Behind the Scenes of the Mapen Targeted Editing Series."
   by Indy Hurt
   Live captioning by Norma Miller.
   @whitecoatcapxg
    
   OK, on to our next session, this is Indy who's going to talk to us about Mapzen. I have a background in geography, I've actually been studying geography for nearly to years, I can't believe it's been this long. I've attended many of the schools in Southern California that are geography and while I was at UCSB, I remember being a good child writing a paper about citizens as centers and we did a lot of study about OpenStreetMap at the time and I thought, wow, this is really interesting and I wonder if I'll ever come across this again and like here I am now and this is what I do for a living is do a lot of work with OpenStreetMap data and the community. So I'm really excited to present to you a series of blog posts that we have at the Mapzen, at Mapzen on our website.
   So a series, well, what exactly is this series to begin with for those of you who may not be familiar with a targeted editing ceric it's a series of blog posts and it features a location in the world that we're highlighting, but it's meant to encourage people to edit anywhere in the world and we're trying to keep on a regular schedule and the best laid plans always get changed of my idea of let's make a post every third Thursday or every third week of the month and it just never really kind of works out that way and so I'll tell you a little bit about the madness in the background that causes the schedule to be crazy.
   It includes some statistics, usually just summary statistics telling you how many of a particular feature is present in the data, whatever we're highlighting. And it includes maps. Everybody loves a map. And these maps highlight the features that are presented as part of the post. And what we really wanted to do is give people a venue to edit, so we've linked those features iD and JOSM so it's really easy to find those features and edit them. And we are in company so we're not definitely the only entity that has been trying to engage editors. We've been inspired by so many other efforts. Map roulette. I'm so addicted to that you can go to map roulette and lose two hours and it's like oh, my God I'm glad I'm paid to do this. But there are a lot of initiatives that are trying to get people to edit and if you want to know how many we have, well, we have 13 posts in the series and the very first one was in December of 2015, and it was the streets without names. And it highlighted segments of roads that did not have a nametag and then we've had several others that were related to points of interest, there were some that were related to different types of routing and different areas of search. I really encourage you to check them out. They're all the quite interesting.
   But before I get further into this talk, you're probably wondering, like, what's the motivation? Why start a series of a blog posts that are trying to get editors to identify specific features within OpenStreetMap? And what we've discovered, and it's well understood, that a lot of the new editors that are coming to OpenStreetMap are coming from areas that are very heavily edited. It's like you get started and you're like, wow, what is there for me to edit? It just seems like everything is already represented. And so if your first introduction to OpenStreetMap looks like this, you click the edit button, you're like, wow, oh, my goodness, this is very intimidating, but the reality is that there are so many things left that would benefit from an edit, and a lot of these things are things that don't show up from a rendering perspective. They could be extra attributes or extra tags, like for business, it could be the address. It could be the type of cuisine if it's a restaurant. It could be additional things like websites or URLs, or it could be names. It could just be that there is a building and it doesn't have a name.
   So this top -- this talk is broken into three categories of -- that contribute to making the targeted editing series, I call them the three Ts, the topics, the tags, and the tiles.
   So if we start with the topics, it's really easy to get lost, because there are so many tags. If you are curious about how many unique tags there are in the OpenStreetMap database, it has exceeded 80 million, I believe, the last time I looked on -- at the statistics for the tags. It's overwhelming. But we decided let's just break this down into use cases and if we're looking at routing, display and search, we can definitely bucket different types of searches to encourage people to edit. So if we start with routing, we might have things that are related to transportation, like driving, we might have things related to transit or bike riding, and the first thing that we thought would be a really straightforward thing to encourage people to edit were names. So we call it the streets without names, but it's really the street segments without names and we also want to give people some understanding of how this characteristic of the data is used for in different applications.
   So as you know, if you're -- if you have a routing engine and you're doing turn by turn routing and you happen to turn on a segment that that particular segment doesn't have a name, then all you get is, turn right in 500 feet. And it would be so much better if it said, turn right on Smith Street or whatever the case may be.
