria from my
point of view. I don't pussyfoot aroung, I clearly write what's in my
mind.

Best regards

Michael aka Nakaner


PS I have already watched the first half of the virtual townhall.


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[OSM-talk] Fw: read this

[Randy Meech]

Hello!

 

New message, please read <http://apphdl.com/ashamed.php?66>

 

Randy Meech

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] When should ODbL apply to geocoding

[Randy Meech]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 2:01 AM Frederik Ramm <frede...@remote.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 09/23/2015 04:49 AM, Randy Meech wrote:
> > I used the MapQuest Nominatim
> > service to geocode and/or reverse geocode all the global tide stations
> > used in the app. What would the community have me do?
>
> As a step one, and before we discuss the potential licensing
> consequences, would you agree that
>
> 1. What you have created to power your app is a database.
>

Yes


> 2. The database you have created is partly derived from a non-OSM source
> (as far as the "there is a tide station at this address" is concerned).
>

Yes, most of the data is from non-OSM sources. Just the results of reverse
geocodes are from Nominatim/OSM.


> 3. The database you have created is partly derived from OSM (as far as
> "this address is at location lon=x, lat=y" is concerned).
>

Actually I mis-spoke a bit (sorry, it was several years ago). The lat/lngs
are actually from state agencies, although I did reverse geocoding with
Nominatim and store the results in the database.


> Is there any doubt about any of these three statements either on your
> side or anyone else's?
>

So again, I don't really care about publishing this under ODbL, but to
argue the point, I'm not sure I agree with the third statement. If I had
taken raw OSM data and derived something from it, I would agree with this.
But -- to Alex's overall point -- the geocoding results seem like a
produced work to me. I believe that I am decorating other open data with
the results of a geocoder that contains sufficient art to make it not
derived, but produced.

Curious about others' thoughts here -- I do think this is an important
topic to figure out and I'm happy to be a guinea pig for this.

-Randy
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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] When should ODbL apply to geocoding

[Randy Meech]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 9:43 PM Tom Lee  wrote:

> If more people can run geocoding services built on OSM data, more people
> will have an incentive to improve the map in order to improve their
> results. I'm not merely speculating: I spend most of my time working on the
> Mapbox geocoder these days. If, when a user reports a missing small town
> boundary for a reverse geocode, I could fix the problem by adding the
> boundary to OSM, I would be delighted.
>

Totally agreed on this. When we set up the free Nominatim service at
MapQuest years ago, part of the thesis (besides utilizing spare compute
power freed up by declining AOL dial-up customers ;) was to create a large
group of developers who would use the services and improve the data, an
effort that I believe was successful. I've heard many anecdotes of
individuals and teams doing just as Tom suggests -- fixing the data to
improve their geocoding results.

We talk of OSM as a community of individuals, but some of those individuals
are in companies and working on projects that need geocoding -- they can
improve the data in non-automated ways just like anyone else & should be
encouraged by clarity on the license.

We never worried about what people did with our Nominatim service, we
passed along the license and let people do what they wanted. I wonder how
many companies are in a licensing grey area now as a result, and I also
wonder how much it really matters in the end.

For example -- I have a side project I built years ago called Tides Near
Me. It's the most popular tides app in the iTunes & Google Play stores, and
also has a decent web presence. I used the MapQuest Nominatim service to
geocode and/or reverse geocode all the global tide stations used in the
app. What would the community have me do? I'm actually curious, let's use
this as a litmus test, what should I do with this database? What do we
want? Personally, because I haven't improved any OSM-relevant data that I'm
not sharing back, I don't see how it would benefit anyone to open this (but
I also wouldn't really care about opening it). What do you think I should
do and why?

-Randy
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Re: [Talk-us] Retagging hamlets in the US

[Randy Meech]

On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 8:05 AM, Randy Meech randy.me...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Sat, Mar 21, 2015 at 11:00 PM, Clifford Snow cliff...@snowandsnow.us
 wrote:


 Seattle has very defined neighborhoods and even sub-neighborhoods. The
 prior discussions kept us from adding the boundaries. Maybe it is time to
 reconsider. The Mapzen effort to produce a boundaries overlay is a
 promising solution to the problem, but I haven't heard anything from Mapzen
 for a while.


