Captions provided by @chaselfrazier and @whitecoatcapxg.
      >> All right.  Everybody, welcome to the 11:30 show.  We are your hosts.  Jon Schleuss and Omar Ureta.
      "Let’s get LA on the map!: The Los Angeles Building Import Case Study."
      By: Jon Schleuss, Omar Ureta, Alan McConchie, and Maning Sambale.
      >> My name is Jon Schleuss, I'm a reporter and graphic at the Los Angeles times, we use maps in a lot of our work every single day, and we need life OpenStreetMap.  Right now I just did the search before we started, and we have about 700 or more maps that we've done in our printed newspaper.  So, like, what other newspaper prints open stream map for things like locating homicides and body found here or, you know, what land development issues are happening here?
      And then we had 10,000 mentions on our website for OpenStreetMap, which we use a lot for homicide and things like that.  So my interest in OpenStreetMap how can we use OpenStreetMap for journalism and better our maps for journalism, and how can I find data in there to tell stories?
      >> And my name is Omar Ureta, I'm a designer at a architectural firm and our office we use OpenStreetMap to build connect 3D models in our work.  On the side, I do -- I'm also an organizer for the Los Angeles chapter map time.
      >> And have fun.
      >> Yeah.  Pretty much.  But to that, we're going to talk about the Los Angeles Building Import case study, the import team really consisted of a lot of people.  Four people that really kind of contributed effortless is Jon Schleuss, myself, Andrew in the back.
      >> He's in the front.  This is Mapbox style some tiles that Mapbox created that looks like Pokémon Go, and ours was we had to catch all the buildings, all the buildings on the map, which there are quite a few.  We're going to start with a quiz first.  Can anyone tell me what area we're looking at?
      >> New York.
      >> New York.  Yeah.  Great.  Okay.  And New York, this is all buildings.  There's no else on this map.  Just buildings.  And New York had 1 million buildings and 900 addresses in 2013 and 2014.  So we're going to make it harder.  Which one's this one?
      >> Chicago.
      >> Yeah, Chicago, mentioned not here in Germany very sad, he mostly did a lot of this in 2013.  What about this one?
      >> Seattle.
      >> Seattle where we are right now and some other great people helped do that import and build community around that.  That was in 2013 as well.
      Okay.  Getting harder.
      >> Portland.
      >> Portland.  Yeah.  Good job.  These are all the Portland buildings and that was done in 2014 and it had buildings and addresses and building types like presidential-type buildings.
      >> This is the really hard one.  These are just buildings.  Anyone?  Okay.  Well, I've got to tell you.  It really upsets me that they're on the map before Los Angeles.  This is Bakersfield.
      [Laughter]
      And I'm really upset about this.  Four to six years ago.  So this is what Los Angeles looked like at the beginning of this year.  These are the buildings.  A few clumps around downtown, east Hollywood is a big block that I did, and I feel really bad if anybody came behind me and changed some of the buildings because I didn't use on S syntax, I apologize, I am in the church now, I am aware of the rules, and I thank you for being really nice about it because only OpenStreetMap contributor for a year now.
      >> And myself a hit-and-run mapper as they call it, and I did this area of downtown L.A.  So how did this get started?  This is going to be broken down in a couple of parts.  Also edit on OpenStreetMap wiki.  We're going to talk about how we planned it, how we got into mapathons and some of the steps that pushed forward into the community in the Los Angeles area.  And I started in 2014 with Ken Schwencke, and he published all county outlines to the whole county.  That's 3 million buildings with heights and elevation attributes into it.  And he just posted that there on the wiki.  And sort of just kind of lingered around.  And then some guy who, like, was a hit-and-run mapper like myself discovered TGIS and the data portal was, like, oh, my god there's all of this data and OpenStreetMap.  And then at that point I thought all of this building outlines, L.A. doesn't really have, like, buildings on there at all.  I'm, like, I'm going to take it further and kind of get people start contributing.  So I kind of contributed in August of 2014 and then what actually kind of started it off, I guess Alan had some black magic mechanisms that monitor OpenStreetMap.  I uploaded a bunch of buildings and then just pop out of nowhere and made contact with me.  Saying he's going to help with building import in September of 2014, and then he actually introduced me to map time L.A. and that sort of is a segue for these to start this really awesome group that is supporting individuals.  So this is how it started.  We use OpenStreetMap wiki to sort of set goals, schedule, importing the data, use that area to talk about how we're going to get this kind of thing going.  GitHub is another platform we used in terms of determining what attributes, like elevation high data.  We also initiated and talked about stripping.  And the cool thing is we were trying to merge -- data tested the building outlines and at these points and county also had and building information, which is information that was acquired by the L.A. County assessor.  The assessor has information like what type of building it is, how many units too and, well, the cool thing was, like, when -- what year were these buildings built?  So we tried to get all of this data together generate OSM files and then in the import guidelines discuss the OSM community on list and find out what we're doing is okay.  And then we can get the go-ahead to upload OpenStreetMap.
