(English) weeklyOSM 345

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02/21/2017-02/27/2017

About us

  • The weeklyOSM team happily switched from Slack to the open source software Mattermost for internal communication. After tests conducted on framasoft‘s framateam, a dedicated instance is now up and running thanks to FOSSGIS.

Mapping

  • Inspired by the German OSM-Blog Wochennotiz № 343, and a previous discussion in the German forum, Ogmios wrote an article about the quality of recycling stations and how to improve their tagging. Also there is a new QA page for recycling tagging.

  • Arun writes about broken relations in river banks and wants a good guide to correct such errors. Christoph explains in the comments why there is no easy answer.

  • Daniel-j-h writes on the two tags, exit_to=* and destination=* and then explains why only the second is used in OSRM. Towards the end, he also shares a tool that allows automatic conversion. (de)

  • User naveenpf shows the steps to associate Wikidata QIDs to Indian districts in OSM.

  • Wille Marcel has restarted development on his OSMCHA project. Its main objective is to help to detect potentially harmful OpenStreetMap edits. Wille asks for your feedback and suggestions for improvements.

  • Anthony Hombiat recently presented his PhD thesis (automatic translation) – "A meta-model for structuring OpenStreetMap folksonomy into a new ontology in Grenoble, France". Here is a related paper on the same.

Community

Imports

  • Facebook has repeatedly uploaded import data into OSM, but without previous discussion as required by the import guidelines, as Frederik Ramm criticizes on the discussion page of the import. People are discussing it at the Thailand section of OSM forum in English.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

  • Matt Amos announced on the Announce mailing list that the OSM API and the osm.org website will be temporarily unavailable on Sunday, March 12 due to a software upgrade, which will start at 11:00 UTC and hopefully take no longer than one hour.

Events

  • You can now apply for a travel scholarship to help you attend State of the Map 2017 which is in Japan. The deadline is March, 22nd.

  • The first fablab in Benin, blolab, promotes the use of open-source projects and tools, including OpenStreetMap through workshops. They have launched a crowd-funding campaign.

  • The international OpenDataDay will take place with events around the globe. Search for your event on this map.

  • The first in-person meeting of OpenStreetMap United Kingdom CIC (Community Interest Company) will take place at iCentrum, Birmingham on Saturday, March 4th between 11:00 and 16:00.

Humanitarian OSM

  • Biondi Sima reports on mapping the whole of Surabaya, Indonesia. This HOT project (funded by USAID, Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA), supported by the University of Hawaii: Pacific Disaster Centre (PDC) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)) concluded in just three months, resulting in addition of over 4,400 buildings and 3000 km of roads.

  • The discussion about the quality of the mapping by HOT-volunteers continues on the hot-mailing list.

  • Pete Master leaves his job as Missing Maps Project Coordinator.

Maps

  • After the ticket about the context menu on the OSM main page had been closed (we reported earlier), the discussion continues on the dev mailing list. Though many who were criticising Tom Hughes, didn’t notice was that the desired feature was actually removed by Leaflet and not by OpenStreetMap.

  • OpenSnowMap is using its own font (ski.ttf) and icons to render the winter sports (downhill, nordic, sledge, etc) of a ski resorts at zoom levels 10 to 12.

switch2OSM

  • The so called "Eurodistrict Strasbourg-Ortenau", uses OSM on its home page.

  • The Open Source Flight Simulator "Flight Gear“, integrates 3D buildings that have been rendered realistically using OSM data in its latest version. (de)

Open Data

  • The surveying authority of the German state of Saxony has, after much negotiation, allowed (automatic translation) the OSM community to use WMS services with aerial imagery and topographic maps as a data source.

Software

  • A German Magazine reports (automatic translation) about a tool by Simon Lührs. This enables urban planners to easily generate figure ground plans out of OpenStreetMap data.

  • Michael von Glasgows published a new map style for winter sports areas. Hartmut Holzgrafe found it so good that he replaced the previous OpenPisteMap style in his maposmatic instances.

  • With the release of Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) version 5.6, Karen Shea highlights its main feature: Making Travel Time and Edge Weights Independent.

Programming

  • Andy Allan describes his steady work on the OpenStreetMap website codebase.

  • Mapzen announced their new address interpolation system. It used in the open source geocoder Pelias, which is therefore used by the Mapzen Search.

  • OSM has been approved as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code this year, as Peter Barth announced on the mailing list OSM-dev. See the project ideas in our OSM-Wiki.

Releases

Did you know …

  • … the Fullscreen Map on sammyshp.de? Besides its full-screen mode, the Leaflet application offers interesting features such as hillshading, a history of views, a functional context menu 😉 (show the current tile, check its status and request re-rendering), and a distance meter.

OSM in the media

  • Following recent political events, a French TV show tries to know where each member of parliament stands on simple questions regarding transparency. The results are displayed on an OSM-based map.

Other “geo” things

  • Nyall Dawson explains the new map coloring algorithm that will be present in QGIS 3.0.

  • Adam Rousell and Alexander Zipf from the GIScience Research Group at the University of Heidelberg publish a paper, which shows a new pedestrian-based navigation service. "Unlike car-based services where instructions generally are comprised of distance and road names, pedestrian instructions should instead focus on the delivery of landmarks to aid in navigation."

  • The OpenHistoricalMap is online again, but changes after May 19th 2015 are now lost, as Rob H. Warren at the mailing list reported.

Upcoming Events

This weeklyOSM was produced by Nakaner, Peda, Polyglot, Rogehm, SeleneYang, Softgrow, SomeoneElse, Spec80, derFred, jcoupey, jinalfoflia, kreuzschnabel, vsandre, wambacher.