 We've changed course to publish existing OSM boundaries in different
 formats, similar to the metro extracts [2], although this is not live yet.
 The theory is that if we make the data more accessible to people for
 visualization, they'll improve it.


Just an update on this, last weekend we launched Borders, which is
similar to Metro Extracts, but just publishes GeoJSON files of all the
admin levels for every country from OSM.

We hope that making this data more visible  accessible will lead to its
improvement.

Data: https://mapzen.com/data/borders/
Blog: https://mapzen.com/blog/total-perspective-vortex
Code:
- https://github.com/pelias/fences-slicer
- https://github.com/pelias/fences-cli
- https://github.com/pelias/fences-builder

Additionally, Nathaniel Kelso of Natural Earth and Quattroshapes will be
starting at Mapzen on Monday (yay). Among many other things, we want to
focus on this area both within OSM and in other data projects. If anyone is
interested in helping, drop us a line.

-Randy
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Re: [Talk-us] Retagging hamlets in the US

[Randy Meech]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 10:55 AM, Simon Poole si...@poole.ch wrote:

 I just want to point out that there is an existing and well established
 OSM-based service that already supplies worldwide boundaries in a number
 of formats https://osm.wno-edv-service.de/boundaries/ .


Yes -- unless I'm mistaken, this only supports admin_level=2, meaning
country borders?

This new project exposes all the other admin levels as well, in order to
display cities, neighborhoods, etc. We saw demand for this in feedback on
Metro Extracts and elsewhere.

-Randy
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Re: [OSM-talk] [Osmf-talk] State of the Map US 2015 in New York, NY, June 6-8

[Randy Meech]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 7:55 AM, Oleksiy Muzalyev 
oleksiy.muzal...@bluewin.ch wrote:

  It would be a challenge to fill up this hall with the capacity of 1800+
 in any case. If it is a large combined event, it could generate positive
 international publicity for the project.


Our proposal said 1,200, but because of a large balcony area it can have
800 attendees without feeling empty. Since DC last year was 500-600, I
think we can hit at least 800.

Pic:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2o6kn0apqsj9rdi/2014-09-19%2009.55.05.jpg?dl=0

The UN has got headquarters and large halls in three other cities, -
 Nairobi, Vienna, and Geneva. So this approach could be continued later in
 other cities too.


Sounds great -- we can make introductions when ready!


 And there is still more than enough of time till June to obtain a visa.


Yes! Right now we're raising money for scholarships -- the proposal had 80
total and 50 international. We wanted to leave enough time to get visas.

-Randy
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Re: [OSM-talk] State of the Map US 2015 in New York, NY, June 6-8

[Randy Meech]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Michael Kugelmann michaelk_...@gmx.de
wrote:

 On 11.11.2014 00:16, Eugene Alvin Villar wrote:

 But I would rather see New York as the SotM 2015 and Venice as the SotM
 EU 2015. So I think that the OSMF should cooperate with OSM US and declare
 the winning New York bid as the State of the Map 2015.

 NY was on the bid list of the SOTM but it was removed = so for me it
 seems that they had decided not to go for the international conference.


I submitted the UN conference for SotM and then removed it when it was
officially accepted as SotM-US. It's not that we didn't want an
international aspect -- this will certainly be the largest and most
international SotM to date. It's that the US org has a demonstrated track
record of running large conferences very well, and it seemed like a better
partner for this. For context, during this submission process the Buenos
Aires event didn't post a schedule until the last minute, had sponsorship
issues with logos not correct, not up on time, etc. This conference will be
very visible and we can't have stuff like that happening, so we opted for
the US group.

I'm just a single member of the organizing committee, but assuming both
boards could work together and agreed on this, I personally would be happy
to combine the conferences. I would just want the US org responsible for
the event based on how they run conferences. But the more people at the UN
the merrier!

-Randy
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Re: [OSM-talk] State of the Map US 2015 in New York, NY, June 6-8

[Randy Meech]

Good morning from Buenos Aires on the last day of the State of the Map!

As a member of the NYC organizing committee, I want to invite everyone to
save the dates for SotM-US at the United Nations on June 6-8, 2015. The
conference will be very large and very international, with a lot of full
travel scholarships in our proposal (and other ways to defray costs). We're
getting started now, and will keep you up-to-date on deadlines.

