05/02/2019-11/02/2019
WhereGroup’s online OSM demo now covers the whole world. 1 | © Leaflet | Imagery © WhereGroup | Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
Mapping
- MSF (Doctors Without Borders) invites everyone to a Missing Maps Mapathon in Berlin on 26 February 2019 from 19:00 to 21:45. Since high-quality maps are essential to help people in crisis areas, experienced mappers are invited to participate, and to train and monitor newbies.
- In his user diary, alexkemp describes the issue with Mapillary overblurring the uploaded photos. According to his post, he considers 92 percent of all blurs on the 111 photos he investigated as “stupid blurs”.
- Apple has created MapRoulette challenges, mainly in South-American countries (we reported earlier). Andrew has now published a list of all challenges. Most new challenges deal with road problems.
- The OSM official blog provides some background information about the Organised Editing Guidelines.
- The proposal about the mapping of disputed boundaries in OSM has drawn some attention and was discussed in other places, in the German forum (automatic translation) for example. However, version 1.6, which has incorporated a lot of feedback based on previous versions, has just reached 17 yes-votes (14 no, 2 abstain) and hence is not considered as approved.
- Voting has started for the key
building:soft_storey=that can be used if a building has at least one building level that is significantly more flexible or weaker in lateral load resistance than the levels above or below.
Community
- The proposal to reform the way that copyright is enforced in the EU was discussed previously in weeklyOSM #425, and the outlook appeared slightly positive. However, according to Julia Reda, a member of the EU parliament, a Franco-German deal made things worse and the likelihood of upload filters for user-generated content are on the rise.
- Tobias Knerr invites developers of open source software from the OSM ecosystem to add project ideas for the approaching Google Summer of Code to the OSM wiki.
- A film by Observatoire des Mobilités Africaines (OMA) featuring Guy-Maurel Konan, the founder of OSM Côte d’Ivoire, uses examples from Abidjan to show what detailed information can be found on OSM. Michelin helps with the registration of roads and traffic signs.
- Vicksun reports that the first interactive webinar session with the the Nigerian OSM community was held successfully .
OpenStreetMap Foundation
- A thread on osmf-Talk entitled “voting fraud” was started in mid-January by Rihards. He asked board members and candidates to comment publicly on the GlobalLogic actions and to disclose any association or foreknowledge about their activities. He stressed that perceived conflicts of interest and perceived election fraud could be very damaging to the OSM as a whole.There have been 59 responses to this thread to date, it appears that the passionate discussions about “governance and conflicts of interest” have shifted from the usual election-time discussions to wider ones about OSMF membership.In the course of the discussion, members asked their representatives for openness and transparency, which was met with some pushback – see the e-mail from Heather Leson and the reply from Allan Mustard.
- Rihards points out on the OSMF mailing list that “senior GL employees that have worked with people who have participated in this thread. Who are friends with candidates to the board. Anybody can see this in various social media.” The thread about the 101 membership applications of GlobalLogic from India broke off at this point, without those addressed having commented on it.
- Dorothea, the Administrative Assistant to the OSMF Board of Directors, has summarised the events surrounding the signup of 101 GlobalLogic employees, including links to individual circular resolutions and mailing list discussions, on the OSMF website.
- Wikipedia’s article on GlobalLogic mentions the “incident” around the OSM elections. That page has for some time been tagged in wikipedia as “reading like an advertisement”; arguably this latest change makes it less so.
- SunCobalt uses graphics to demonstrate (automatic translation) that while Germany (and others like Italy, Russia and Poland) have little interest in the OSMF compared to the number of mappers, in India and the USA interest in the OSMF even exceeds the interest in mapping.
- The OSMF Board of Directors has replied with justification for overturning the DWG decision on the application of the “on the ground rule” to Crimea published in December. The resulting thread contained considerable criticism, but also some speaking in favour of a “least strife” goal. Despite being asked over a week ago, the board has not communicated with the wider OSM community beyond the relatively small audience of osmf-talk.
Events
- The State of the Map working group published a blog post which gives some organisational details about the upcoming State of the Map in Heidelberg, Germany. The post provides the estimated timeline for the conference, a list of contact e-mail addresses, the reason for the monkey on the logo and some other insights.