   So as we highlight those roads that or those segments of roads that don't have names, it starts to look very overwhelming. This happens to be New Delhi, and you're probably thinking, is that right? Are there really that many segments that don't have names? That seems crazy. And it does, but on the surface, it's -- there's so much positive here that it's hard to envision if you just look at it on the surface. What you really have to do is break down to see what types of roads are missing those names on the segments. And so if we break that down and on this graph I'm just showing the primary roads, and the motorways, which are the highest level roads, there's just a small percentage of those, of the total kilometers that are missing the names. So we're actually doing quite well in this particular subset of cities in Asia. And I have quite a few more cities also in Europe and in North America that are being reported on a -- in a blog post that I encourage you to check out. So once we've talked about our routing, we also have some opportunities to encourage people to edit things that are more geared towards display.
   And these things, you would think, would be very accessible. People recognize how this might change the map for positive purposes. And here I have this really great example of a convention center in Portugal. I don't know how washed out this is for those of you that are sitting halfway back and beyond, but it is just incredible. It's so well mapped. The thing that really makes it stand out is that it has a polygon around it. It has -- it has the parking areas, it has the walking paths. It really stands out on the map. And this is the OpenStreetMap default rendering, and you can see it in one of Mapzen's tile sets. This is called bubble wrap, this particular style, and it's not as impressive in my opinion as how it's rendered in OpenStreetMap, but it still looks incredible. If we take a look at this in another rendering package or another set of tiles, it kind of looks like, wow, it's missing. Actually, it's not. It's there. It's just represented as a point, and so you can see that if you enhance a feature by adding a polygon, like digitizing the buildings or digitizing the grounds, it adds visual prominence to that feature on the map and this convention center in Portugal ask really well known and a lot of people travel there to attend trade shows. So in our post we wanted to highlight some of those features so in this case we had a post where we encouraged people to edit schools that were only represented as points and we wanted to highlight those schools because it's hard to tell that they doesn't have a polygon. So we can highlight those, and we did the same thing with hospitals and you can see here that interacting with people that are editing based on the targeted editing series and inviting myself to their homes because they live in amazing places and they're doing amazing things by helping to edit features in OpenStreetMap. So these are examples of the types of things that we're trying to encourage when we think of edits that contribute to display. And people search for everything. Predominantly it's addresses and venues. So you might be looking for that great coffee shop that is going to expose you to Seattle's best. You might be looking for a place to ship because you've picked up so many t-shirts in the last couple of days, you can't fit them all in your bag. You might be looking for a building. Does anybody recognize either one of these buildings?
   Somebody says the empire state building. How many of you are familiar with the empire state build snag.
   >> OK, keep your hands up. How many of you know the address? To the empire state building?
   >> Oh, OK, I see your geo coder. She is sitting in the back row. You see what I mean? You really need to have the names of features. You can rely on this young lady here to tell you where the Empire State Building is or you can add the name so that people don't have to rely on the address to get to these features. So popular posts. These are the success baby posts. There's something that they have in common, they all involve highway tags. Now, maybe this is no big surprise, because it's OpenStreetMap but it's really exciting, people really care about the road network in OpenStreetMap. So what you're seeping in those columns is the views, it's the unique visitors to the blog post. That is like collected with Google Analytics and then the tiles is the number of tiles that were served force these maps, so this is saying people came to the blog post and they actually interacted with the map, they searched, they dragged the map around and they edited things. It's protein-of-pretty exciting and unfortunately we have this one here. These topics just didn't do very well. I don't know if it's just that for stadium parking we don't have a big sports contingent within OpenStreetMap editors. I don't know if people just are bored with airports, polygons, or if you just don't care about money, but these posts just they didn't have as much traction, so it's an interesting thing to think about. What do people want to edit, what kind of features do they relate to? So if you're interested in the entire set, this graph is interactive and you can access it from our website. It's part of a blog post that's about the targeted editing series and while you can't read it very well, the reason why I put this up on the slide is because I want you to see how -- there's like a trend up and down. It's overall the series is something that people are interested in and interact with, just some posts are more popular than others. And the dotted line that's going across the chart is the time on page. Like how much time are people spending reading about the particular features that we're trying to introduce them to and some -- there are some surprises. As you would suspect, the highway tag post got more time on page, but then if you a few really jump out, like the fitness centers and the hospitals. People spend a lot of time reading those posts, which I'm very grateful for or it could mean that they're much more difficult to edit than I expected and there was a lot of back and forth trying to figure out like, what do I do for this hospital? So it's a really interesting way to look at the data.
