The European Water Project, a collaboration between Wikimedia Suisse and OpenStreetMap, collects photos of drinking water wells or springs and makes these photos available on Wikimedia Commons and in OpenStreetMap. A wiki page describes how to do it in English, Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano and Nederlands. On the talk-fr mailing list, Stuart Rapoport from the European Water Project said (automatic translation) that Stefan Keller recommends the tag amenity=drinking_water instead of amenity=fountain and drinking_water=yes. This mail is followed (automatic translation) by a discussion.
Cascafico Giovanni is interested in active volcanoes and has created an overpass query to find them and compared the result with infrared data from Sentinel-2. He wonders what the criteria for volcano:status=active are, as most of these volcanoes don’t have an infrared signature.
Thibault Molleman questions the existing tagging of fuel types at petrol (gas) stations, as usage numbers don’t reflect the changes made to the EU naming scheme in 2018.
The voting for amenity=give_box, an amenity where you can share various types of items freely, has started.
Community
Hot on the heels of the upcoming LGBQT+ mapathon in Cebu City, which we reported two weeks ago, Mikko Tamura reports on a similar activity which was recently hosted by the Geography Department of University of the Philippines Dilman. The mapping party, held on 11 January, was organised by MAP-BEKS. Over 600 health-related facilities were identified where more data needs to be collected, and 150 were either added or updated on OSM
Board elections are underway for OSM-US. A couple of candidates have written manifestos or position statements on their OSM Diaries: Minh Nguyen, and Daniela Waltersdorfer (DW2515 on OSM). Others are available via the wiki.
OpenStreetMap Foundation
In a blog entry titled ‘Diversity in OpenStreetMap, Seeking your help on ideas for the Foundation’ Mikel Maron reports about the current discussion at the OSMF board on diversity and the idea of forming a Diversity Working Group.
Events
OSM and OSGeo/FOSSGIS will be represented in a separate area at the AGIT 2020(automatic translation), Austria’s largest applied geographic information event. The event, for which volunteers are still being sought (automatic translation), will take place from 8 to 10 July 2020 in Salzburg, Austria.
Humanitarian OSM
HOT is looking for a location for the HOT Summit 2020. The organisation surveyed its followers on Twitter and got in touch with the OSM SotM Working Group.
Heidelberg University’s GIScience Research Group blogged about an analysis of the activity in mapping the Rohingya refugee camps, in Bangladesh, by using the potential of the OpenStreetMap History Data API.
Maps
Downloads from Planet OSM are currently rate limited to 400 kB/s. Grant Slater explained the background to this change and suggested that people make use of a mirror for full speed downloads.
Mark Lester presented BuzMap, an interesting map that displays the services, and related data, that run on private railways and FlixBus roads.
Cartonumerique(automatic translation) critiqued some of the visualisations of the Coronavirus outbreak, where some representations are at the country level with red colours. Various other visualisations, including CNBC’s Tableau visualisation (data collected by the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering, USA), let the viewer better track the Coronavirus spreading around the world, using various sized circles to show intensity - partly at the province or city level.
Open Data
The state of Brandenburg has released several hundred datasets with basic geographic data, free of charge and for any use. Previously the data was available only with restrictive licences and for significant fees.
The Open Knowledge Foundation announced their mini-grant scheme for 2020.
Programming
Daniel Patterson announced Mapbox’s decision to shut down the hosting of router.project-osrm.org and asked on the OSRM-talk mailing list if someone would volunteer to take over the task.
Harmut wrote on his blog about an issue he uncovered while implementing an area bounds feature for MapOsmatic.
Releases
The OsmAnd team updated the Online GPS Tracker to version 0.8. The new version makes location sharing easier, comes with a widget, improves formats and units and fixes some bugs in the Android app.
Skunks blogged about the update of OpenStreetBrowser to v4.7, which allows rendering of the offset and width of lines in metres, as provided by the real-world object, as opposed to pixels as found in (almost) all other map renderers to date. As an example he mentions railway gauges.
Did you know …
… FlowingData, a website about the analysis, visualisation and exploration of data, published an article about an online map, which allows the user to create a ridgeline map (also known as frequency trails) showing elevation for every part of the world? The source code for the map, which was provided by Andrei Kashcha, is available at GitHub.
… the house number rendering on regio-osm.de? There are already many European countries included. Two examples: Bonn in North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany) and Basel (Switzerland).
Other “geo” things
BusinessMirrorfeatured an article titled ‘Innovation, digital technologies boost cycling culture’, which details the impact of digital data on cycling. The article mentions OSM as source for PeopleForBikes’s Bicycle Network Analysis tool, which tries to use our data and provide an assessment on the quality of the bicycle infrastructure and network.
Recently the UN Pulse Lab Jakarta has developed a disaster monitoring WebApp called the MIND/DisasterMon platform. According to the UN Pulse Lab the objective of the MIND/DisasterMon platform is to try to answer questions related to disaster monitoring and emergency response by looking into various sources of data and information from open data platforms and social media. The platform also integrates APIs from Openrouteservice, developed by HeiGIT, to help identify suitable routes for the transportation of aid and resources.
Tesla is reported to be planning to use maps from Baidu, the Chinese Google, for the vehicles it will make in China.
Rob Matheson describes the use of artificial intelligence in the collection of data for digital maps in an article about a model from MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute. The researchers have trained and tested their model, which is supposed to collect road features such as lanes or parking spots, with OSM data.
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