- Steven Feldman reported his experiences at and around the first geomob BCN in Barcelona, a meetup of geoinnovation fans that was started back in 2008 in London. Because of the great success, the next date for Barcelona has already been set for 24 April.
- Crowd2Map Tanzania Development Trust and Una Quantum invite you to a mapathon to be held in Rome, at Millepiani Coworking, via Nicolo Odero, 13, 00154 on 6 March.
- The winning logo for the State of the Map Africa, which will take place this year in Grand Bassam, Côte d’Ivoire from 22 to 24 November 2019, was revealed. It was created by Christa Obeng Nimako. An overview of all submissions can be found here.
Humanitarian OSM
- Following Stefano Maffulli’s talk at the FOSDEM 2019 about using OpenStreetMap and QGIS to build resiliency maps for emergency preparation, Hartmut Holzgraefe created a resiliency overlay style for his MapOSMatic instance based on the presented prototype.
- In an interview with The Citizen, Bornlove Ntikha, from Tanzania, explains how he joined HOT’s Technology and Innovation Department and the goals he is pursuing. He is currently working on the design of drones to be used by HOT to map the suburbs of Dar es Salaam.
Maps
- Martin Raifer reports that the global OpenMapSurfer map tiles by GIScience Heidelberg have been moved to the university cloud and are now available via the openrouteservice API.
They also offer further OSM maps like osm-wms.de, histosm.org, the ohsome osmatrix, osmlanduse.org and the climate protection map. - [1] WhereGroup’s online OSM demo now covers the whole world. The company released a statement (automatic translation) that WMS, WMS-C, WMTS and TMS services, which are free for private and testing purposes, now include the Lyrk and the greyscale mapstyle, while osm_ch and osm_at specific layers have been discontinued.
switch2OSM
- Geoawesomeness, a blog about geospatial technologies, is of the opinion that OSM is becoming the mapping standard. In an article the website provides the reasons for their opinion.
Software
- Trufi (Taxi de ruta fija) Taxis with fixed routes are an important part of public transport in Bolivia. A Bolivian-German group called Trufi Association has launched the public transport app Trufi especially for Cochabamba, Bolivia. Now they want to extend the service to El Alto (second largest city in Bolivia) and ask
(automatic translation) the OSM community for help. - MapRoulette has been updated to version 3.1.3 with a new Korean translation, support for simplestyle Task styling, new leaderboard features and more. Martijn van Exel writes about it in his diary.
(automatic Programming
- Nick Whitelegg is looking for affordable hosting of an OSM database for his Hikar project, an augmented reality app for walkers and hikers,which he introduced during the recent FOSDEM. He plans to extend the coverage of Hikar, which is currently limited to Great Britain, Ireland and Greece
Releases
- A new stable version of JOSM has been released. Version 19.01 adds a tab with installation details in the “About” popup, improves behaviour for retaining the history when unglueing nodes, optimises “Zoom to selection” behaviour, changes the default settings for auto-resizing the tags table to optional, and a lot of other fixes and improvements.
Did you know …
- …. the map farmshops.eu, which shows farm shops, market places and vending machines for food and milk in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and some neighbouring regions? The developer recently added beekeepers.
OSM in the media
- Lucas Selfslagh reports for Medium on the development of his community open world video game “Ghent Theft Auto” and why he chose OSM as the database for creating his world’s data.
Other “geo” things
- Tom Lee, of Mapbox, lists privacy recommendations for developers and how to deal with their users’ location data. The recommendations are the result of Mapbox’s own approach to dealing with users’ location data.
- Ian Bancroft asks on Twitter Why does @googlemaps continue to insist that I have to go via either #Montenegro or #Macedonia in order to reach #Kosovo from #Serbia, and vice versa? The answers include references to OSM and related services.
- Melanie Eckle, from the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT), shared her experience at the Red Cross congress “Digital in civil protection” congress, where she and her colleague presented information about Missing Maps and related work of the GIScience/HeiGIT team, including openrouteservice for disaster management and ohsome, the OpenStreetMap History Data Analytics Platform.
