Help mapping up countries

Question

This is not a question at all, but a shout-out to those that are a bit extra familiar with Project-GC.

We have for a long time been planning to make the maps in Profile stats look a lot better. For this we need to map "Geocaching countries" with the data in OpenStreetMap.

For some countries this is a bit of work, where local knowledge will make it faster and more simple. In most cases it's just a lot of quite easy work though. We are looking for help to continue the translation list (https://project-gc.com/w/Geocaching-country_to_OSM-ID_mappings) created on our Wiki.

If you wish to help, feel free to do so, we really appreciate it. Have questions? Either reply with an "answer" here or use the Discussion tab in the Wiki.

Today the maps in Profile stats are using a world map that's not really aligned with our country borders, which honestly makes it look like crap.

Comments

The third column is number of geocaches, isn't it? The wiki says "number of countries", which would be a lot in the examples ;)

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the wiki also requires review so I am not sure how it will work if everyone will start editing at the same time. Added mine changes for review.

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@Jakuje

I approved your update.

It requires review for new users (new to Wiki). I will try to be fast to review them. You did remove one of my changes though, probably due to the moderation. Not a big deal, I just added it again.

I also asked you a question in the Discussion tab. I didn't really understand why the second ID was needed for Czechia. But maybe I am missing something?

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And I also added you as auto-moderated now.

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Would it not make sense to include the administrative boundaries of the next order at the same time?

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You mean to be able to define regions? There usually are name issues to cover as well, at least for countries where HQ already have regions.

There is also a big chance that the data will be changed in OSM before we get there for every country. From experience, every time we do a new import of a country, something changed.

But it's definitely something we should look into having publicly available in the future.

This will be step one and should fix the first issues with mentioned maps. Hopefully we can take more steps later this year. Right now I am working on adapting Osm-boundaries.com to also support Antarctic. The was something else that needed to be imported too. Then I will change how Project-GC stores these polygons locally to a more modern way. So there is plenty to do already.

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I would still like to see the usage of heat map.  It would be nice to see color depict the concentration of caches I have found in any given county,state,country.  I had another thread on this as a request for functionality.

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How is this related to the original topic?

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I saw a reference to maps in profile stats and just wanted to comment as an improvement.

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By areas of the nearest administrative unit, I meant, for example, the "Lans" in Sweden, cantons in Switzerland or federal states in Germany

Answer 1

Great initiative! As I love geographical statistics I’d certainly be willing to help. I have tried to understand what exactly you need, but I was not really sure how this works. Where do the values after db= and osmIds= come from?

Comments

From https://osm-boundaries.com/

The db-value isn't visible in it's raw format. But as long as you don't change the DB-selector below the map it should be set to osm20200810 as the current ones are. But if you change the db-selector below the map to for example "2020-08-03" you should change the value to osm20200803.

The values after osmIds= are the IDs of the polygons you have selected. For example; If we make up a fake country that should consist of polygons for Albania and Afghanistan we would select those two in the tree view at the site. When we have the polygons we need we right click the tree and select the list item in the context menu (Copy all selected IDs). Now the list of IDs is copied and we can just paste it into the wiki.
(a fake country consisting of Albania and Afghanistan is of course a very unrealistic example)

A more realistic example that's fairly known to most is USA. United States includes Puerto Rico (and some others) that according to HQ (and some definitions) aren't a part of USA. Therefore we can't select the outer level called "United States" because it would include Puerto Rico as well. Instead we select every single state that USA has.

Example screenshot of USA: https://1447.se/shutter/screenshot_20200909_20%3A47%3A21_9177.png
I might have selected too many or too few polygons for that example, just made it as a proof of concept.

Normally all data should exist and work with the latest database (2020-08-10), but I know for example that Thailand is broken in that data-set. However, the database 2020-08-03 has temporary become disabled, it should show up in 1-2 days again.

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Perfect, thanks a lot for the explanation, that makes it clear.

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Okay, I see that my changes to the page are sent to moderation. As I have no idea how long it would take for them to go online it would risk doubling the work. So I’d better not continue. But if you want me to do e.g. a certain block (from number xx to number yy) please tell me and I’ll take care of it.

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It's already approved and published, and future changes won't go through moderation.

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Pefect, thanks a lot! I’ll continue then.