      And it kept -- with the effort we sort of forked from the New York effort.  You've got to realize there's a lot of imports being done already, and it's really cool especially on GitHub, I think most of them, where you can sort of, like, take on and -- you'll have to start from scratch.  You can build off the efforts, and you can actually build off on our own so far in terms of, like, doing efforts in New York City.  And then at that point we started to cite what attributes we had because we had maybe, like, what?  50 columns?
      >> Yeah.  Should we add swimming pool.  And then equivalent and then we did scripting and testing.  And this is the information that's available now.
      >> Yeah.  This is the famous Hollywood and vine intersection.  There's a really good Starbucks there and trader José.  But this is a particular building, an apartment building, so it came through with all of this different information, all the red arrows are the things that came through the import.  Already information there, the addresses, and the name.  But they came through with the apartment as a elevation 155, height 38 and then the AIN, which is the assessor information number which allows us to track the property and then the building ID number, and it was built in 1925.
      >> And then we sort of planned it out, and it kind of just, like --
      >> We hit -- you and I both had full-time jobs.
      >> And Alan.  We just kind of lingered off.  So we kind of snoozed it a little bit.  And then somehow maybe about five months later, this individual was right next to me started complaining about sort of like not having enough buildings in the area.
      >> I was, like, what the hell, man, it sucks.
      >> So he joined in July 2015 and this awesome individual started going into the nitty-gritty of the dataset in terms of the online.  This is the city of Pasadena.  Pasadena had somehow was tracing the awnings of the balconies.  But what's really awesome is they push it further.  After it was sort of slowing down, they picked it up in terms of scripting and programming.  And we actually ended up moving -- using these three datasets.  L.A. city, L.A. County, because it -- 2014 updated dataset in terms of the buildings.  We were using 2015 and the 2015 local assessor.  And the OSM files are going to be served through a server that's going to go through a custom task manager and go to Java and check it out and all of this stuff.
      And then a quick note if you didn't see that, we didn't add any addresses.  Alan made this graphic in terms of identifying, like, there's these multiple buildings, I don't know if you want to add to that.
      >> Yeah.  It's just a mess.  It was, like, if we talk about addresses and debate whether gear import or join address nodes to the building shapes, we were going to delay this project for, like, another year or two, and it would be this monstrous thing.  But, for instance, my neighborhood, my building, I live in an apartment complex that's five buildings, each with four units.  And each of them have a unique address.  Well, all of those in the GIS from county they come in as nodes that are stacked right on top of each other.  So you have 20 nodes on top of each other, and it's, like, which one do we assign to which building, and it became this nightmare, like, we don't know.  Let's just start buildings and then move on.  I'm the let's get it done kind of guy.
      >> Yeah.  And he -- so he ended up merging the data and file sets together, and he handed them off to Manny, they actually helped in terms of tag matching for the scripting and breaking them into groups.  You broke up a whole dataset into senses --
      >> Yeah.  Senses block groups.
      >> So that they could be handled by task managers, everybody who uses a task manager can use the buildings and upload to Java and OpenStreetMap.
