Looking at https://opencampingmap.org one might get the impression that nothing has changed.

This is true as far as the general UI is concerned, however quite a lot has been changed behind the scenes.

BTW, I still would like to have prettier site icons. Probably somebody with better graphic skills than mine can help here!

So here is what has been changed behind the scenes:

In the past I was somewhat frustrated that search engines like Google did not find the link to a particular campsite on my map even if there was no better information somewhere else on the web.

Often search engines come up with mostly useless stuff like https://campingspots.info which is basically just a rip of locations from OpenStreetMap data tagged tourism=camp_site providing no further information.

That they did not find the more useful information on Open Camping Map has mostly technical reasons and is hopefully fixed now.

In the past a campsite description like https://opencampingmap.org/de/way/164951603 has been generated by pure Javascript in the users web browser so no way for a search engine to index this description as these usually can not select sites from interactive maps.

So what I did now is generating a static version of the campsite descriptions on the server side using the same code executed only inside the users web browser before. The result can be seen if Javascript is turned of in the browser. So finally this is something a search engine should now be able to index.

My backend is now running osm2pgsql (flex) instead of imposm and a clever setup allows for faster database updates. I also generate sitemaps for crawlers like Googlebot which should then be able to find and index all the campsites shown on the map.

In light of the upcoming virtual meetup on osm2pgsql I decided to write a short blogpost about the top five features I want to see in osm2pgsql.

1. To be able to move my map localisation stuff from PostgreSQL stored procedures to the data import stage I will need the get_bbox() feature of the new flex output driver to also work for relations. The reason is, that I do geolocation aware transcription which would not be possible on relations without such a function. This will then hopefully recover my development of the German map style.
2. The flex backend has a new feature which will allow to pass information from a relation to its members. Currently this works for ways only but would be very nice to have for nodes and relations as well. What I think about where such a feature will be handy is for rendering of site relations.
3. There are many ways to import OSM data into PostgreSQL, but if the target database needs to be kept up to date with osm there are only two options left. These options are imposm and osm2pgsql.Unfortunately there are features which are not available on both applications. Currently imposm will need rougly half the storage size osm2pgsql uses for updating. The main reason for this is the usage of LevelDB which might also be an option for osm2pgsql.
4. Another feature which imposm provides is support for generalized tables for rendering low zoom objects which would be nice to have in osm2pgsql as well.
5. Finally I would like to see support for geometries to be stored in TWKB format which will help to further reduce the storage size of production databases.

I am the Maintainer of the German Style OSM Carto fork and operator of http://tile.openstreetmap.de for a couple of years now. Usually I try to follow upstream releases as fast as possible to make sure that the fork keeps as close to upstream as possible.

However, back in March OSM Carto v5.0.0 has been released which requires a reimport of the osm2pgsql database. As doing this is a lot of work for my small two-server setup maintained by a single person I decided to combine this reimport with a new Approach for map localization I have been thinking about for some time. The code is designed for the new osm2pgsql Flex Backend introduced by Jochen Topf in February. Unfortunately I did not look closely enough at the Flex Backends documentation. I missed the fact, that the get_bbox()function is currently not available on relations which would force me to disable localization for relations. I decided against doing this for now in the hope that Jochen will add this missing feature to his code soon. If this situation will persist till the end of the year I will likely have to think about another solution, but for now we will unfortunately just have to wait.

When I started mapping the then newly established backcountry campsites in the Black Forest back in 2017, I discovered, that the current mapping quality of campgrounds in Openstreetmap is actually quite poor. Unfortunately this situation did not improve that much since then.

Being active in OSM for more than 10 years now, I also know that improvements will only happen, when there is an appropriate special interest map which will help motivate people to improve tagging.

So here comes Open Camping Map!

It is provided in the hope, that it will help getting mappers to improve the tagging. There is a bugs section and an edit button besides the actual info about a particular site. The Map will likely be of interest also to camping enthusiasts just looking for a site in a particular area.

Some statistics about the current (bad) state of campsites in Openstreetmap. There are about 120000 camping and caravan sites in our database. About 35000 of them do not even have a name tag. Another 39000 of them do only have a name tag and nothing else. Thus about half of the campsite data in Openstreetmap is of no further value than drawing a (sometimes named) tent on a rendered map.

Wouldn’t it be nice to use Openstreetmap to locate a suitable campsite for your next bicycle or hiking trip or just for your ordinary summer camping holiday?

I do think so, thus lets start and improve the map.

This task is even suitable for armchair mappers as most of the campsites do have a website nowadays. Probably I should also think about adding this to StreetComplete or MapRoulette challenge.

Finally here are some issues I came about while coding this map:

• Duplicating campsites as node and way ist not a good idea. Please map the area only.
• Please add at least some contact data to make the data useful for potential customers of a site.
• caravan only pitches inside a campsite should not to be tagged as caravan_site.camp_site=camp_pitch would be a better option.
• I invented a tag called permanent_camping=yes,no,only as it is common on many sites in Germany, that people rent a pitch on a seasonal basis and do not move their caravan for years. There are even sites where this is the only option.

So where will I go from here. I intend to make the map multilingual and probably add more improvement on the next Karlsruhe Hack Weekend. I will be happy about further suggestions for improvements or (even better) patches.

The backend is based on PostGIS and Imposm and the associated configuration is also available at GitHub. It is likely suitable for other POI maps. Thus feel free to contact me if you like to build one! The most easy frontend for such a map will likely be uMap.

Happy campsite mapping!

