weeklyOSM 494

31/12/2019-06/01/2020

About us

• We are currently looking for people to help with the French language edition of weeklyOSM. If you are willing to help then please contact us.

Mapping

• Christine Karch, of Geofabrik, tweets about a new service developed by the company: regional instances of taginfo. The urls follow the same pattern as on Geofabrik’s download service.
• Pascal Neis has updated “Unmapped Places of OpenStreetMap“.
• Jiri Vlasak presented the Damn-Project (Divide and Map. Now.) as an alternative to the HOT Tasking Manager. In his blog post he explains issues with HOT Tasking Manager and how he proposes solving them.
• Markus Peloso announced the drafting of a proposal for amenity=give_box to allow the tagging of free sharing points for various types of goods.
• Hauke Stieler has submitted a proposal for the tagging of duty-free shops (discussion on the tagging mailing list).
• Andrew Harvey has updated the Australia-specific tagging guidelines on how to tag fire stations in New South Wales. He’d like to add or update the operator data for fire stations and has created a MapRoulette challenge for it.
• Brian Prangle blogged about the 4th quarter project of OpenStreetMap UK, which aimed for the reduction of FIXME and fixme tags. However, instead of a drop, the number of such tags increased by 1 percent. Brian writes about his findings and why the tags often represent the “social geology” of OSM, rather than mere issues to be resolved.

Community

• Darafei’s “hate chart” caused the newly elected OSMF board member Allan Mustard to tweet his thoughts about the state of relations between groups within the community. He made an interesting point about diversity in the OSM context by prioritising the diversity between “craft mappers”/”humanitarians”/”corporations”/”passive users”/”social engineers”/”one-time contributors”/”programmers/operators”/”data dumpers”/”local chapters” before the “classic” dividers such as gender, social class, education or ethnicity.
• OpenCage Geocoder announced the publication of the first interview in their OSM series for 2020. They interviewed OSM_Pontarlier, a 21 year old tech enthusiast from Pontarlier, France, who provided insights into the challenges of mapping small towns such as the lack of other contributors, the help of “global mappers” and his general thoughts about OSM now and in the future.
• The French government’s open data portal announced the latest (Jan 2020) release of shapefiles of communes. These are based on OSM data. The simplified geometry release normally follows shortly afterwards.
• You can help to develop an OSM editor without any programming knowledge! You only need to know one language besides English to help with translating StreetComplete or another OSM editor.
• StreetComplete’s author is now accepting donations via GitHub Sponsors, Liberapay and Patreon.

Imports

• Daniel tried to restart the import of Microsoft building outlines, which has received some opposition, and addresses the main points in a comprehensive proposal on the Canadian mailing list.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Komяpa has been suggesting for some time that OpenStreetMap’s infrastructure should support change. He’s now suggested a plan to get there (though that “plan” doesn’t seem to include any discussion about what it should achieve, or any documentation, yet).

Humanitarian OSM

• The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team is looking for a full-time Communications Manager and refers to the official job advertisement.
• Not everyone agrees with HOT’s marketing strategies. Answer from JM Liotier to a HOTOSM marketing tweet.

Maps

• Giuseppe Sollazzo has coloured maps of street name elements (“Road”, “Street” etc.) in various urban areas in the United Kingdom (and New York as well). Using OSMnx and OpenStreetMap meant that less than ten lines of program code were needed.
• GIS LOUNGE provides an overview of how to reach your destination by the most pleasant route instead of always taking the fastest route. Tools for pedestrians and cyclists are presented.
• “Since moving to Ireland, my mapping interest has been mostly a historical one”, writes b-unicycling on her map of “Historically interesting things on OpenStreetMap”. By choosing different layers, you can look at benchmarks, tower houses, manual pumps and ringforts.
• Marvin Gülker wrote (automatic translation) about the creation of printable maps with the German OpenStreetMap carto style. A followup post (automatic translation) focuses on the rendering of GPS tracks.
• Aromatiker has put the Whisk(e)y map back online (automatic translation) with 318 distilleries worldwide.