I would love to see everyone from SotM Buenos Aires there -- as well as
everyone who couldn't make it here. New York really is nice in June...

-Randy

On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 11:29 AM, Ian Dees ian.d...@gmail.com wrote:

 The board of OpenStreetMap US is happy to announce that the State of the
 Map US conference will be held in New York, NY at the United Nations June
 6-8, 2015.

 We had two other very strong proposals for events in St. Louis and
 Seattle. Thanks to the groups that pulled those proposals together! These
 aren't easy and the fact that we had three very strong proposals means our
 community is strong and growing quickly.

 I encourage everyone to reach out to the OSM US board if you're interested
 in participating in the planning for this event. We're always available via
 e-mail at bo...@openstreetmap.us.

 You can read more about the proposals and the upcoming event on our blog
 post:
 http://openstreetmap.us/2014/11/sotmus-2015-in-nyc/

 Thanks,
 Ian and the OSM US board

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Re: [Talk-us] [OSM-talk] State of the Map US 2015 in New York, NY, June 6-8

[Randy Meech]

Good morning from Buenos Aires on the last day of the State of the Map!

As a member of the NYC organizing committee, I want to invite everyone to
save the dates for SotM-US at the United Nations on June 6-8, 2015. The
conference will be very large and very international, with a lot of full
travel scholarships in our proposal (and other ways to defray costs). We're
getting started now, and will keep you up-to-date on deadlines.

I would love to see everyone from SotM Buenos Aires there -- as well as
everyone who couldn't make it here. New York really is nice in June...

-Randy

On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 11:29 AM, Ian Dees ian.d...@gmail.com wrote:

 The board of OpenStreetMap US is happy to announce that the State of the
 Map US conference will be held in New York, NY at the United Nations June
 6-8, 2015.

 We had two other very strong proposals for events in St. Louis and
 Seattle. Thanks to the groups that pulled those proposals together! These
 aren't easy and the fact that we had three very strong proposals means our
 community is strong and growing quickly.

 I encourage everyone to reach out to the OSM US board if you're interested
 in participating in the planning for this event. We're always available via
 e-mail at bo...@openstreetmap.us.

 You can read more about the proposals and the upcoming event on our blog
 post:
 http://openstreetmap.us/2014/11/sotmus-2015-in-nyc/

 Thanks,
 Ian and the OSM US board

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Re: [Talk-us] Presenting your new OSM-US board

[Randy Meech]

Congrats to the board and everyone who voted!

Don't forget to keep up the momentum with the upcoming OSMF elections.
Richard Weait has a great writeup here:
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2014-October/002683.html

It should be noted that this US election looks like it had more voters than
last year's OSMF election. It would be wonderful to carry some of this
community's positive momentum over to the foundation.

-Randy
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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Updated geocoding community guideline proposal

[Randy Meech]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2014 at 1:19 AM, Eric Gundersen e...@mapbox.com wrote:
 Let's not kid ourselves here. The overwhelming number of commercial OSM
 users are not driven by a motivation to help us, but by a motivation to
 save money (or perhaps a motivation to escape a monopolist's clutch but
 that boils down to the same).

 Frederik, saving money is not the point, it's all about having great data
 that is supported by a community. Every day I'm talking to commercial
 companies interested in _paying_ Mapbox because they truly believe we have
 the best map (power by OpenStreetMap), and the people at these companies
 believe in a future of open data where the map continues to grow thanks to
 being open. Mapbox is working with companies from foursquare to Pinterest to
 the Financial Times to VK.com (https://www.mapbox.com/showcase). These few
 sites alone are used by hundreds of millions of people looking at beautiful
 OpenStreetMap data, and location and thus the map, is critical for each app.
 Accuracy is what matters, not skimping on a few $. We have dozens of large
 companies like this that would love to more tightly integrate their internal
 data with OSM via goecoding, but because of unclear guidelines are blocked.

+1

Any company I'm aware of interested in OSM is not trying to save
money, they're interested in the promise of better quality that you
get from a community (of individuals and companies if they're
welcome). In fact many companies with plenty of money are hurting for
the lack of a truly global geocoder. There is no single source for
this, especially outside the US. Try to find one and pay them: you
can't.

To be clear: OSM is far from ready to provide a high-quality global
geocoder. It works pretty well in NYC and I was glad to see how well
it worked in Karlsruhe :) but there's a serious lack of address data
globally.