Following this tweet about a request of localized maps on osm.org I would like to share some thoughts on this topic.

OpenStreetMap is very useful in general, but, for me, is almost unusable in countries with non-Latin alphabets. The best option I've seen so far is this German-named map https://t.co/a6mQGWfY1P. It solves 95% of the problem, but does anyone know an English-named equivalent?

— Laurence Tratt (@laurencetratt) August 31, 2018

My first versions of the localization code used in German style dates back to 2012. Back then I had the exact same problem as Laurence using OSM based maps in regions of the world where Latin script is not the norm and thus I started developing the localization code for German style.

Fortunately I was able to improve this code in December 2015 as part of a research project during my day job.

I also gave some talks about it in 2016 at FOSSGIS and FOSS4G conferences.
Recordings and slides of these talks are available at the l10n wiki.

Map localization seems to be mostly unprecedented in traditional GIS applications as before Openstreetmap there was no such thing as a global dataset of geographical data.

Contrary to my initial thought doing localization “good enough” is not an easy task and I learned a lot of stuff about writing systems that in fact I not even wanted to know.

What I intend to share here is basically the dos and don’ts of map localization.

Currently my code is implemented mostly as PostgreSQL shared procedures, which was a good idea back in 2012 when rendering almost always involved PostgreSQL/PostGIS at some stage anyway. This will likely change in a vector tile only tool chain used in future. To take this into account in the meantime I also have a proof of concept implementation written in python.

So what is the current state of affairs?

Basically there are two functions which will output either a localized street name or place name using an associative array of tags and a geometry object as input. In the output street names are separated by “-” while place names are usually two-line strings. Additionally street names are abbreviated whenever possible (if I know how to do this in a particular language). Feel free to send patches if you language does not contain abbreviations yet!

Initialy I used to put the localized name in parenthesis, but this is not a very good idea for various reasons. First of all which one would be the correct name to put in parenthesis? And even more important, what would one do in the case of scripts like arabic or hebrew? So I finaly got rid of the parenthesis altogether.

What else does the code in which way and whats the rationale behind it?

There are various regions of the world with more than one official language. In those regions the generic name tag will usually contain both names which will just make sense if only this tag is rendered like osm carto does.

So what to do in those cases?

Well if the desired target language name is part of the generic name tag just use this one and avoid duplicates at any cost! As an example lets take Bolzano/Bozen in the autonomous province South Tyrol. Official languages there are Italian and German thus the generic name tag will be “Bolzano – Bozen”. Doing some search magic in various name tags we will end up using “Bolzano\nBozen” in German localization and using “Bolzano – Bozen” unaltered in English localization because there is no name:en tag.

But what to do if name contains non latin scripts?

The main rationale behind my whole code is that the mapper is always right and that automatic transcription should be only used as a last resort.

This said please do not tag transcriptions as localized names in any case because they will be redundant at best and plain wrong at worst. This is a job that computers should be able to do better. Also do never map automated transcriptions.

Transcriptions might be mapped in cases when they are printed on an official place-name sign. Please use the appropriate tag like name:jp_rm or name:ko-Latn in this case and not something like name:en or name:de.

(Image ©Heinrich Damm Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Correct tagging (IMO) should be:
name=ถนนเยาวราช
name:th=ถนนเยาวราช
name:th-Latn=thanon yaoverat
name:en=CHINA TOWN

So a few final words to transcription and the code currently in use. Please keep in mind that transcription is always done as a last resort only in case when there are no suitable name-tags on the object.

Some of the readers may already know the difference between transcription and transliteration. Nevertheless some may not so I will explain it. While transliteration is fully reversible transcription might not always be. So in case of rendered maps transcription is likely what we want to have because we do not care about a reversible algorithm in this case.

First I started with a rather naive approach. I just used the Any-Latin transliteration code from libicu. Unfortunately this was not a very good idea in a couple of cases thus I went for a little bit more sophisticated approach.

So here is how the current code performs transcription:

1. Call a function to get the country where the object is located at
   (This function is actually based on a database table from nominatim)
2. If the country in question is one with a country specific transcription algorithm go for this one and use libicu otherwise.

Currently in Japan kakasi is used instead of libicu in order to avoid chinese transcriptions and in Thailand some python code is used because libicu uses a rarely used ISO standard transliteration instead of the more common Royal Thai General System of Transcription (RTGS).

There are still a couple of other issues. The most notable one is likely the fact, that transcription of arabic is far from perfect as vowels are usually not part of names in this case. Furthermore transcription based on pronunciation is difficult as arabic script is used for very different languages.

So where to go from here?

Having localized rendering on osm.org for every requested language is unrealistic using the current technology as any additional language will double the effort of map rendering. Although my current code might even produce some strange results when non-latin output languages are selected.

This said it would be very easy to setup a tile-server with localized rendering in any target language using Latin script. For this purpose you might not even need to use the German Mapnik style as I even maintain a localized version of vanilla OSM Carto style.

Actually I have a Tileserver running this code with English localization at my workplace.

So as for a map with English localization http://www.openstreetmap.us/ or
http://www.openstreetmap.co.uk would be the right place to host such a map.

So why not implementing this on osm.org? I suppose that this should be done as part of the transition to vector tiles whenever this will happen. As the back-end technology of the vector-tiles server is not yet known I can not tell how suitable my code would be for this case. Likely it might need to be rewritten in C++ for this purpose. As I already wrote, I have a proof of concept implementation written in python which can be used to localize osm/pbf files.