Mapbox publishes a starter guide Mapping with OpenStreetMap under CC0. The guide was originally developed to aid Mapbox’ data team.
Martijn van Exel informs aber news to his missing roads project, which tries to find unmapped roads using computer vision.
Saikabhi writes about his first edits in OpenStreetMap, mapping his hometown Jorhat in the indian state Assam.
Community
German only
german only
We reported before about the meeting between Rijkswaterstaat and the OSM-community in The Netherlands. Frank Steggink givesmore details on the Dutch mailing list. Some 9 initiatives were started. Each initiative has a contact person from Rijkswaterstaat and one from the community. Some of the initiatives are “OSM.nl for Dummies”, “Defining a real added value for both partners”, “Making the government geo-data (BGT) available for OSM”, “Destination signs”, “Aerial images”, etc.
Pierre Béland is looking for a tool to help experienced mappers analyze data after a mapping party. A lot of data was added as response to the earthquake in Nepal. There were many new mappers, that never did any other mapping besides the mapping party in which they participated. The verification of this data is a huge job. Pierre’s approach is to find objects without primary key (such as building, highway, etc) or where the value is clearly a note (such as highway=I’m not sure whether there is a road here). He tried some analysis with his own tools on a planet dumb of Nepal. With some help from the community he finds the JOSM plugins OSMantic and OSMRecPlugin. The second one seems promising for his needs. Also there are some disabled tests from Osmose that might help. (on the French mailing list
Rory McCann is asking for volunteers who would like to translatetownlands.ie into languages other than English. He’s learning German himself and will have a go at the German translation.
Rory McCann asks for volunteers who want to translate townlands.ie into other languages than English, especially German. He himself wants to do the German translation.
At the 5th of december there will be a general meeting of the OpenStreetMap-Foundation with reelection of 4 board members. Thus, Michael wants to know how to become a member without having to use Paypal. To be able to vote, you have to be a member 30 days early. Wir recommend: Become a member now and vote or even run for a seat! Candidates can be found in the wiki.
German only
Michael Reichert asks at Talk mailing list how to become an OSM member without an PayPal account.-
Events
german only
Humanitarian OSM
The GIScience Group of Uni Heidelberg operates a Pybossa-instance for humanitarian purposes where crowd sourcing is used to generate ground truth data for automatical classification algorithms (e.g. automatic road extraction from satallite images). The algomrithmus decides based on crowd sourced data whether it is a road or not.
Maps
Arun (PlaneMad) from the Mapbox Data Team writes about a Multilingual Map Test Tool by Jochen Topf. This tool renders a transparent overlay of name labels based on the language code given.
SK53 reports in his blog how he has created a record with the Irish Vice Counties based on OSM. Vice Counties are areas which are based on administrative boundaries (in Ireland follow this mostly still natural or artificial barriers such as hedges, waterways,Bahnlin roads or railway lines) and are used by biologists for mapping of flora and fauna.
German only
Open Data
german only
german only
After requests by different groups of people, British authorities now released 11-Terabyte of LIDAR data under an “Open Government Licence”, consisting of a high resolution model of the country.
Licences
german only
Matthias Meißer asks for legal help regarding the mixture of proprietary and ODbL data in a special case.
Software
In a detailed blogpost, Stephen Smith explains the usage and the news of Mapbox Studio on the basis of an example.
On October 14th, 2015 Basecamp Mac version 4.5.2 was released. Highlight is support for Mac OS X 10.11.
Awesome website to create a specific mobile Android app for capturing OSM data, Prof. Stefan Keller says. (via @sfkeller)
Also on October 14th, 2015 EB Dirigo version 1.0.1 was released.
Some bug fixes and improved traffic sign recognition
Peter Vojtek published an experimental smartphone app for touchless map control employing smartphone’s accelerometer. One possilble use case: move and zoom map on your smartphone while wearing gloves. ;-) The app is available in GPlay
On October 8th, 2015 Locus Bugfix version 3.12.2 was released.
On July 31st, 2015 Maperitive version 2.3.34 was released. Sorry, can’t find any release infos.
Version 2.3 of the openrouteservice.org was released, see this blog post about new features.
Programming
Richard Fairhurst publishes Glug, a text-based and compact markup language that compiles to Mapbox GL JSON styles. (via @richardf)
On October 18th, 2015 a fresh BRouter version 1.3.1 was released.
Compared to version 1.2 many enhancements and some bugfixes are included.
Andrew Collier reports in his series of articles about the programming language Julia about the well documented interface to OpenStreetMap.
French researchers have digitized the Cassini map (data from the 18th century). One of the aims was to understand the development of infrastructure networks and the development of urban systems. Here is the online map.
Geopackage is a new standard by the Open Geospatial Consortium, which is based on SQLite. By some it is seen as a shapefile successor. Monde Geospatial shows a one-hour Webinar. Whether Geopackage permeated as default, we will see in a few years. OGC standards are known for bloating and intensive XML use.
Google has acquired the 360-degree-panorama specialist Digisfera to enhance its “Street View” team.
Google acquires the 360-degree-panorama specialist Digisfera to enhance its Street-View-Team.
weeklyOSM recommends the game Mercator Puzzle!, to understand which aberrations in the Google Web Mercator projection (EPSG: 3857) occur. (Note: The background map is from Google) (via @saerdner)
Bing maps has implemented numerous changes to the Bing Maps Preview Bing Maps Preview.
german only
The Romanian Today Software Magazine talksabout OSM and Telenav.
The US Navy reintroduces sextant navigation in its education, because satellite based Navigation can fail due to technical issues or attacks. The US Merchant Marine Academy and the German Marine never stopped teaching this skill.
The US is working on a regulation to force owners to register their drones to reduce private flights near airports.
Because satellite based Navigation can fail due to technical issues or attacks the US Navy reintroduces sextant navigation in its education.
The US Merchant Marine Academy and the German Marine never stopped teaching this skill.
The US is working on a regulation to force owners to register their drones to reduce private flights near airports.
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