Wrong Tree Barker

A Telegram Bot that alerts me whenever someone incorrectly maps trees as ways in openstreetmap.

I pride myself in having completely eliminated trees that are wrongly mapped as ways (instead of nodes) on openstreetmap. This, however, takes some maintanance from time to time as people expand the map continuously and therefore continue to make such mistakes. To make my life a bit easier, I made this simple script that checks for such tree ways every 15 minutes and alerts me via Telegram when a new one was found.

I'm not suggesting anyone should do the very same thing as those tree accidents occur rarely and when they do, they take only so many people to fix. However, I publish this so you can be inspired to chose your own "pet issue" to fix and keep fixed. How about overlapping buildings in your home town or rogue orphan nodes in your region?

Usage

Create your own telegram bot by interacting with the BotFather telegram account. You will recieve an API Token. You can then find out your personal Telegram Chat ID, for example using this python function:

from telegram import Bot

API_TOKEN = 'YOUR_BOT_API_TOKEN'

bot = Bot(token=API_TOKEN)
updates = bot.get_updates()

for update in updates:
    print(update.message.chat.id) 

Insert both the API Token and the Chat ID into the appropriate parts of the WrongTreeBarker.py code.

Adjust the querytext string to query for whatever issues you want to monitor. For simple queries, the query wizard tool on Overpass Turbo is useful. For examples of more complex queries, see the OSM Wiki page on overpass query examples. ChatGPT is also a surprisingly good tool for writing queries of mid to high complexity.

Note that, due to the nature of my tree search, I set up the script to only parse query results that are ways. For nodes or relations, please expand the helper function by its appropriate counterparts:

def node_to_feature(node):
  return geojson.Feature(
    id=node.id,
    geometry=geojson.Point((float(node.lon), float(node.lat))),
    properties=node.tags
    )

or

def relation_to_feature(relation):
  # This example handles only multipolygon type of relations
  polygons = []
  for member in relation.members:
     if isinstance(member, overpy.Way):
        coordinates = [(float(node.lon), float(node.lat)) for node in member.nodes]
           polygons.append(coordinates)
           return geojson.Feature(
              id=relation.id,
              geometry=geojson.MultiPolygon([polygons]),
              properties=relation.tags
              )