      >> Yeah.  So, you know, just -- it's really important to say that this effort wouldn't have started, like, when it did in April without the help of Mapbox.  Mapbox was a huge help in getting this rolling.  And manning approached us.  They really want to push and improve the map, so they're looking in different communities so they're, like, let's focus on L.A.  And then they decided to reach out to us and then use us for local support.  So the really nice thing is that they -- they wanted us to be, like, kind of the locals to be kind of running the show so that Mapbox could come in and do the validation, do -- help kind of push the import forward.  Because after you import 100,000 buildings, you get kind of tired of it.  Like, I got really tired.  So it was really great of them to jump in and do that.  So big props to them.
      >> This is we're talking about 3 million buildings, broke it into four phases.  To start seeing if this does work and scripting works in the real world setting, we started doing one big part -- one smart of L.A. the City of L.A. and after phase one was done, we updated documentation, checked for any outcomes and sort of how can we -- and people misinterpreted the import guidelines, we went back and updated the documentation.  Once that was updated, we went to the rest of the city of L.A. and now we're sort of finished right now at this point with the city of L.A.  We're moving now into importing the rest of the county.  Except for Pasadena of course because their dataset is really, really --
      >> They're ugly.  I hate it.
      >> They're behind.  So now we're sort of like letting the building again.  This is how using an import as a way of engaging and bringing people into the individual street to familiarize themself with the platform itself.  The building import is really cool because it's like a window of opportunity you could say in terms of bringing people a local interest over the street map.  And we brought the map in terms of -- and this is something based on the development guide in terms of creating a mapathon.  We got ourselves together so it's a peer effort.  One group it's, like, let's learn together.  But if you're not familiar with a street map, how to use it, like a lower OSM technique and developed.  And then let's get it done.  We've done some social media through map time L.A. and man time L.A. was some of the organizers for some of these mapathon and events also tutorials letting people know how to use.  So we started -- I don't know which day.
      >> Yeah.  I think it was March 31st was our first -- this is April 2nd, this is Saturday, this is the Los Angeles times.  We hosted three different mapping parties, and I will host so many more.  But we started with the JOSM training on March 32nd, but then we had other parties and then another import party at the L.A. Times and then another import party and then another one.
      >> And then another import.
      >> And then taught how to do 3D modeling.
      >> If you see an image, people kind of just vanished.
      >> And one of the comments we got was, like, John, there's only so many times you can call it a party.  Because it's a lot of work.  It's, like, it's work.  You know?  And we were graciously donated pizza, so did L.A. Times.  So we -- we were chugging along and making it happen.  But it was a lot of work.  And that's what my coworker was also complaining to me.  And I was, like, well, if you drink while you're doing it, it's, like, more fun; right?
      [Laughter]
      >> So, you know, around this point we had imported a lot of the buildings and Omar and I sat together and we were, like, well, why are we doing this?  We're both math geeks but why?  Why are we doing this?  So we hadn't really defined that.  Like, oh, we'll just do the buildings and the map.  So we sat down and kind of came up with this list.  Like, bring users in OpenStreetMap, trying to have the map, prepare for disasters, there's going to be a big earthquake that's going to hit Los Angeles and if there's a building dataset already there, they could use that to then tag particular buildings as destroyed or damaged or red tagged or deficient.  To improve the Los Angeles times maps like I said we use these maps, so it's a really helpful thing for us as well.  And to encourage more.
      >> So these are sort of the basics of what we're thinking about in terms of what value this dataset could be used for the general public.  We're actually open to other suggestions as well.  Because these are some of the very basic stuff that we came up with.  And based on this kind of collaboration in terms of, like, why are we really doing this?  We started the documentation under the book the tasking manager we updated something, like, why are we doing this?  Sort of these things and we started doing some more social media stuff on our Twitter account the map time on our Twitter account and one other thing too, we started map time and map time L.A. chapter, we started doing tutorials, like, all right.  So we had map parties, we're importing them, contributing data, but we should also have, like, how do you use it if you can make maps with it?  Like, bringing more the community and sometimes these things are, like, use OpenStreetMap to crowd source the map.  We had a night like that.
      And we actually had map time hikes.  We had these hikes where people would use some of the OpenStreetMap tools to go out and hike and mapping things and pull tutorials in terms of making that stuff.  And here we help and making a tutorial in terms of making 3D models on the tags for local street map.  This is one that just did the uploading some of the buildings all of that we started with these kinds of things within our neighborhood.  So it's a compliment, contributing and then adding and making maps out of it.
