weeklyOSM 273

06/10/2015-12/10/2015

Mapping

• german only

• This is a report about “A little update on OpenStreetMap editing in gnome-maps”

• Mappa Mercia writes about their success to newly map the entire mainline multilevel station in Birmingham. (TODO: Might add link to older Weekly if you reported about their call-for-mappers)

• german only

Community

• german only

• On TNW Ben Woods claims that OSM got a big boost by Maps.Me.

• Simon Poole has updated the Contributor Statistics Reports (it happens once per quarter). (via @ sp8962)

• The tool “How did you contribute” by Pascal Neis now supports the editor Level0 created by Ilya Zverev.

• higa4 describes what OsmHydrant is, how it can be used to add fire hydrants and why you should do it.

  

• Historic.Place map (Screenhots from a Comenius school project) is offline due to a disk failure. The former link with a dataset from 06/17/2015 works. The recovery of data can take days or even weeks, the maintainer Lutz said.

• According to Richard Phililips son’s sad posting on Talk-gb-westmidlands mailing list, Richard Philips recently passed away. He was an “addicted mapper” (HDYC) and active around Evesham area (England).

• According to his son’s posting on Talk-gb-westmidlands mailing list, Richard Phililips recently died. He was an “addicted mapper” (HDYC) and active around Evesham (England).

• german only

Imports

• PlaneMad from Mapbox Data Team discovered many problems with road data quality in Japan such as unconnected, misalignment and many short segments. His description sound as horrible as the descriptions about the TIGER import in the U.S. Most data seems to be coming from an the Yahoo Japan Import shortly after the Great Earthquake on March 11, 2011 and was never maintained afterwards.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• All paid members of OSM US may take part at the elections for OSM US board. End of election is on October,18. You have the choice between nine candidates (excl. deputies). Nakaner has had a deeper look into the manifestos. There was a virtual townhall on October, 12 where everyone could ask questions via Tiwtter, IRC and Google+.

• Paul Norman announces informal a OSMF general meeting on 5th of December 2015. During this meeting 4 board members will be voted. The reason of this early announcement is to give you the possibility to renew your membership early enough. Although it gives you the possibility to stand up for an election.

• With Ilya Zverev there is a first candidate for the OSMF election on the OSMF mailing list.

Events

• German only

• Gregory Marler reports on the SotM Scotland.

• After State of the Map in Scotland and Catalonia, SotM Japan will take place on October 31, 2015 in Hamamastu City.

• The first videos from SotMCAT 2015 in Barcelona appeard on the Youtube channel OSM en català

Humanitarian OSM

• A new export tool is now [live] (http://hotosm.org/updates/2015-10-06_the_new_osm_export_tool_is_live) on the webpage of HOT OSM. The tool can be used to select and export OSM data (either following OSM or HOT scheme) in different formats.

Maps

• It looks like, as if the face lift at OSM Buildings inspires to 3D mapping . ;-)

• Blogging service googlemapsmania is writing about vector based maps, which is horizon-less like in the Inception movie.

• german only

• Stefan Keller from Geometa Lab HSR shows in a blogpost, how to integrate uptodate OSM data into uMap.

• Map Compare from BBBike supports now up to 140 maps. (via @BBBikeWorld)

• Tangram is a JavaScript library for rendering 2D & 3D maps live in a web browser with WebGL

Open Data

• Two master thesis at the Chair of Geoinformatics at the University of Munich created a 3d city model of the city of New York. The model in CityGML format is derived from data of the NYC Open Data Portal and can be viewed in a 3D Online Viewer. (via @textkoch)

• The 1-SRTM data (about 30 cm ground resolution) are now available worldwide.

• User KDDA reports at his user diary that the official townlands data in North Ireland has been taken offline.

Licences

• User timetabling claims at Twitter that OSM should also have a license enforcment guideline as the Free Software Foundation has. (We reported about it) Elsewise, OSM should drop share-alike.

• The German company Omniscale presents a Sustainability-Open-Source-Software-Licence, in short SOSS-Licence. By the purchase of this kind of licence, a better development of opensource projects is expected.

Software

• The “Game of Nodes” is collecting money on Kickstarter for a Ingress-like Game but using OpenStreetMap data. However, the funding target has not been reached yet. (via @OSMMV)

• In a term paper “Gamified Extraction of Crossroads from Aerial Images” two computer science students at the University of Applied Sciences in Rapperswil. Switzerland, developed an application that automatically extracts pedestrian crossings from aerial images. Here, an image recognition algorithm travels along OSM streets of Switzerland, maybe soon all over Europe. The coordinates found by the application are checked for duplicates and then consigned to MapRoulette so that they can be gathered in OSM. This work benefits from the project “Zebrastreifen Safari” (see weeklyOSM 272), where the result is reviewed with “ground data”. Stefan Keller says: “So far, we know mainly two approaches to detect street axes and building outlines. The point-like objects such as pedestrians crossings (Node-Tag highway=crossing) appear promising.”

• Richard Fairhurst reports about a Tilemaker version that has support for shapefiles.

Programming

• Paul Ramsey reports in the cartodb.com blog how to compress geospatial data from a PostGIS database effectively without big loss of quality.

• Chros Whong has published a plugin for the javascript based Leaflet library, that places a 3d globe in the corner of your map, centered on the same location as the main map.

• Jerome Cukier reports that the sourcecode of React-map-gl was published. This project provides a React friendly API wrapper around Mapbox GL JS. A webGL based vector tile mapping library.

• In Italy there is now not a big Italy shapefile anymore on the server of Geofabrik but shapefiles for five regions. The same applies for Poland where the 16 voivodeships have their own extracts.

• On September 10th, 2015 OpenLayers version 3.10.1 was released.

• On October 7th, 2015 PostGIS version 2.2 was released.

• On October 8th, 2015 PostgreSQL version 9.4.5 was released.

• Also on October 8th, 2015 Mapnik version 3.0.6 was released.

Did you know …

• … IMY or International Map Year, a project run by the International Geographic Association supported by the UN. Obviously, the importance of maps should be emphasized.

• … the Page/Map with jobs from GIS surroundings?

• … that Canada offers streets with very funny names? ;-)

Other “geo” things

• Cool, now the kids have not to go out to a maze. The Corn Maze near Edmonton is already available online. ;-)

• Jan Erik Solem casts a glance at Two Years of Mapillary.

• A Map of Every Device in the World that is connected to the Internet.

• Christoph Hormann writes in the imagico.de blog about “Map design economics” and cites as an example the recently introduced Wikimedia maps.

• The German railway “Deutsche Bahn” starts in cooperation with Open Data City “Netzradar”, a crowdsourcing app for detecting the mobile radio network coverage (and the dead spots) along the routes of DB long distance traffic. Refer to the press release DB and the press release of P3 group.

• german only

• With the help of modern image computer vision it’s possible to extract building footprints out of aerial imagery. OpenStreetMap prefers to keep the manual traces ;-)

• german only

• GIS Doctor says: “I love OpenStreetMap. It’s the best …, it’s the most important thing to have happened to the geo community since Dr. Tomlinson started working with map overlays in the 1960s.” And GIS Doctor explains why!

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