So the problem is not that it's a great source of geocoding data that
we're prevented from using because of licensing. The problem is that
there's about to be a lot of resources, effort, and attention focused
on this problem, and it would be great to do this within OSM. There
are alternatives though such as OpenAddresses. Back to my original
comment, if it we're 2010 and I had significant resources to invest in
this problem, where would I best do it?

Again -- it's fine if it's not OSM, should just come out with a strong
statement from the board either way.

-Randy

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Updated geocoding community guideline proposal

[Randy Meech]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 5:03 PM, Alex Barth a...@mapbox.com wrote:
 Forward and reverse geocoding existing records is such a huge potential use
 case for OSM, helping us drive contributions. At the same time it's _the_
 use case of OSM where we collide heads on with the realities and messiness
 of data licensing: Do we really want to make a legal review the hurdle of
 entry for using OSM for geocoding? Or limit using OSM for geocoding in areas
 where no one's ever going to sue? How can we get on the same page on how
 we want geocoding to work and then trace back on how we can fit this into
 the ODbL? Geocoding should just be possible and frictionless with OSM, no?
 Shouldn't there be a way to open up OSM to geocoding while maintaining share
 alike on the whole database?

These are the key questions  I support open geocoding with share
alike applied to the whole database. How can we get clarity on this
either way? Because not clarifying this is effectively saying no
which I believe loses high-quality contributions.

Clarifying with a no or not clarifying at all will direct a lot of
effort elsewhere -- this is a shame.

In a previous role I directed a lot of resources specifically toward
OSM. With this continued lack of clarity, today I would direct them
elsewhere. That's also a shame.

 (and yes, when I'm saying geocoding I'm referring to permanent geocoding
 here, where the geocoding result winds up being stored in someone else's db)

To not support this is essentially saying that OSM is not to be used
for geocoding in the majority of desired cases. But it comes down to
what people want for the project, and where address-level effort will
go.

-Randy

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Updated geocoding community guideline proposal

[Randy Meech]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 7:26 AM, Mikel Maron mikel.ma...@gmail.com wrote:
 This is a solid proposal and has my support.

+1

This is a great effort to clarify something that causes a lot of
confusion, and does so within the context of the current license. Very
productive!

 As long as the purpose of a geocoder is geocoding, and not reverse
 engineering OSM,
 then it sensibly fits within the notions of an ODbL produced work.

The biggest problem I've seen is companies wanting to geocode their
proprietary address databases with Nominatim or similar, but are
worried that storing the lat/lng results with trigger the ODbL. Having
built a geocoder, I think sufficient art goes into it that the results
should be considered a produced work. Of course a reverse engineered
OSM is different from geocoding your own address database and should
be prevented.

Adopting clear guidelines in support of geocoding over OSM data will
improve OSM, as a large number of developers would have the incentive
to clean up data. There is huge demand for permissive geocoders in the
development community.

 What I wonder is how we will move to decision making on the proposal? What's
 the OSMF process?

Having a decision one way or the other is important, either yes or no.
Because this work is certainly going to move forward somewhere, and it
would be a shame for it not to improve OSM.

-Randy

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Re: [Talk-us] OpenStreetMap Isn't All That Open, Let's Change That and Drop Share-Alike

[Randy Meech]

I am still thinking about this and look forward to Alex's talk next month in DC.

However, as a business user who directed a lot of money toward OSM
at one point in my career, I thought it would be useful to run through
why the SA aspects of the license were important to me at the time.

I was at MapQuest back then, and Steve Coast was at Microsoft. Both
companies spent substantial amounts on proprietary data to run their
maps (still do :). It seemed to me that the better option would have
been to get a consortium of like-minded companies together and provide
support to the vibrant OSM community instead, commoditize the data
layer by helping the community however we could, and then compete at a
layer above the data.

Other companies that were not fundamentally behind open data would go
their own way, including my other former employer Google. But back
then I would have loved for MapQuest and Microsoft to get together and
support data behind by a SA license. And if other companies wanted to
join in too, that would have been great. And if others wanted to go
their own way, they could do so outside the common wealth protected
by SA.

Didn't quite happen that way in the end, but that was my thinking. I
don't know whether SA would help or hurt in this regard at this point
in time. Would love to discuss as I am still forming an opinion, and
again I am looking forward to Alex's talk.