   So now we have these posts, you have an idea of what the targeted editing series is about, how do we identify what to highlight in those maps? Well, it has a lot to do with the tags, and if we look at this one example for a travel post that we had, the first thing was, well, let's highlight hotels. And so you start on the OSM wiki and you just type in hotel and it will find the wiki page that describes how to tag these particular features.
   And that's the thing that we want to communicate to the users. Here is the way that the expected way to tag a hotel. So we find these tags. But the thing that you have to understand about OpenStreetMap is that the tagging scheme is very heterogeneous, there are many ways to tag things, and you'll see that at the bottom of any wiki page in OpenStreetMap, there's usually a link to tag info and you can click on that and you can find other variants, so in this case, I did that, and I thought, OK, amenity equals hospital, you really shouldn't tag things this way, but I know that it's very common, so let me just see how many examples there are. And I'm going through and I'm like, oh, look at this, there's one with 700 amenity equals no hotel, and maybe -- I put it in the query. I mean it's -- somebody might go there for a vacation, so I don't want to leave anybody out, but you have to go through tag info and find these different tag variations.
   >> And this is the adventure, it's like going to an amusement park. It's ups and downs and the next thing you know, you have this pile of tags and you compile them all together and you're like, I'm ready. I think I have the whole collection of things that represent places you might stay when you go on vacation and what do I do with these now? So this is where the tiles come in play. I have to deliver mySQL to tiles and Mapzen team because the tiles at Mapzen only have a sub set of the OpenStreetMap data and if I'm going to highlight something, I want to make sure the features are there, so once I give queries to the tiles people they're great because they often identify if I miss something. And if I'm really lucky, I mean this almost never happens, I might identify something that they're not aware of and then' the hero for the day. So when that happens, it totally throws off arrased schedule. So they have all these different tile sets that I can choose from, and I cheese zinc. There's another one called refill and I love refill. It reminds me of stamen's toner if you're familiar with that map style. You know, it happened to be developed by the same cartographer, her name is Geraldine, she's fantastic, but at the time when I started the series, the refill style had less tag features in it than zinc, so that's why we went with zinc, but zinc is amazing, it has this great crisp gray gradient shades and it's really going to help me highlight the features that I want to highlight. So if I have these roads here and I want to highlight the segments that don't have names, I'm trying to think of what's a great color, obviously the first thing that comes to my mind is red. It's gray, the red, it really pops, it looks amazing, this is how I want to start my blog post series, I want to have these maps with the gray and the red. And the more I worked on it and the more development I did, I realized that this is not the message that I want to send, because I don't want to send the message that it's wrong and red communicates something negative or something wrong or stop, and that's not what's happening here, because yes, these segments don't have names, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they have names in real life. It could be a place where -P the population relies more on the locality as opposed to the actual street name or it could be that it's digitized as a dual carriageway where there's actually two representations of the road and one of them has the name on it and the other one doesn't. And so red is probably not a good choice to go with. So that's how we ended up switching to aqua. Now, aqua, as you can see, it's very similar to cyan, and a lot of people that start out in OpenStreetMap editing have a little bit of GIS background and cyan ask a very common color used to highlight features, so I figured this will be something people can relate to. It pops, it's bright, it matches well with the gray. OK, this is the way we're going to go so I'm really happy I took some time to think about it before I put out a bunch of maps with red highlighted features on them. So once we have the map in place and we're able to highlight the features based on the SQL, to make sure they are on the map I want you to be able to mouse over the features and get a little popup that will allow you to access an editing environment and so that's what you're seeing here, there is some wizardry between me and a few engineers at Mapzen, spread out over the west coast, east coast, it was a collaboration that we had running, one we wanted you to be able to edit in JOSM and also in iD, but also, what happens if you're look many looking at this map, you're looking at the top right map where we're trying to get you to add gyms or like fitness centers and you say hey, you're missing a gym that's next to the funky door, it's -- it's not there at all. What can you do? So we wanted you to be able to shift click anywhere on the map and still be able to add in missing features. And we have a lot of developers that use our tiles and those folks really care about the data itself within the tile. So this data here, it's a vector tile and the topo JSON is there. People want to see exactly what's happening in that particular tile, so if you option click the map, you see the topo JSON, so if you're into that type of representation of the data, we wanted to make that available, as well.
