The weeklyOSM team is looking for new members to join the team. weeklyOSM publishes 52 issues per year currently in eight languages, regardless of holidays or public holidays. To do this we need to get reinforcements. As a part of weeklyOSM, you can work on: collecting and evaluate links belonging to OSM, writing articles, translating and proofreading, editing images, etc. Please drop an email to ( blog at openstreetmap dot de ) with your OSM account.
Mapping
DigitalGlobe and Mapboxshared two new global satellite imagery layers for live tracing on OpenStreetMap. Now, mappers will have even more sources of high quality, recent imagery layers to trace, identify, and validate roads, places, and buildings to continue to expand this free and open database of the Earth’s features. In JOSM, you have to activate it explicitly under Background → Background Settings. For more information read DigitalGlobe’s employee Kevin Bullock’s diary entry, the discussions in the German forum and the mailing lists: Talk-en and Talk. The License Terms are available in the OSM Wiki.
There is an interesting discussion in the OpenStreetMap forum about tips, tools and apps that can be used for videomapping while biking.
Community
Roland Olbricht highlighted three suggestions for improving data protection, which were discussed at the FOSSGIS conference in Passau. There were related discussions in the German forum (automatic translation) and on the mailing list Talk-de (automatic translation) and later on the mailing list talk.
Yuri Astrakhan writes about the SPARQL (rdf) database with both OSM and Wikidata being ready for testing. It allows massive cross-referenced queries between two datasets. This service is a test, and needs a permanent home to stay alive.Oleksiy Muzalyev points to his Web app, in which one click on the map shows the associated Wikipedia articles.
Jinalfoflia shares her experience of being a part of the mapping party hosted by the Ottawa OpenStreetMap community.
The Guardian reported on an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Pete Masters and Claire Halleux have published the tasks. Nicolas Chavent summarized the priorities on two wiki pages in English and in French.
Maps
[1] Melody Cao designed maps of cities to look like they were made of wood. At multiple zoom levels, explore the different textures she has made use of.
At Rotterdam Central Station, OpenStreetMap is shown on a big screen where people can explore the city by dragging and tapping the screen. It is the only interactive map in the station, so it has been consciously chosen.
The French National Institute for preventive archaeological research provides a visualization tool based on OSM for its archaeological sites.
Baran Kahyaoglu from Mapbox writes about the creation of geo coordinates data structure to match Unity World Space with the real world. Read more about this and other things that have been added in the latest Mapbox Unity SDK release.
Casio started the sales of a new Smartwatch, named “Pro Trek”. The watch loads OSM maps powered by Mapbox.
Other “geo” things
Google now offers to certify panoramic cameras as compatible with Street View. Street View has been accepting crowd sourced images for some time now, however similar services Mapillary and OpenStreetCam, also do and keep the images available under a free license.
On ápfelmagazin.de you can read (automatic translation) an interview with Tobias Hallermann by komoot.
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This weeklyOSM was produced by Nakaner, Peda, Polyglot, Rogehm, SomeoneElse, Spec80, SrrReal, YoViajo, derFred, jcoupey, jinalfoflia, keithonearth.