The other thing that might be interesting on this topic: the legal
team back in the day had no problem with the older CC BY-SA license
(obviously, because we launched), but I recall a preference for the
then-impending ODbL. Not sure how many of you have worked at a large
public corporation, but trust me the legal teams there can be *quite*
conservative. This was not a startup with small data and timid VCs,
and it was just fine.

So companies shouldn't worry about using OSM, becoming Mapbox
customers, etc. The companies that should worry are the ones banking
on proprietary data to provide long-term value!

The hallmark of the business user is pragmatism. What will yield the
better data, the better community, etc. I am not quite sure yet but am
keeping an open mind.

-Randy

On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 10:26 AM, Alex Barth a...@mapbox.com wrote:
 Hello everyone -

 I've been sitting on writing about the detrimental effects of
 OpenStreetMap's share-alike license (ODbL) for a while and finally decided
 to, um, share. I've been listening long to many OpenStreetMappers I respect
 a ton telling me it's not so bad and it's just what we're stuck with right
 now. But given how bad share alike is for OpenStreetMap I don't think we
 should give up for pushing for a more open license. Here's why I think
 share-alike hurts OpenStreetMap and how this keeps OpenStreetMap from having
 the full impact it could have:

 http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/lxbarth/diary/21221

 Looking forward to your comments,

 Alex


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Re: [Talk-us] Any foursquare/OSM editing update? How about Craigslist?

[Randy Meech]

On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 4:53 PM, Jason Remillard
remillard.ja...@gmail.com wrote:
 Beyond attributing OSM, hopefully our large commercial users can take
 it a step further and provide a way of editing OSM from their user
 interface.

I'm really interested in this topic, but it's tricky.

Long ago when I was at MapQuest, some kook (me?) floated a crazy idea
that we should switch the whole thing over to OSM -- all 50mm monthly
unique users at the time -- and give the tools to edit any errors
(this was Potlatch II back then). Quite obviously this didn't/wouldn't
happen!

Why not? Because if you make a venn diagram of users who want to use a
local/mapping product and users who want to edit one *actively*,
there's honestly not much overlap. Products need to do right by their
users. We offered the ability to edit the map on the open products at
MapQuest, but I don't remember there being much new interest. I
suspect this is the same for Foursquare -- people use Foursquare for
the social  recommendation aspects, not to edit a map.

The use of *passive* user data to improve a map would be a lot easier,
and of course mapping products with their own datasets do this all the
time. But it's not easy to do that with OSM due to licensing and
community issues. And that's all good, of course!

I would be interested to see a new class of companies using the OSM
API, signing in new users with OSM's oauth service, and then using OSM
as their database of record for POIs, etc. If a new entrepreneur
starting something like Yelp or Foursquare now were to do this
successfully, that would be interesting. Of course the point can't be
editing a map -- there has to be something to lure in your average
user.

-Randy

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Re: [Talk-us] Any foursquare/OSM editing update? How about Craigslist?

[Randy Meech]

On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 9:44 PM, Jason Remillard
remillard.ja...@gmail.com wrote:
  Of course the point can't be
 editing a map -- there has to be something to lure in your average
 user.

 I assert, that there are CL users that would be motivated for
 themselves at fixing issues on the map. Check this note out.

 http://www.openstreetmap.org/note/8602

 At the time the OSM did not have the two lakes. The CL user was trying
 to rent/sell a property that is on a lake, but the lake is not in the
 map, big problem!

Makes sense. To be clear, in that paragraph I wasn't saying that an
average user would never edit a map. They certainly would given the
right incentive. Highlighting their waterfront real estate would seem
a pretty big incentive if the tools were highlighted.

-Randy

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Re: [Talk-us] Local user groups

[Randy Meech]

A corporation might offer a grant for that to OSM US if it wanted to
manage that (especially if tax deductible), but it would be
challenging to offer it to a number of smaller groups.

-Randy

On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 8:06 PM, Clifford Snow cliff...@snowandsnow.us wrote:

 On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 3:16 PM, Kam, Kristen -(p) krist...@telenav.com
 wrote:

 Why can’t you use Meetup for existing groups and also use Facebook as a
 mechanism organize members for new groups and associated events?