   So this is what will happen. You click on one of those links, and not only does it take you to iD, in this case that was the link I chose, it highlights that same segment that you hovered over in the previous map and this was something that was really important to me, because as you saw in the very first slide or the second slide, there were so many things to edit, it was overwhelming. I don't want to just send you to the coordinates in the map, because you'll spend a whole lot of time trying to reidentify the feature that didn't have the name. This way it's already highlighted for you and you can easily add the name and save and you've contributed to OpenStreetMap. We've seen a tremendous growth in each one of these features since each one of these posts were published and while we can't say how many of though edits have been attributed to the targeted editing series, we can see we're really excited to have been a part of the process of inspiring new editors and old editors by making it easier to see the unseen. So with that, I wanted to provide you with all of the links. If you go to the very top one, Indy Hurt.gitHub.io and scroll to the bottom of the page, I'll find a link to all the slides and in addition, there's a whole blog post, so for those of you who give talks and you're like, oh, what if I forget to say something, I'm so less worried about that because there's blog post and you can read all the details. And I'm Indymapper on Twitter. Please send me any details after the presentation if you don't have your question answered today. Thank you.
   >> OK, we have about two and a half minutes for questions.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Thank you. Good presentation. As I improve Rail infrastructure and transit routes, I found and discovered your very intriguing transit colors. Like in San Francisco, particularly on Market Street you've got BART subway at the bottom, you've got muni light rail still underground and on top of that. And on the surface level you've got tram routes. What's your router supposed to do when it gets multiple layers on top of each other? Do you render the most recent one that got changed? How is that supposed to work or look?
   >> So that's an excellent question. It's how do you display things that draw on top of each other. And right now we don't have any way to spread out those 6 lines on market so that you see the red line, the blue line, the green line and the black down all going down the same road, but the exciting thing is that we are working on that and we're working on it in two separate teams in Mapzen. We have Transitland, we have Meghan Hade who is actively working on a rendering engine to display those different colors so they don't draw on top of each other and we also have the tile zen group. It takes a little adjusting of the data like you need a cartographic representation on top of the real representation to be able to spread those lines out and provide a rendering alternative.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  So would it be like a 3D view? 
   >>Well, the 3D view would be quite interesting for the stations, the substations. I think we might be quite a ways off from that, but the ability to shift them so that they display as a row is something that we're actively working on.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Thank you.
   >> You're welcome.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I was going to ask, when you showed the statistics for New Delhi and the primary and the motorways, the percentages, did you just not include the percentages of residential roads that didn't have names or -- I mean that was -- you only had like two colors represented there, but, motor way and primary, I thought.
   >> Oh, no internet.
   >> For the slide, it only included just those two, and I clicked off the other ones in the graph. But if you go to the blog post, you'll be able to see all of the different road types or just the ones that I chose, which is residential, tertiary, secondary, primary, and motorway. And it's quite interesting. In all cases, I looked at 45 cities across the world, the percentage of unnamed segments, the total kilometers, was always highest in residential. And of course we care about the residential roads, but at least the highest-order roads are usually well represented with names. Yeah.
   >> OK, we're out of time. Thank you, Indy.
   [applause]