      >> Yeah.  And there are some things that need to be ironed out.  We had to cleanup this import.  I don't think it's going to be that much work.  We did a lot of work on the git go on.  But there are certain things pointed out by a great community and locally.  Condos weren't correctly labeled as houses, so we have to go and fix that, and garages incorrectly labeled as houses.  And then buildings on a parcel, so, for instance, there was one example of a lifeguard stand that was a building on the beach, and it was, like, heavy industrial.  And it wasn't actually.
      [Laughter]
      So we have to cleanup that.  But they're small.
      >> So what's next?  We're trying to look for ways in terms of, like, experimenting with the developing continue interest in this and involvement.  And sort of the method that we're developing in terms of hosting mapathons injunction with these tutorials this is what you can do with it.  These are the maps that you can make with it.  And then sort of branching out to, like, other professions of other people that can come in, especially with the technology we come down such a low -- a really easy bar to get into.
      >> Right.
      >> So they sort of coincide with the ticktock, five minutes left?
      >> Uh-huh.
      >> Awesome of -- intel has something, like, one year they're going to, the next year have made going to speed up the processors.  So sort of applying that in terms of, like, ticking it in terms of, like, adding, contributing work to the street map, data, what have you.  These are some of the items that we're going to continue on right after the imports.  There's a huge list of when the national, state, and local register places that I mean it's sitting on a lot of websites and that we can start, like, with buildings that we have.  You can add that information in there for that kind of effort.  And then talk, which is making stuff with it.  Experimenting with the OSM data tools.  Making field trips, hikes, meeting in different areas.  A lot of times meeting groups are being held centrally located.  Like, us, L.A.'s huge.  And it takes many moons to get to Santa Monica.
      >> And that's if you have a car.
      >> That's if you have a car too.  Although now we have a transit facility.  But it would help us bring people together.  And promote it through finding Windows of opportunities, especially with the recent earthquakes.  There was one small earthquake that spooked L.A. and we're always spooked when something happens.
      >> If it rains.
      >> Yeah.  We started doing something -- we had some buildings map our neighborhood in terms of, like, what earthquakes would do and stuff like that.  John Kingdon said we can use OpenStreetMap in the newspaper.  I think it's experimenting reaching to other groups, specifically journalists.
      >> Uh-huh.
      >> And utilize it with the street maps.
      >> So these maps that we -- this is New York, everyone.  The colors here are actually color coded.  So anything that's white is building equals yes and building that's yellow is building equals something other than yes, sir.  And this is L.A. today.  There's a lot of cool metadata that we're adding to the map we hope you're excited about.  We are.
      >> These are all the users that contributed and added to the street map and the discussions.  So thank you very much.
      [Applause]
      Any questions?
      >> Thank you, guys, for this very good talk.  And I have a question.  The first question is how to communicate in the local community.  Like you said, you know, can be miss aligned so how -- what was the best, you know, communication platform you guys used to let people know okay.  We're doing this.  We have mistakes.  Could you help us?
      >> The big -- one of the tools for communicating was GitHub.  We got some communication through that.
      >> I also spammed a whole bunch of people on OpenStreetMap.org to the point where I almost through out a script to write messages out in mass.  Because I wanted people in the local community that this was going on.  To know that their data may be changing.  So just a lot of copying and pasting marked down files in OpenStreetMap saying hello, this is John, again, can you please, you know --
      >> I see.  So that happens on the OpenStreetMap forum; right?
      >> Right.  In the website as well.  Just, like, go to users page and hit send message, a lot of that.
      >> Cool.  Cool.
      >> And same question about the data sourcing you guys have whether it's a solution to extend to other cities in the U.S.
      >> Well, we -- a lot of the stuff we talked about, it's well documented on our GitHub page.  It's OSM -- actually if you just go L.A.buildings.com, that's where our import effort is going through.
      >> L.A.buildingsimport.com.
      >> Or just Google it.  You don't need to go to dot-com.
      >> All of this is documented and you can fork it over -- or you can contact us.  We contacted people in New York to get guidance in terms of what they did.  So it's a matter of reaching out to those individuals.
