Author: weeklyteam

weeklyOSM 529

01/09/2020-07/09/2020

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Wheelmap.org celebrates its 10th birthday – Happy birthday! 1 | © Wheelmap.org | data © OpenStreetMap contributors

About us

  • Our editorial system now gives you the opportunity to post your articles directly into our system, and to suggest an initial formulation. We may make slight editorial changes to adapt the text to our language style. Translation into 12 languages will be done by us.

Mapping

  • The French ‘Project of the Month’ (fr) > en, has a graphically prepared interim balance of what has been achieved. It still has 18 days to run and aims for the complete mapping of defibrillators (AED). PanierAvide gives (fr) > en, in addition, a few tips for further work.
  • In September 2010, the Berlin-based association Sozialhelden e.V. launched (de) > en the Wheelmap.org project. Ten years later, Wheelmap has become the largest online map of wheelchair accessible places with over one million entries. In September, the team invites you to join in the celebrations under the motto ‘Wheelmap turns 10’. The campaign is taking place in the Wheelmap social networks and as a digital mapping action. They are also launching a small mapping campaign with the aim of getting people to each evaluate ten places on the Wheelmap that still have unknown wheelchair accessibility.
  • Andrew Harvey proposes the new tag shelter_type=rock_shelter to mark the difference between the already existing natural=cave_entrance and a shallow cave-like opening at the base of a bluff or cliff, which may be used to protect yourself from the weather.
  • In his blog post (de) > en, Robhubi deals with different types and names of watercourses that lead to mills in Austria and Germany. He evaluates entries in OpenStreetmap. WSHerx rates the publication as ‘impressively thorough work and convincing argumentation’.

Community

  • On 1 September, Amazon Web Services (AWS) released an episode of their documentary series Now Go Build, which highlighted the work done by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team in the Philippines, especially in mapping the town of Guagua, in the province of Pampanga.Several members of the OSM-PH community, however, observed that there were missing and problematic narratives in the video related to the story it tells of geospatial and humanitarian workers in the country. Therefore, they prepared and released this statement (pdf).
  • Martin Koppenhoefer asked on osmf-talk whether Brexit will have an effect on OSM and wondered if the foundation could be moved to another European country. The core database, website and API are already hosted in the Netherlands (since late 2018), but there is still some user data stored in the United Kingdom (Forum, Piwik, Foundation wiki, mailing lists). Additionally AWS is used for some data storage needs; the data is primarily stored on AWS Ireland.
  • AI is not a magic bullet. Even for a company as resourceful as Facebook the results of an image recognition algorithm still needs to be manually verified. Some mappers using the results of MapwithAI, bypassing the upload limits, mass uploaded without reviewing the results. As a result users have discovered zh-tw strange ‘roads’ on Rudy Map, the most important offline map dataset in Taiwan, and have reported them in the Facebook user group. Cartographers of a mountaineering group have also had to remove non-existent roads in the mountains, or correct streams without water in the dry season, which were wrongly classified as roads.
  • Prajwal Shrestha, a student of the Institute of Agriculture and Animal Science-Lamjung, Tribhuvan University (Lamjung Campus), Nepal, shared his excitement about joining the OSM community through the creation of a new YouthMappers chapter (Agri-Mappers Lamjung) on his university campus.
  • Facebook has released a third update to Daylight, their complete, downloadable preview of OpenStreetMap data (57 GB). Michal Migurski gives some insights in his blog and provides relevant links.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Events

  • The 2020 Pista ng Mapa (Festival of Maps) organisers from the OpenStreetMap and FOSS4G communities in the Philippines are calling for presenters and workshop proposals on Open Data, Mapping, and FOSS4G for presentation at their 2020 conference this November. The call is open until 30 September. Also, this month, they are holding a map and poster making contest with the theme ‘Mapa para sa lahat’ (Maps for everyone). Check out their website for details. Prizes await winners in two categories: students and professionals.
  • Alessandro Sarretta presented a poster entitled ‘OpenStreetMap: an opportunity for Citizen Science’ at the ECSA 2020 conference, showing the many ways OpenStreetMap and citizen science can help each other.

Humanitarian OSM

  • Jean-Marc Liotier criticised HOT’s use of the number of mapped buildings as a measure of the ‘state of OpenStreetMap in Africa’. At the same time, he acknowledged that criticising bad metrics is easy, but finding good ones is difficult and he agreed to participate in an ‘open working group on OpenStreetMap metrics’.
  • Taichi Furuhashi (User MAPconcierge) looked back (ja) on the crisis mapping conducted in response to heavy rain in Japan and summarised points to be improved. Over 1800 people participated in the task, and over 65,000 buildings were mapped.

Maps

  • Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) has developed a mapping system to assist blind people in navigating cities.

Open Data

  • The Croatian State Geodetic Administration has published (hr) > en new aerial imagery for the eastern and southern parts of Croatia taken in 2019, and extended new topographic 1:25,000 map coverage.

Software

Programming

  • At the Google Summer of Code, Kishan Tripathi, K Rahul Reddy, Rebecca Schmidt and Daniel Weaver worked on OpenStreetMap.

Releases

  • The changelog for the stable version #17013 of JOSM lists, among many others, the addition of the Serbian language with Latin script, GPX routes as a separate layer, and a dark mode via the plugin FlatLaf as major changes.

Did you know …

  • OSM Streak? Do you still need a few days to get your free membership at the OSM Foundation? Ilya Zverev’s Telegram bot OSM Streak reminds you with a small daily task. 😉
  • … there is a list of the OSM mailing lists? However, many of them are orphaned.
  • … OSM Ireland has its own site for mapping tasks that can be solved from home? The focus is on buildings.

Other “geo” things

  • Allan Mustard says the article by Maite Vermeulen, Leon de Korte and Henk van Houtum in The Correspondent presents an ‘excellent case study of political bias in maps’.
  • When US companies were ordered to stop working with Huawei, Google Maps was one of the apps that was dearly missed. Now the Chinese smartphone company has released TomTom’s navigation app on Huawei AppGallery. With OsmAnd, Here WeGo and maps.me there were already some alternatives available in the store.

Upcoming Events

WhereWhatWhenCountry
Potsdam147. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch2020-09-10germany
MunichMünchner Treffen2020-09-10germany
Zurich121. OSM Meetup Zurich2020-09-11switzerland
LeobenStammtisch Obersteiermark2020-09-12austria
San JoséNational Day of Civic Hacking2020-09-12united states
AshurstTrek View New Forest Pano Party2020-09-13united kingdom
MontrougeRencontre des contributeurs de Montrouge et alentours2020-09-14france
Cologne Bonn Airport131. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch (Online)2020-09-15germany
LüneburgLüneburger Mappertreffen2020-09-15germany
Salt Lake City / VirtualOpenStreetMap Utah Map Night2020-09-15united states
Kabul / OnlineWhy OSM and how to Contribute into it on Software Freedom Day 20202020-09-18afghanistan
NottinghamNottingham pub meetup2020-09-22united kingdom
BratislavaMissing Maps Mapathon Bratislava #92020-09-24slovakia
DüsseldorfDüsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch2020-09-25germany
Salt Lake City / VirtualOpenStreetMap Utah Map Night2020-09-29united states
Alice2020 Pista ng Mapa2020-11-13-2020-11-27philippines
AliceFOSS4G SotM Oceania 20202020-11-20oceania

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 AnisKoutsi, GOwin, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, Polyglot, Rogehm, TheSwavu, derFred, richter_fn.