- New York’s police demand that Google remove the new feature that displays the location of speed cameras from Google Maps.
- EOX announced their release of a cloudless composite of 2018 captured Sentinel-2 data.
- The beta version of Google Earth Studio allows users to render animations from Google Earth data. The website digitalproduction.com explains (automatic translation) their experience with the tool.
(automatic Upcoming Events
| Where | What | When | Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| Barcelona | Mapes i Birres Febrer (Trobada d’usuaris d’OpenStreetMap)[1] | 2019-02-15 |  |
| Belfast | QuB | 2019-02-16 |  |
| Taipei | OSM x Wikidata #1 | 2019-02-18 |  |
| Cologne Bonn Airport | Bonner Stammtisch | 2019-02-19 |  |
| Derby | East Midlands Pub meetup | 2019-02-19 |  |
| Salt Lake City | SLC Map Night | 2019-02-19 |  |
| Reading | Missing Maps Reading Mapathon | 2019-02-19 | |
| Lüneburg | Lüneburger Mappertreffen | 2019-02-19 | |
| Mumble Creek | OpenStreetMap Foundation public board meeting | 2019-02-20 |  |
| Karlsruhe | Stammtisch | 2019-02-20 | |
| Scotland | Edinburgh | 2019-02-20 | |
| Padua | FOSS4G-IT 2019 (OSMit2019) | 2019-02-20-2019-02-24 |  |
| Salt Lake City | SLUG meeting (with OSM presentation) | 2019-02-21 | |
| Greater Vancouver area | Metrotown mappy Hour | 2019-02-22 |  |
| Biella | Incontro mensile | 2019-02-23 | |
| Manila | 【MapaTime!】 @ co.lab | 2019-02-23 |  |
| Karlsruhe | Karlsruhe Hack Weekend February 2019 | 2019-02-23-2019-02-24 | |
| Rennes | Créer ses propres cartes avec uMap | 2019-02-24 |  |
| Bremen | Bremer Mappertreffen | 2019-02-25 | |
| Digne-les-Bains | Conférence « Communs numériques – Cartes sensibles » | 2019-02-26 | |
| Viersen | OSM Stammtisch Viersen | 2019-02-26 | |
| Düsseldorf | Stammtisch | 2019-02-27 | |
| Lübeck | Lübecker Mappertreffen | 2019-02-28 | |
| Leoberdorf | Leobersdorfer Stammtisch | 2019-02-28 |  |
| Montrouge | Rencontre des contributeurs de Montrouge et alentours | 2019-02-28 | |
| Minsk | byGIS Meetup | 2019-03-01 |  |
| Stuttgart | Stuttgarter Stammtisch | 2019-03-06 | |
| Dresden | Stammtisch Dresden | 2019-03-07 | |
| Nantes | Réunion mensuelle | 2019-03-07 | |
| Dresden | FOSSGIS 2019 | 2019-03-13-2019-03-16 | |
| Portmarnock | Erasmus+ EuYoutH_OSM Meeting | 2019-03-25-2019-03-29 |  |
| Montpellier | State of the Map France 2019 | 2019-06-14-2019-06-16 | |
| Angra do Heroísmo | Erasmus+ EuYoutH_OSM Meeting | 2019-06-24-2019-06-29 |  |
| Minneapolis | State of the Map US 2019 | 2019-09-06-2019-09-08 | |
| Edinburgh | FOSS4GUK 2019 | 2019-09-18-2019-09-21 | |
| Heidelberg | Erasmus+ EuYoutH_OSM Meeting | 2019-09-18-2019-09-23 | |
| Heidelberg | HOT Summit 2019 | 2019-09-19-2019-09-20 | |
| Heidelberg | State of the Map 2019 (international conference) | 2019-09-21-2019-09-23 | |
| Grand-Bassam | State of the Map Africa 2019 | 2019-11-22-2019-11-24 |  |
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 Nakaner, PierZen, Polyglot, Rogehm, SomeoneElse, Guillaume Rischard, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, kartonage, keithonearth.