      >> Hi, do you -- I work for the county here and participated in some of the import for the Seattle area, and I'm curious.  Are you -- some of the people I worked with probably did reference that materials that you're talking about for New York and stuff.  But I'm curious how the on going effort will go and whether or not you -- there is a way -- an effort to abstract the process and improve -- like take what you've done, and I'm sure you've distilled some of your documentation and stuff because it all starts as a mess and then matures sort of.  Is it -- does it make sense to have a project that's a guide nationally or, you know -- so you're telling us to go to L.A. project, but it started as a New York project.
      >> Right.
      >> Will this things come together as a unified system, documentation kind of thing?
      >> All depends on the community; right?
      >> Yeah.
      >> If he can all get together, we can do this.  Trying to branch out just from Los Angeles because, you know, at the L.A. Times we talk in terms of Southern California and California.  So we're thinking, like, one of our future projects is let's talk about the buildings in Orange County.  Orange County just to south of us, doesn't have a GIS organized group.  At least they don't have them on a data portal, so they've got individual cities there, so we're going to investigate their data, see how good it is.  It could be really bad and we don't want to import it.  So we just want to go through those processes again.  But there's really great import documentation on just how to -- the guidelines on the OSM wiki for any import.
      >> And do you have ways to pitch back to the community organizations or government organizations how they can leverage what's going on?
      >> Yeah.  Already -- we did a lot of conversations with mark who is this great guy at L.A. County, GIS, and I've been talking to him a lot, and he's interested in the 3D modeling aspect of it.  How can the county use that in terms of doing those kinds of geo -- what is it called?
      >> Extrusion.
      >> Yeah, there you go.
      >> And we have one more question.
      >> I just want to say thank you, guys.  So I'm from Miami, and we're actually replicating, you guys have really beautiful documentation.  You may sell yourself short and be, like, yeah, we're still working on our documentation.  But our initiative, we're modeling after you guys.  So we're several months obviously behind you guys, but you're allowing us to leapfrog significantly.  So we're hoping to emulate a lot of the decisions that you guys have made.  I want to -- so, yeah, that's the shameless plug.  I'm actually giving five I'm doing a five-minute lightning talk about the basics of the Miami initiative.  But I want to ask specifically on a more technical note about your decision to not join the addresses.  We're obviously facing that same choice, and we've kind of tentatively decided to go ahead and move forward with those cases where there is a clean one to one relationship with the addresses and the buildings.  And I just wonder, like, what was your guys' calculus for determining that.  For those that are not a one-to-one relationship, we're going to put them in the manual inspection that we also learn from you guys are going to divide up into block groups.
      >> Right.
      >> So if you could just expand upon that and thanks again.  This is really awesome.  I was recording the whole presentation, even though I know it was being recorded as well.
      >> It's being typed by this really awesome guy right here.
      >> Yeah.  From Southern California.  So it was more of a technical thing there.  And now that I've had a year to think about, like, what my interpretation of mapping is, I have, like, questions about whether an address should be attached to a building, should an address be attached to a building or to a doorway?  What's -- should be a node or should it be attached to a way?  There are two questions there that are going to stop us from doing it.  And we got -- we had to have some momentum or we would have just crashed.
      >> And I think it goes to, like, there is no one template.  To your question.  There's no one template to sort of talk about what you're going to import because you have varying datasets, you have varying people with interest.  And then the culture itself with each city.  Each country you could say.  There are certain countries that they prefer having an import a certain way.  And it could be, like, language and how we speak to each other in terms of the words that we use that sort of has different meanings, you know?
      I think there was some issue where some of the, like, we were talking about these trails, these types of trails in England where they were reworded differently.  I think something like the statement was kind of alluding to.  But in some countries, like, certain trails was named differently, and it was tagged differently in the middle of the country.  And there's a conflict in terms of how to use the words of meaning utilized, which is interesting.  So there's no one template.  It's just readapting this template, but I think the effort is still the same.  But the cool thing is that the documentation's on there, and you can sort of take pieces of it as well.
      >> Thank you very much, gentlemen.
      >> Thank you, guys.
      >> Thank you, guys.
      [Applause]