weeklyOSM 577

03/08/2021-09/08/2021

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Arnalie reflected on how State of the Map worked from the perspective of an organiser [1]

About us

  • Mariotomo, from Panama, explained some of the problems faced by our readers in countries with poor and/or expensive internet connections. He has a relatively simple solution: using a bash script to pull items from the RSS feed which may be of interest to others.The weeklyOSM team are interested to hear of similar issues or solutions. Our aim is to reach as many as possible in the broad OpenStreetMap community wherever they are.

Mapping

  • TomTom has introduced a new QA tool. The announcement coincided with OSM’s 17th anniversary.
  • Reddit user midforty asked, on the OSM subreddit, about mapping unofficial hiking trails. They had mapped one which someone else had then deleted. Various opinions are expressed about whether this is good practice or not in the comments.
  • Requests have been made for comments on the following proposals:
    • catholic=* for a more precise tagging of the Catholic denomination.
    • transformer=* for refining power transformers classification.

Community

  • You are invited to upload photos from various OSM 17th birthday parties to the wiki.

Imports

  • Kirill Setdekov posted on the OSMF-talk mailing list hoping to make a request to import Google’s Open Buildings for Africa into OSM. The post met strong opposition by mappers in several African communities who deemed that the building footprints were of low quality and would only exacerbate poor quality edits in the region.

Events

  • [1] Arnalie reflected on how State of the Map worked from the perspective of an organiser, and made some recommendations for future online only events.

OSM research

  • Researchers from HeiGIT have studied the impact of large data imports on OpenStreetMap by comparing contributor activity both when imports are active and when they are paused.

Maps

  • RobJN recently created an MVT (Mapbox Vector Tile) layer of property data (UPRNs) in Great Britain, but many labels were duplicated. In his latest post he describes how he overcame this issue by styling the layer in JOSM. The general principles are more widely applicable to other MVT layers.

switch2OSM

  • Niceboard posted on Hackernoon explaining why they switched from Google Places to Mapbox for their Autocomplete API.

Software

  • José Juan Montes showcased the DDD project’s capabilities in generating and showing 3D scenery built from OpenStreetMap data.
  • Felix Delattre has announced a new version of mod_tile and renderd (to generate raster tile images and deliver them via a web server). At the same time the software packages have just became available in the official sources of the brand new stable Debian 11 (bullseye) and Ubuntu 21.04 (hirsute).

Releases

  • The Android version of OsmAnd 4.0 has been released. This version offers cloud backup, the ability to colour tracks by altitude, speed or slope, and other interesting new features. Note that this release introduces new subscription models.

Did you know …

  • … you can easily extract administrative boundaries such as country, state and regional borders or equivalents from OpenStreetMap using OSM-Boundaries?
  • … of the South-pointing chariot (our historical map-related item of the week)? A Chinese invention which used a mechanism to take movement of the chariot’s wheels and ensure a pointing device was always oriented to the south.

OSM in the media

  • Bloomberg CityLab reported on HOT’s various projects for mapping informal settlements (slums) in less-developed nations.

Other “geo” things

  • This week OpenCage’s geo weirdness thread returns to Europe to take a look at Belgium.
  • Whilst doing some mapping in the London suburb of Mill Hill, SK53 noticed roads named after famous scientists with one female (given) name amongst the (male) surnames.
  • Bloomberg reported that the attempt to establish a union at Mapbox failed. Although more than half of the voting employees had become union members, Mapbox opted to exercise their legal option to force an additional ballot. A majority of those voting in this ballot did not support union recognition.
  • Matt Parilla asked the rhetorical question ‘why does sunlight come from the north in shaded relief maps?’. He shows in the answering thread that it is related to how the human brain interprets light and shade to detect objects in three dimensions.

Upcoming Events

WhereWhatOnlineWhenCountry
Bonn142. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn osmcalpic2021-08-17flag
BerlinOSM-Verkehrswende #26 (Online) osmcalpic2021-08-17flag
LüneburgLüneburger Mappertreffen (online) osmcalpic2021-08-17flag
KölnStammtisch Köln osmcalpic2021-08-18flag
OSM US Mappy Hour osmcalpic2021-08-19
DRK Missing Maps Mapathon osmcalpic2021-08-19
San JoseSouth Bay Map Night osmcalpic2021-08-20flag
潍坊市OpenStreetMap(中国大陆)第一次线下聚会 osmcalpic2021-08-20 – 2021-08-30flag
AmsterdamOSM Nederland maandelijkse bijeenkomst (online) osmcalpic2021-08-21flag
BremenBremer Mappertreffen (Online) osmcalpic2021-08-23flag
105. OSM-Stammtisch Viersen und Umgebung osmcalpic2021-08-24
DerbyEast Midlands OSM Pub Meet-up : Derby osmcalpic2021-08-24flag
DüsseldorfDüsseldorfer OSM-Treffen (online) osmcalpic2021-08-25flag
ZürichMissing Maps Zürich Mapathon osmcalpic2021-08-25flag
[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public meeting osmcalpic2021-08-27
Autrans-Méaudre en VercorsWikiCamp L’Escandille osmcalpic2021-08-28 – 2021-08-29flag
San JoseSouth Bay Map Night osmcalpic2021-09-03flag
京田辺市京都!街歩き!マッピングパーティ:第26回 一休寺 osmcalpic2021-09-04jp

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by SK53, Sammyhawkrad, TheSwavu, derFred.

2 Replies to “weeklyOSM 577”

  1. Regarding improving the site, you should really look into your wp-content/themes/aletheia/css/fonts.css file. It calls google fonts with http:// even though your site is https://. Obviously, such requests will fail until browser will proactively upgrade requests to https. As of right now only Firefox does it, Chrome might in the near future. But it’s better if you just fix your theme in the first place.

    Also, you include Piwik analytics block, but it’s pointing to https://openstreetmap.fr/piwik/piwik.js, which is 404. So either remove the whole piwik block or fix the link.

    Overall, if you can perhaps use wp-super-cache plugin to optimize and speed a lot of things on your site.

  2. @Mxx Thank you for your hints! Sounds fair. MatthiasMatthias will take care of it,