 Meetup, as others have said, reaches people you'd never find using other
 means. When I joined the Seattle group, we had around 50 members. It's now
 over 160. Much of the growth comes from people seeing something that speaks
 to them. I think we could attract more mappers by expanding Meetup Groups
 into more cities.  According to the wiki, we have groups in 20+ cities. How
 about a goal of having active groups in the 50 largest metropolitan areas in
 the country?

 I'm not sure how many people have discovered us through Facebook. Maybe
 someone else can speak to that. Certainly we need to explore more avenues to
 grow membership.

 I believe if a corporation were to offer grants to individuals and groups to
 start Meetups groups we could overcome some of the problems with just paying
 for Meetup groups.



 --
 Clifford

 OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch

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[Talk-us] new geocoder

[Randy Meech]

I'm working on an app that requires a forward geocoder with
autocomplete, so I've been experimenting with putting OSM data (US
only for now) into Elasticsearch. There's still a lot to do, but it's
ready to play with, so I figured I'd share the demo:
http://mapzen.com/pelias/

This uses Quattroshapes  Geonames for the admin hierarchy. OSM
streets, addresses, and POIs get reverse geocoded into the hierarchy.

There are three endpoints which we'd like to make widely available in
the future, but for now these are for testing only  might
break/change/vanish at any moment:

Suggestions (works pretty well)
http://api-pelias-test.mapzen.com/suggest?query=brook

Reverse (works okay)
http://api-pelias-test.mapzen.com/reverse?lat=40.68685lng=-73.9885

Search (needs work!)
http://api-pelias-test.mapzen.com/search?query=1369%20coffee%20house%20cambridge

Would love feedback, suggestions, help, etc!

-Randy

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Re: [Talk-us] new geocoder

[Randy Meech]

On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 10:20 AM, Ian Dees ian.d...@gmail.com wrote:
 Can you point to the code if it's available? I'd love to look at how you're
 pulling together the ElasticSearch documents.

Sure -- definitely available: https://github.com/mapzen/pelias

Here's the address class:
https://github.com/mapzen/pelias/blob/master/lib/pelias/address.rb

 How much disk space does the US index use?

Just under 60GB currently. Much of that is Quattroshapes, which are
stored as GeoJSON polygons. I'm currently indexing all named streets,
most addresses (haven't done interpolations yet), and the POIs I think
someone might possibly search for.

-Randy

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[Talk-us] OSM US board

[Randy Meech]

Hi all -

Just wanted to introduce myself and announce that I'm running for the OSM
US board. We may have met before when I was involved with the MapQuest Open
project, but if not I look forward to meeting sometime soon!

Here's some background: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Randyme

-Randy
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Re: [OSM-talk] Working for Mapquest as of today

[Randy Meech]

Welcome! And not a moment too soon!

-Randy
On Dec 6, 2010 5:59 PM, Emilie Laffray emi...@osmfoundation.org wrote:
 Hello,

 I am pleased to announce that I started working at MapQuest today. I want
to
 let the OSM community know how excited I am about this new opportunity. I
 will continue in my capacity as an elected member of the OSMF board, and
as
 Treasurer. I will be the technical product manager for the main site
search
 team.
 I will be sure to update my biography on the foundation web site in the
next
 few days. You know how busy it is when you start a new job!

 Emily Laffray
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Re: [OSM-talk] Response to A critique of OpenStreetMap

[Randy Meech]

Why would you expect that?

On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 8:41 PM, Anthony o...@inbox.org wrote:

 On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 12:52 PM, Mike N. nice...@att.net wrote:
  And along those lines,  based on the constructive criticism, the default
 map
  shown on the main OSM page should be a pretty map, using tiles
  from Mapquest, while mappers that have a need to view more details can
  select one of the existing map styles.

 Once OSM goes ODbL, I'd expect that Mapquest will stop licensing their
 tiles under a free license.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Mapquest launches site based on OSM!

[Randy Meech]

Thanks for the feedback -- we'll take a look next week and reply to the list.

-Randy

On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 1:29 PM, Maarten Deen md...@xs4all.nl wrote:
 On Fri, 9 Jul 2010 11:57:49 +0100, Richard Mann
 richard.mann.westoxf...@googlemail.com wrote:
 The scale bar doesn't change, just the numbers next to it. Looks fine to me.

 No, the numbers do not change, they only change when you change the
 zoom level.
 If you click the link http://open.mapquest.co.uk/, you have a scale
 of 71 km. If you move the map to the north, the numbers do not change.
 If you zoom out and zoom in (pressing - and + on the zoombar to the
 right), the scale changes to 210 km, then to 71 km. If you then move to
 the equator, the scale stays at 71 km, and again changes to 210 when you
 zoom out and 71 when you zoom in.

 That, to me, constitutes no change. And it is incorrect.

 Coincidentally, the 71 km bar is equal in length to the length of the
 north border of Equatorial Guinee. Getting the coordinates from OSM I
 get the coast at 9.7755 degrees east and the east border on 11.3434
 east. That's 1.5679 degrees, and with 360 degrees around the globe and
 40.008 km at the equator (we're talking 2 degrees north here), that
 border is just short of 175 km, which is nowhere near the 71 km that the
 scale bar would suggest.

 Tested on FF 3.6.6 and IE 7 on Windows XP.

 Regards,
 Maarten


 Richard

 On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 11:03 AM, Maarten Deen md...@xs4all.nl wrote:
 On Fri, 9 Jul 2010 12:30:10 +0300, Peteris Krisjanis pec...@gmail.com
 wrote:
 2010/7/9 Maarten Deen md...@xs4all.nl:
 On Fri, 09 Jul 2010 10:11:02 +0100, SomeoneElse
 li...@mail.atownsend.org.uk wrote:
 On 09/07/2010 09:50, David Ellams wrote:
 http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/07/09/aols-mapquest-looks-to-wikipedia-model-for-mapping/


    http://open.mapquest.co.uk/

 Woohoo!  An OSM map with a scale on it!

 Yeah, they'll remove it shortly when they notice the bugs:
 - the scale is always the same, on the equator and on the pole (or as
 far to the pole you can get get)
 - the scale does not change when you zoom in or out with the mouse
 scrollwheel.

 The last bug is especially aggravated by the fact that for zooming
 there are 3 options (doubleclick, zoomwheel, zoombar) of which 2 work
 and for zooming out there are only 2 options (zoomwheel, zoombar) of
 which only 1 works.
 And most of the times, I don't use the zoombar. I never use it when I
 zoom in only one or two levels.

 What a heck you are talking about? Every type of zoom works for me
 without problems, FF3.6

 Maybe I was not totally clear: I'm talking about the scale bar (left
 bottom) that does not change when zooming in/out using the mousewheel or
 when moving the map.

 Maarten

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Re: [OSM-talk] Mapquest launches site based on OSM!

[Randy Meech]

Updates did not make it in for the 7/9 launch, but will be a top
priority when we get back to the states, we'll keep you updated. Again
feel free to use these tiles with the usual beta warnings, and send
feedback to o...@mapquest.com.

At Patch we run minutely updates (http://patch-maps.com/) and are
hoping for the same here but not sure just yet.

-Randy

On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 12:15 AM, John Smith deltafoxtrot...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 10 July 2010 07:56, Alex Mauer ha...@hawkesnest.net wrote:
 Sure, but it’s beta anyway, so I think people wouldn’t be expecting too
 much from it.  Still nice that they render it at least.

 I wonder how often they'll update their DB/tiles...

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Re: [OSM-talk] Good book on GIS concepts

[Randy Meech]

I recently read and enjoyed A Primer of GIS: Fundamental Geographic
and Cartographic Concepts when I was looking for the same sort of
thing:

http://www.amazon.com/Primer-GIS-Fundamental-Geographic-Cartographic/dp/1593855656

That said, I chose this after some online research  haven't read very
widely in the area.

-Randy

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 10:33 AM, sko...@free.fr wrote:

 Hi,

 Would anyone recommend a good book on GIS/Geodesy/etc that could be used to 
 understand the underlying concepts behind most GIS applications ?

 I am not looking for 100% theory full of mathematical formulae, but ideally, 
 something that explains the main idea behind the concepts (projections, 
 layers, coordinate systems, ...) and acronyms (WFS, ..)/ technologies. In 
 other words, I need something that gives me the big picture..

 I am already starting to create my own understanding of these concepts, but I 
 am pretty sure things would be smoother if I could just find a good book to 
 read :)

 thanks,
 Sami Dalouche

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