weekly 251 – 05.05.-11.05.2015

05.05.-11.05.2015

About us

• Errata: The very nice guide on how data can be collected for Mapillary from pedestrians was not written by Xxzme (the user has simply moved the wiki page), but was created by Peter Neubauer.

Weekly exercise

• That this further remains – Remember kids, Google Maps is better than OpenStreetMap because any prankster can edit OSM… no one can edit Google (via @Anonymaps),
• Google has now pulled the emergency brake: Google as follows: Please everyone continue working with OpenStreetMap! (via @presroi)

Mapping

• Please update your JOSM to version 8339. This version repaired three fatal errors in version 8279
• A user now has been locked out for another 3 months having caused a lot of trouble in the Wiki .
• Long-time OpenStreetMapper and Wikipedian Andy Mabbett (User Pigsonthewing) is now an administrator of our wiki.  Grant Slater is now concentrating on operational and hardware work.
• User stephan75 shows how fixme= and note= can be displayed with OSMAnd 2.0 and Overpass.
• Even for unusual gates, tags can be found.

Community

• The mapper of the month in Belgium is user eMerzh.
• Mateusz Konieczny compares different map styles for his “Google Summer of Code” Project. First he looked at the OSM Standard style and the style of Google Maps.
• On OpenStreetMapData.com, thanks to the cooperation of Christoph Hormann, extracts of the Antarctic ice plate now feature alongside the daily extracts of coastlines – generalized coastlines
• The GIS department of the city of Erlangen now has an account with OpenStreetMap.
• Since OSMAnd version 2.0.4 it is easy to open GPX tracks and the corresponding 3GP files within JOSM

Imports

• A mapper working on behalf of BP, the parent company of Aral) has figured out that the community has, over the past decade, mapped 99.7% of all German Aral petrol stations.  For the remaining 8 petrol stations (yes, that’s eight)  Pavel Machek suggests just hitting the import button.

Humanitarian OSM

• Wired.com und The Atlantic report on OSM and HOT after the earthquake in Nepal.
• For the Nepal region, the HOT map style was changed from SRTM elevation data with 90 m to the newer data with 30 m resolution. Read in the blog post how to integrate the new SRTM data quickly into your own maps.

Maps

• [1] Discover the world in Lichtenstein style. Katie Kowalsky created a Pop Art tileset in the style of Roy Lichtenstein. (via: CITYLAB)
• In OpenSnowMap blog, three statistics on length of slopes and lifts have been published.

Open-Data

• Lyrk published the manually improved satellite images under CC-BY.
• The Sunlight Foundation has put together 100 examples of the postitive benefits of Open Data.

Licences

• We now know what extra permissions are needed to include CC-BY data in OSM.

Software

• BugFix-Release 2.8.2 ‘Wien’ from QGIS released. 122 bugs have been fixed.
• The documentation for Imposm3 is ready.

Did you know …

• … there are more than 200 plug-ins for leaflet?

Other “geo” things

• Uber has allegedly bid three billion dollars for Nokia’s “HERE” mapping service.
• Since some Google Maps editors were doing too much damage (i.e. an Andoid peeing on an Apple), the automated and moderated transfer of changes from Google Map Maker to Google Maps has been switched off.
• Wheregroup offers a job: IT administrator (Vacancy as PDF).
• If you like want to relive your childhood: Google Maps and Street View can also be viewed in Lego style.