Licences

• Nuno Caldeira asks Shipyard Games, Strava and last but not least the New York Times, via Twitter, to attribute the maps provided by Mapbox and based on OpenStreetMap data in accordance with OSM’s licence terms.Allan Mustard, the new elected member of the OSMF board, seems to support this position. Brian Housel from Mapbox argues that the “i”, which only opens the OSM attribution after a “mouse over”, is sufficient. Chris Hill opposes this position. Igor Brecj, from the company ScalableMaps, refers to the attribution FAQ of the OSMF and says that Mapbox will certainly try to justify this kind of attribution or the lack thereof. Many others have participated in this discussion including other members of board of the OSM Foundation, namely Mikel Maron from Mapbox and Guillaume Rischard, who has no professional ties to OSM.
• Nuno Caldeira and Rob Nickerson noticed Facebook’s release of new countries for RapiD. Facebook made 84 new countries available in their editor, which provides missing features, detected by artificial intelligence on imagery, to the users of RapiD who can then add the features to OSM.

Did you know …

• … the many options for evaluating OSM data that Pascal Neis has created?
• … the tag memorial=ghost_bike? To remember cyclists killed in traffic, ghost cycles are placed at the location of the accident. They can be mapped with memorial=ghost_bike in conjunction with historic=memorial. This mapcontrib shows all known ghost bikes; please help to add the missing ones, especially since the website inspiring the tag seems to be unmaintained.

Other “geo” things

• OSM mappers who still use older Garmin GPS devices, and connoisseurs of software problems, may like to note that the firmware for certain Garmin eTrex devices had a Y2020 problem, with the date wrapping to sometime in May 2000. The Garmin support site provides instructions for updating the firmware, which worked (even on Windows 10) for at least one member of the OSM Weekly team.
• The market research aggregator Reports Monitor linked to a newly published report, by QY Research, on the global digital map market between 2014 and 2025. As usual with this type of report, it is very expensive.
• The Swiss mountain village of Brienz/Brinazauls (Graubünden) slides downhill (automatic translation)) at a speed of one metre per year due to a geological “smear mass”. To add to their worries the village also sits under an unstable cliff. The village may need to be moved from its current position as a catastrophe could befall the village if it remains where it is. An extensive geological monitoring system will be installed (automatic translation) to warn the villagers in time. SelfishSeahorse has taken picturesque mapillary images of this area.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Berlin	139. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch	2020-01-09
Bochum	Mappertreffen	2020-01-09
Nantes	Rencontre mensuelle	2020-01-09
Montrouge	Rencontre mensuelle locale des contributeurs de Montrouge et alentours	2020-01-09
Dresden	Stammtisch Dresden	2020-01-09
Salvador	Mapeia Bahia	2020-01-11
Toronto	Toronto Mappy Hour	2020-01-13
Munich	Münchner Stammtisch	2020-01-14
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen	2020-01-14
Zurich	113. OSM Meetup Zurich	2020-01-14
Cologne	Köln Stammtisch	2020-01-15
Ulmer Alb	Stammtisch Ulmer Alb	2020-01-16
Dortmund	Mappertreffen	2020-01-17
Maranhão	Mapeia Maranhão	2020-01-18
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	2020-01-21
Nottingham	Nottingham pub meetup	2020-01-22
Bratislava	Missing Maps Mapathon Bratislava #8	2020-01-23
Lübeck	Lübecker Mappertreffen	2020-01-23
Riga	State of the Map Baltics	2020-03-06
Freiburg	FOSSGIS-Konferenz	2020-03-11-2020-03-14
Valcea	EuYoutH OSM Meeting	2020-04-27-2020-05-01
Cape Town	State of the Map 2020	2020-07-03-2020-07-05

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 Mateusz Konieczny, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, Sammyhawkrad, SomeoneElse, Guillaume Rischard (Stereo), SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred.