Alexander Zeynalov: “You may not even know that you have OpenStreetMap, but it will be it”

Alexander Zeynalov is a system administrator who is one of the “key keepers” of the servers of the Russian OpenStreetMap community. In addition, he has extensive experience using OSM data. What kind of servers this is, how to place your own project on them, and what you should not look for in OSM - he told all this in an interview.

- How and when did you meet OpenStreetMap?

- For the first time I heard about the project in 2007, but two years later, when my friend and colleague Sergey Gladilin “dragged me there” I became a participant . Thanks to him, I not only registered with OSM, but from the very beginning I began to edit the map in the JOSM editor .

- What interested you in the project? Still, drawing a map is not the usual thing.

- I have always been interested in cards. While still at school I tried to map: I took ordinary paper maps and changed their scale from 2-5 kilometers in centimeter to one, that is, I brought it much closer, and began to finish drawing up what was missing. I also had a wonderful and incredibly interesting children's bookabout cartography (AM Kuprin. "Entertaining cartography"), from which I learned a lot. For example, at school they don’t tell much about the Mercator projection , and this book contained information about this. Moreover, everything was stated in a simple and understandable language.

We can say that cards and everything connected with them is my hobby. Therefore, I could not get past OSM. By the way, he attracted me not only by the fact that this is a “pro-map” project, but by his technological side. He has his own technologies, data formats, ways of automating tasks - to me, as a programmer, all this seemed interesting. And it was interesting not just to abstractly practice working with data, but to achieve some result that might be useful to others.

- What was the OSM community in 2009 when you came to it? What happened then?

- Actively drew a map. Then back in Moscow, a lot of things were missing, and what can we say about other places? At that time, only two types of satellite imagery were available for OSM: Landsat (with a resolution of 15 meters per pixel) and Yahoo! (higher resolution, but only for a few large Russian cities). On them it was possible to draw only the main roads, some forests and rivers. No houses and paths - they simply were not visible. Everything else was contributed using GPS tracks. There were many of them where they were, they were in demand, everyone recommended to each other to record them and upload them to the site. In addition, they are still used to “snap” satellite images, which are always offset relative to the surface of the Earth.

- Continue to map?

- Rarely. But this is not due to the fact that I was tired of the project. Trite, I have less free time, and I have more or less drawn up the places where my daily migration goes - from home to work and back. I also liked to map the territory around my summer house, but it has already been put in order. At the same time, I note, I did not leave the project: I continue to support various services and servers related to OSM, for example, I monitor the statistics service , where there is information on Russian regions, and daily I do free downloads from OSM to CIS countries and Russian regions to PBF format. In addition, I advise those who are trying to use OSM data or want to switch to it on the forum and in Telegram chat.

- You are one of the “key keepers” of the servers of the Russian OSM community. Can you talk about this?

- You could say that. The main administrator of this project is Gleb Smirnov (glebius), thanks to which these servers appeared. They were provided in 2012 by Rambler. On their part, it was an act of goodwill and a plus for karma. Cars are not new, but still relevant. A number of small projects related to RU-OSM “spin” on them: the openstreetmap.ru site, map generators for various navigators, validators, etc.
If someone wants to host their project, then information about servers and terms of cooperation can be found on the corresponding pagein WikiOSM. I note that FreeBSD stands as the OS, which imposes a number of its limitations, since not all software runs easily and simply in its environment.



- Also, as far as I know, you are one of the authors of the railway validator. Tell us about this project?

- His concept was invented by Sergey Gladilin, which I already mentioned. By the way, at that time we were not alone with him thinking about how to automatically or semi-automatically verify OSM data with any external sources and ultimately improve the map. Then, in general, many different validators appeared, including ours.

What exactly did we do? Firstly, they created the most accurate, true and complete version of the ECP railway guide(single network markup). Its feature is that there is no single official version of this document. Each country, it can be said, has its own, since it differs in something from exactly the same in another country. It was a difficult job - to make a heap of disparate sources more or less high-quality database. And only, secondly, they correlated this database with what is in OSM. As a result, we have one of the best databases in RuNet for train stations with coordinates.

When we just started this validatorin 2010, it turned out that only about 20% of the railway stations in Russia, the CIS countries and the Baltic countries were brought into OSM. Over the years, much work has been done to bring this information into OSM. At the moment, this figure is 3.5 times higher - 75% compliance. But I will say right away that it will be almost impossible to reach 100%, since many railway stations exist only on paper, and there is also a certain confusion with codes that has not yet been avoided. I think we should focus on the figure of 90% and assume that this is a real achievable maximum. Therefore, there is still room for improvement.

- Do you use OSM data in your work or in your personal life?

- At present, my work is far from cartography and geodata, therefore - no. But I had such an experience in the past. Once I worked in the field of education - in one of the territorial departments of the Moscow Department of Education. And there we made, on the basis of the OSM, maps of areas under our jurisdiction, including those on which all educational institutions and the boundaries of the areas where students were attached to them were noted. In fact, we visualized what was contained in official documents in the form of lists. And to some extent, these cards were also official - when they appeared as annexes to the official order on the attachment of schools, even the heads of district administrations put their signatures on them. It was an interesting project. In the course of it, we introduced many educational institutions in Moscow into OSM and clarified data on already noted ones.Then we used these data in our work. OSM then helped us a lot, as a platform for working with geodata, but we, in turn, made it more accurate and better.



If we talk about personal life, once I participated in car orienteering competitions as a navigator, that is, I laid a route. For this, of course, I used OSM. I prepared for all competitions: I studied maps, satellite images, and if something was missing, I drew it right there. This helped in some cases to lay a more optimal route, since many other participants on the maps didn’t have all the roads.



- Was it hard to work with OSM data?

- The fact is that when we were preparing maps of educational institutions in Moscow, they were mainly worked on by those who were already familiar with OSM and were an active participant in it. Therefore, we perfectly understood what kind of data it was and how to work with it. Often, problems come from people who come from outside who do not want to spend time studying the project. If you dive into it at least a little, read WikiOSM, draw a map yourself, then you’ll close half of the future questions, since the OSM world has invented a huge number of tools and services for working with data.

Still problems arise when they want from OSM what it is not created for and is not intended for. For example, those who are closely connected with remote sensing of the Earth and the analysis of satellite images sometimes come to the project and want to calculate, for example, the area of ​​agricultural land. This, of course, you can try to do, but the result will be very approximate and even far from reality, because with the completeness, accuracy and relevance of land use categories in OSM, everything can be difficult - mappers can not always reliably determine them from a satellite image. So, such experience with OSM may be perceived as negative, but the project itself is not to blame.

- A person thinks: to take part in the OSM project or not. What would you tell him?

- OSM is a socially significant project that helps millions of people around the world. His data is used almost everywhere. You may not even know that OSM is in front of you, but it will be it. However, it is created by a significantly smaller number of people - only a few thousand enthusiasts rule the map a day. For most of them, this is a hobby. Therefore, new activists are always welcome in the project. If someone doubts how useful it can be to the project, then let him know that any contribution is important - even the smallest or insignificant, because OSM consists of them. One painted the house, the other put down the address, the third - the floors - and this is the product. Can you add only a bicycle parking or cafe near the office? Good. This will also make the map more accurate and better.

- Some people think that OSM, as a project, is in crisis. What do you think about this?

- It’s hard for me to think about this, because lately I’m not so much immersed in OSM as before. But it seems to me that OSM has not yet reached the limits of its development, and therefore talk about his funeral is premature. For example, the Germans not so long ago believed that the project had a crisis, because they had painted in their country almost everything that they could, they say, had nothing more to do. But some time passed, and in OSM, tagging schemes appeared on the existing architecture, with which it was possible to do 3D, draw internal floor plans of buildings and mark public transport routes. Therefore, the project has enough growth points. The only real problem is the number of participants. I want them to be much more.

- What do you say at the end?

- Take a look at OSM. This is not only an interesting project where you can draw a map - this is an incredible amount of data, moreover, available for free. Therefore, there are a lot of different services around it, and not even maps. In addition, this is a good alternative to commercial card services, in which you are rigidly tied to one style. There are many more. In theory, if you are “with your hands”, you can make your own card style, which will “highlight” and display the objects you need. But what I like most about OSM is that you can fix any drawbacks of the card yourself and they will be immediately added to the database.

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Communication of Russian OpenStreetMap participants is in the Telegram chat room and on the forum .
There are also groups on social networks VKontakte , Facebook , but they mainly publish news.

→ Join OSM!

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