weeklyOSM 627

19/07/2022-25/07/2022

Mapping

  • Andrea Spinelli wondered how to add a point of interest with iD at a specific coordinate. Officially, this function is not desired. Developers recommend the use of Cmd + Opt + M, or equivalent, to open the measurement panel, which shows the exact location of a selected node. In comments following the blog post, readers shared their alternative approaches.
  • A bicycle route linking Stuttgart in Germany to Strasbourg in France has been created, as reported last week. Without signposts along it, a discussion has started about whether it meets OpenStreetMap’s inclusion criteria. At the moment there are opinions on multiple channels for and against, including the French mailing list (fr) > en and the German forum (de) > en.
  • EdoBoo reported, in their OSM Diary, that their visit to Forte di Montecchio motivated them to revise the mapping of this fortress with more detail.
  • Mapping public transport seems to remain a challenge for new mappers, although the wiki contains a step-by-step tutorial.
  • ngumenawesamson, from HOT, presented a detailed classification of aspects of data quality on OSM, under 10 headings. It is planned to use this classification to identify actions which can be taken, within HOT projects, to reduce some of these issues.
  • Voting on Documentation of key prefixes and suffixes, to establish the convention of documenting key prefixes at pages named Key:prefix:* and key suffixes at pages named Key:*:suffix on the wiki, is open until Sunday 7 August.
  • Voting on the following proposals has closed:
    • school=entrance, to deprecate the use of the tag school=entrance, was approved with 26 votes for, 3 votes against and 0 abstentions.
    • amenity=library_dropoff, for mapping a place where library patrons can return or drop-off books, other than the library itself, was approved with 12 votes for, 1 vote against and 0 abstentions.

Community

  • The national mapping agency for Great Britain, the Ordnance Survey (OSGB), recently released a new map, OS Map, as a website and a mobile app. The map provides both free and subscription layers. The free layers integrate data from a range of sources: OSGB open data, OSGB closed data and OpenStreetMap via MapBox. The UK community has noticed problems with the latter layer as it includes private paths, which has resulted in irate landowners deleting perfectly valid OSM data.
  • User TrickyFoxy raised the question of whether registration for OpenStreetMap by mobile users (especially with Google) is too complex and linked to different issues on GitHub, one of which has been open since 2015. As Tom Hughes pointed out at the time, any solution must enable new mappers to accept the contributor terms.

Education

  • Introducing young people to responsible mapping through education and training is certainly more meaningful than hunting for nodes. Great examples are the actions of Muni Mappers from Uganda and Laura Mugeha at the Technical University, Nairobi, Kenya.

OSM research

  • Roberto Pizzolotto, of the University of Calabria, published a scientific trajectory of OpenStreetMap. It showed that the main themes (a conceptual network) chiefly related to technical matters. Collaboration among scholars and institutes (the social network) was not strong, and knowledge and ideas circulated within a limited network.

Maps

switch2OSM

  • The French association Randonner Leger (fr) > en, wrote (fr) > en a guide about using OSMAnd for trekking purposes.

Software

  • Canadian contributors reported reliability problems with OSM tile servers. The OpenStreetMap operations group is aware of latency problems for North American users as the one US rendering server, Pyrene, no longer has the capacity to keep up with demand. It is planned to add a new server soon in the east of North America.
  • Benjamin Clark, from Meta, shared the 2022 development plans for MapWithAI’s RapiD editor for OpenStreetMap in a GitHub project issue. It is open to comments and feedback.
  • Ilya Zverev wondered how to edit tags directly from openstreetmap.org. He built a solution which works as a browser extension available for Firefox and Chrome.

Programming

  • Paul Norman took the recent outage of the standard tile layer as motivation to describe the means of monitoring system health.

Did you know …

Other “geo” things

  • The Tour de France Femmes bicycle race has a live map of the event which uses the Leaflet library, known for its use of OpenStreetMap as a base layer provider, among others.

Upcoming Events

WhereWhatOnlineWhenCountry
iD for Beginner Training osmcalpic2022-07-30
臺北市COSCUP 2022 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 聯合議程軌 osmcalpic2022-07-30flag
Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires4a reunión bimestral de OSM Latam (organiza OSM Argentina) osmcalpic2022-07-30flag
ErnakulamOSM Kerala Community Meetup 2022 osmcalpic2022-07-31flag
OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting osmcalpic2022-08-01
MapRoulette Monthly Community Meeting osmcalpic2022-08-02
StuttgartStuttgarter Stammtisch osmcalpic2022-08-02flag
San JoseSouth Bay Map Night osmcalpic2022-08-03flag
City of WestminsterMissing Maps London Mapathon osmcalpic2022-08-02flag
BerlinOSM-Verkehrswende #38 (Online) osmcalpic2022-08-02flag
Salt Lake CityOSM Utah Monthly Meetup osmcalpic2022-08-04flag
CayambeNotathon en OpenStreetMap – resolvamos notas de Cayambé, Ecuador osmcalpic2022-08-06flag
OSM Africa August Mapathon: Map Rwanda osmcalpic2022-08-06
新北市OpenStreetMap 街景踏查團 #3 osmcalpic2022-08-07flag
WashingtonMappingDC Mappy Hour osmcalpic2022-08-10flag
HamburgHamburger Mappertreffen osmcalpic2022-08-09flag
Köln25. Stammtisch Köln osmcalpic2022-08-10flag
Salt Lake CityOSM Utah Monthly Meetup osmcalpic2022-08-11flag
MünchenMünchner OSM-Treffen osmcalpic2022-08-10flag
Zürich143. OSM-Stammtisch osmcalpic2022-08-11flag
Berlin170. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch osmcalpic2022-08-12flag
臺北市OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #43 osmcalpic2022-08-15flag
San JoseSouth Bay Map Night osmcalpic2022-08-17flag
154. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn osmcalpic2022-08-16
LüneburgLüneburger Mappertreffen (online) osmcalpic2022-08-16flag
FirenzeState of the Map 2022 osmcalpic2022-08-19 – 2022-08-21flag

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 Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, PierZen, SK53, TheSwavu, derFred.