weekly 256 – 09.06.–15.06.2015

09.06.-15.06.2015

Fundraising campaign for new server hardware

• Have you already donated? For over a week, the fundraising campaign of the OpenStreetMap Foundation for new server hardware running. At present, only four-fifths of the required sum of £56,000 (about €78,100 or $89.000 US) has been achieved. The largest single donations so far have come from Mapbox and Mapzen, who have both donated $20,000 each (about £12,900 or €17,800). Every little bit helps.

Mapping

• Joost Schouppe reports about power editing with Level0 editor and Overpass turbo.
• Frederik Ramm launched an escalating discussion on the pros and cons of armchair mapping, particularly in connection with HOT / Missing Maps.
• Richard Welty suggests the tag README=* should be used to display a warning if an object carries this tag. README=* should contain a warning if the aerial photos are outdated locally (eg new buildings, demolished buildings).

Community

• Frederik Ramm asks who else has received “research project” mail about a “VGI in land administration” project.
• Pascal Neis’ side of changeset discussions can now filter by country (see his tweet).

Imports

• According to Pavel Kwiecien, the import of Czech land use information has been completed. (see this OSM diary entry by xkomczax )
• Robert Buchholz asks on the import list whether his use agreement for the OpenStreetMap community is sufficient. He would like to import 3D data (minimum building heights) of the city of Berlin.

Events

• User “maning” reports on a mapping party held in Iloilo City in May.
• The Call for Papers for WhereCamp in November 2015 in Berlin runs until September 26.
• See all future events in the OSM Event Calendar.

Humanitarian OSM

• Milo van der Linden has set up a meetbot in HOT-IRC that logs the chat at meetings.

Maps

• Richard Fairhurst’s bicycle router on cycle.travel is now also available for the USA. Due to the poor data situation rural roads with a highway=residential tag and a tiger:reviewed=no tag (i.e. not reviewed by a human after the TIGER import) are avoided during routing.

Software

• Simon announced the first release candidate of Vespucci 0.9.6 (Android OSM editor). It is also available via the beta program on Google Store.
• In the last issue (#255) it was suggested that an Apple Watch at SotM-US in New York was the first to run an OSM map.  However, Maps.me was faster!  (via @ШТОСМ)
• QField (a QGIS-compatible GIS for Android) is now available as a beta version in the Google Play Store.
• On GitHub, there is an R interface for Leaflet, which allows an easy integration and use of maps with Leaflet in the programming language R.
• Milo Yip has published a lecture on RapidJSON, a particularly fast JSON parser.(via @kkaefer)
• Mapnik’s project website has been updated.
• tassia presents a draft GUI for OpenAerialMap plugins for QGIS.

Did you know…

• … there’s a sandbox that you can use for testing and playing around with the raw data from OSM? Here you can can create and delete things and try something and do all you want, without breaking anything.

Other “geo” things

• Apple is driving around places for Apple Maps in the US, the UK and Ireland. A list of cities can be found on an Apple web site.
• AOL’s subsidiary company Mapquest’s tiles will be rendered in the future at Mapbox, instead of doing it themselves. In addition, revisions to the products are planned (via TechCrunch, also owned by AOL). Mapbox welcomes Mapquest on Twitter.
• Fred Johansen has created a website to visualise “history with automated event maps”. It seems that the base map is one from a market companion.
• At Geohipster.com, there’s an interview with Eric Gundersen (CEO Mapbox) and Alex Barth (head of Mapbox Data Team).