01/09/2020-07/09/2020

About us

• Our editorial system now gives you the opportunity to post your articles directly into our system, and to suggest an initial formulation. We may make slight editorial changes to adapt the text to our language style. Translation into 12 languages will be done by us.

Mapping

• The French ‘Project of the Month’ > , has a graphically prepared interim balance of what has been achieved. It still has 18 days to run and aims for the complete mapping of defibrillators (AED). PanierAvide gives > , in addition, a few tips for further work.
• In September 2010, the Berlin-based association Sozialhelden e.V. launched > the Wheelmap.org project. Ten years later, Wheelmap has become the largest online map of wheelchair accessible places with over one million entries. In September, the team invites you to join in the celebrations under the motto ‘Wheelmap turns 10’. The campaign is taking place in the Wheelmap social networks and as a digital mapping action. They are also launching a small mapping campaign with the aim of getting people to each evaluate ten places on the Wheelmap that still have unknown wheelchair accessibility.
• Andrew Harvey proposes the new tag shelter_type=rock_shelter to mark the difference between the already existing natural=cave_entrance and a shallow cave-like opening at the base of a bluff or cliff, which may be used to protect yourself from the weather.
• In his blog post > , Robhubi deals with different types and names of watercourses that lead to mills in Austria and Germany. He evaluates entries in OpenStreetmap. WSHerx rates the publication as ‘impressively thorough work and convincing argumentation’.

Community

• On 1 September, Amazon Web Services (AWS) released an episode of their documentary series Now Go Build, which highlighted the work done by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team in the Philippines, especially in mapping the town of Guagua, in the province of Pampanga.Several members of the OSM-PH community, however, observed that there were missing and problematic narratives in the video related to the story it tells of geospatial and humanitarian workers in the country. Therefore, they prepared and released this statement (pdf).
• Martin Koppenhoefer asked on osmf-talk whether Brexit will have an effect on OSM and wondered if the foundation could be moved to another European country. The core database, website and API are already hosted in the Netherlands (since late 2018), but there is still some user data stored in the United Kingdom (Forum, Piwik, Foundation wiki, mailing lists). Additionally AWS is used for some data storage needs; the data is primarily stored on AWS Ireland.
• AI is not a magic bullet. Even for a company as resourceful as Facebook the results of an image recognition algorithm still needs to be manually verified. Some mappers using the results of MapwithAI, bypassing the upload limits, mass uploaded without reviewing the results. As a result users have discovered strange ‘roads’ on Rudy Map, the most important offline map dataset in Taiwan, and have reported them in the Facebook user group. Cartographers of a mountaineering group have also had to remove non-existent roads in the mountains, or correct streams without water in the dry season, which were wrongly classified as roads.
• Prajwal Shrestha, a student of the Institute of Agriculture and Animal Science-Lamjung, Tribhuvan University (Lamjung Campus), Nepal, shared his excitement about joining the OSM community through the creation of a new YouthMappers chapter (Agri-Mappers Lamjung) on his university campus.
• Facebook has released a third update to Daylight, their complete, downloadable preview of OpenStreetMap data (57 GB). Michal Migurski gives some insights in his blog and provides relevant links.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Dorothea Kazazi gave us a brief overview about the recent OSMF reports: Volunteer WGs, the Board of Directors and the Committees, Local Chapter applications and related news, Membership statistics and added a link to previous reports.

Events

• The 2020 Pista ng Mapa (Festival of Maps) organisers from the OpenStreetMap and FOSS4G communities in the Philippines are calling for presenters and workshop proposals on Open Data, Mapping, and FOSS4G for presentation at their 2020 conference this November. The call is open until 30 September. Also, this month, they are holding a map and poster making contest with the theme ‘Mapa para sa lahat’ (Maps for everyone). Check out their website for details. Prizes await winners in two categories: students and professionals.
• Alessandro Sarretta presented a poster entitled ‘OpenStreetMap: an opportunity for Citizen Science’ at the ECSA 2020 conference, showing the many ways OpenStreetMap and citizen science can help each other.

Humanitarian OSM

• Jean-Marc Liotier criticised HOT’s use of the number of mapped buildings as a measure of the ‘state of OpenStreetMap in Africa’. At the same time, he acknowledged that criticising bad metrics is easy, but finding good ones is difficult and he agreed to participate in an ‘open working group on OpenStreetMap metrics’.
• Taichi Furuhashi (User MAPconcierge) looked back on the crisis mapping conducted in response to heavy rain in Japan and summarised points to be improved. Over 1800 people participated in the task, and over 65,000 buildings were mapped.

Maps

• Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) has developed a mapping system to assist blind people in navigating cities.

Open Data

• The Croatian State Geodetic Administration has published > new aerial imagery for the eastern and southern parts of Croatia taken in 2019, and extended new topographic 1:25,000 map coverage.

Software

• Ulf Buermeyer has created MapAlarm, an iOS app that allows you to save POIs. According to his own statements MapAlarm should become a ‘personal placebook’. The application is in beta testing and Ulf is asking for help.

Programming

• At the Google Summer of Code, Kishan Tripathi, K Rahul Reddy, Rebecca Schmidt and Daniel Weaver worked on OpenStreetMap.
  • K Rahul Reddy documented his project about search suggestions on osm.org in detail on his blog.
  • Here you can find the code for indoor tagging by Rebecca Schmidt, Kishan Tripathi and Daniel Weaver, whose blog post we reported on last week.

Releases

• The changelog for the stable version #17013 of JOSM lists, among many others, the addition of the Serbian language with Latin script, GPX routes as a separate layer, and a dark mode via the plugin FlatLaf as major changes.

Did you know …

• … OSM Streak? Do you still need a few days to get your free membership at the OSM Foundation? Ilya Zverev’s Telegram bot OSM Streak reminds you with a small daily task. 😉
• … there is a list of the OSM mailing lists? However, many of them are orphaned.
• … OSM Ireland has its own site for mapping tasks that can be solved from home? The focus is on buildings.

Other “geo” things

• Allan Mustard says the article by Maite Vermeulen, Leon de Korte and Henk van Houtum in The Correspondent presents an ‘excellent case study of political bias in maps’.
• When US companies were ordered to stop working with Huawei, Google Maps was one of the apps that was dearly missed. Now the Chinese smartphone company has released TomTom’s navigation app on Huawei AppGallery. With OsmAnd, Here WeGo and maps.me there were already some alternatives available in the store.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Potsdam	147. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch	2020-09-10
Munich	Münchner Treffen	2020-09-10
Zurich	121. OSM Meetup Zurich	2020-09-11
Leoben	Stammtisch Obersteiermark	2020-09-12
San José	National Day of Civic Hacking	2020-09-12
Ashurst	Trek View New Forest Pano Party	2020-09-13
Montrouge	Rencontre des contributeurs de Montrouge et alentours	2020-09-14
Cologne Bonn Airport	131. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch (Online)	2020-09-15
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	2020-09-15
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-09-15
Kabul / Online	Why OSM and how to Contribute into it on Software Freedom Day 2020	2020-09-18
Nottingham	Nottingham pub meetup	2020-09-22
Bratislava	Missing Maps Mapathon Bratislava #9	2020-09-24
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch	2020-09-25
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-09-29
Alice	2020 Pista ng Mapa	2020-11-13-2020-11-27
Alice	FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2020	2020-11-20

Note: If you like to see your event here, please put it into the calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM. Please check your event in our public calendar preview and correct it, where appropriate.

This weeklyOSM was produced by AnisKoutsi, GOwin, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, Polyglot, Rogehm, TheSwavu, derFred, richter_fn.