Way number 1,000,000,000 has been uploaded to OpenStreetMap.
Ilya Zverev also noted> the uploading of the billionth way to OSM, along with the 100 millionth changeset and node number 2³³, and reflected on the problems and benefits of assuming a finite numerical space.
Community
Public Lab Mongolia have started a blog series. First up: ‘Creating An Open-Source Database To Improve Access To Health Services Amid COVID-19 Pandemic In Mongolia’.
Michael Collinson, acting as facilitator, has published the official set of questions and instructions for board candidates. Candidates are asked to send answers and manifestos by 24:00 UTC, Sunday 14 November.
Amanda McCann informed the Osmf-talk mail list that the microgrants programme has been shelved while the Board works out the budgeting.
Amanda McCann shared, in her diary, what she did in OpenStreetMap during October.
This year’s OSMF Annual General Meeting has a special resolution to change the OSMF’s Articles of Association to count time as associate member for board candidacy requirements.
Instructions on voting at this year’s OSMF Annual General Meeting have been published.
OSM research
A dissertation by Filip Krumpe was published> at the University of Stuttgart that deals with the labelling of interactive maps. OSM data are used as the geodata basis. The thesis can be downloadedas a pdf (file size: 29.1 MB).
Lukas Kruitwagen and colleagues at Oxford University published (paywall) a large worldwide dataset of predicted locations of solar power plants. The lead author has also written an accessible account. The work involved using machine learning based on a training dataset from solar farms mapped on OpenStreetMap around 2017. Satellite imagery from both SPOT and Sentinel-2 were used for both the initial training and creation of the predicted data.
Humanitarian OSM
The annual HOT Summit will be held on Monday 22 November as a virtual event, with the theme: ‘The Evolution of Local Humanitarian Open Mapping Ecosystems: Understanding Community, Collaboration, and Contribution’. Registration closes on Friday 19 November.
Maps
[1] Participants in the ‘30 Day Map Challenge’ on Twitter continued to make maps using OpenStreetMap data:
Day 3: Polygons. Angela Teyvi showed how how much detail exists for some buildings in Accra, Ghana.
Day 4: Hexagons. Hexbinning of bus stops in Accra also by Angela Teyvi. SIG UCA found some actual hexagons to map – lecture theatres in San Salvador, El Salvador.
Day 6: Red. Polluted lakes in Finland by Sini Pöytäniemi.
Day 7: Green. Shammilah showed isochrons of walking time to heatlh care facilites in Kisoro District, Uganda.
Day 8: Blue. Common choices were watery themes and places with blue in the name. Jaroslav_sm combined the two for lakes named ‘Blue Lake’ in Ukranian.
Day 9: Monochrome. Heikki produced an intriguing identification quiz on Irish towns and cities, based on buildings alone (cleverly leveraging and publicising the project to map them across Ireland).
Day 5 was a little special as OpenStreetMap was the theme. Many mappers chose to explore specific classes of objects: Sber offices in Moscow (Дмитрий); restaurants in Merced (Derek Sollberger); 7-11 convenience stores in Hong Kong (Brandon Qilin).
Xavier Olive did something a little different and explored the history of Zurich Airport on OSM.
Software
Mythic Beats hosting company donated two virtual servers to Organic Maps to help them distribute maps for offline usage on mobile devices. They point out that the apparently low value of their donation (in comparison to some other cloud service providers) is in part due to them not having to fund their own space programme.
TrackExplorer is software that allows you to upload a GPX file and visualise the trip in 3D. O J’s diary post gives some examples and notes that the base data is OSM, so the more accurate the data, the better the 3D environment displayed.
Programming
Komadinovic Vanja gave a whirlwind introduction to using OSM’s OAuth 2 authentication service.
Niantic announced that the AR game ‘Harry Potter: Wizards Unite’ will cease to operate on 31 January 2022. The in-game map and data used to calculate monsters’ types and appearance rates are from OpenStreetMap.
User-contributed content added to Google Street View is causing players of GeoGuessr to get angry. As Andrew Deck explained players of GeoGuessr, an online game where you guess your randomly selected location based on street views, are unhappy with the grainy, blurry, or otherwise poor-quality uploads that slow them down.
grin wrote about his experiences with his real-time kinematic (RTK) configuration in search of the most accurate position (precise to within a few centimetres).
ARTE has a series (withsubtitles) of videos on ‘Mapping the World’. The series presents the complex world of geopolitics broken down into ten minute, bite-sized chunks. Allegedly ‘you’ll never sound uninformed at the dinner table ever again’.
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