Author: weeklyteam

weekly 280

11/24/2015-11/30/2015

Screenshot des OpenStreetMap Dark Theme mit Greasemonkey
Distribution of the OSM community counted by continents, chart by Simon Poole [1]

Mapping

  • Clifford Snow asks the tagging mailing list for the best way to map sidewalks so new mappers can easily add tags for (wheelchair) routing.
  • Flanders Geographical Information Agency (FGIA) renews its services for aerial images. The service is better known under its Dutch acronym AGIV in Flanders. Only the “orthofoto’s” and some parts of the historical maps can be used during mapping.
  • A pull request to the iD editor by Bryan Housel makes it possible to display the aerial images that are better than Bing as default instead of Bing. Until now, users had to switch manually from Bing to the better local aerial image provider. A comment by Mateusz Konieczny explains why this is important. The modification will be rolled out at osm.org with the next iD release.
  • While you can’t use aerial imagery to map turn restrictions, you can use Mapillary instead. User jinalfoflia of Mapbox Data Team wrote a guide which describes her mapping with Mapillary.
  • User Porjo remembers that Steve Coast announced the open access to Bing imagery for OpenStreetMap mapping five years ago.
  • OpenStreetMap Ireland congratulates Stephen who has mapped more than 10,000 townlands.
  • Dominic Coletti asks at Tagging mailing list for comments on his proposal office=adoption_agency.
  • Clemens Schüller asks (Google Translate) at Talk-at mailing list how to map the times when the kitchen of a restaurant is manned (i.e. when warm meals are served).

Community

  • Jothirnadh of MapBox describes how he completes missing cities in India with the help of the public and free database of the country. In his diary he writes about how he adds the missing information, whether it is a city or a village.
  • Michael Reichert has written a review of the candidates of current OSMF board elections. (part 1, part 2)
  • Have you already bought  your christmas gifts for this year? No? Then you should have a look at malenki’s summary and go buy your presents using the affiliate links from Amazon (UK and US)
  • [1] Simon Poole analyses how large the national communities are. Germany is the largest community (103,673 mappers), followed by US (55,919), France (33,528), Russia (32,422) and Great Britan (27,750). But these numbers do not have an effect on the data quality at OSM. This is influenced by the normalised number of mappers. Austria leads (1.307 mappers per 1,000 inhabitants), followed by Germany (1.278), Luxemburg (1.045) and Switzerland (0.920).
  • Users Nighto declared in his user blog how he transmits (free) videos in Mapillary using OpenStreetMap.
  • GOwin reports about mapping activities in the Philippines.
  • OpenCageData-Blog interviewed Matthias aka !i!.

Imports

  • User bdiscoe reports about his cleanup work of the NHD import in North Caroline. This import from the year 2009 was done badly, contained a huge number of redundancies (the reason the import was discovered in the first place) and the accuracy was bad, too.
  • Mapbox Data Team has published a detailed report about its manual cleanup efforts on the messy data in Japan, which has been imported by the poor documented Yahoo Import in 2011. (We reported)

OpenStreetMap Foundation

  • Dmitry Kiselev writes on the OSMF-talk list that he had applied for the domains osm.map and openstreet.map. He starts a discussion whether the OSMF for registration of OSM-like domains for generic top-level domains (eg .map, .cylce, …) should apply or not. Another mapper has reserved openstreetmap.map .

Events

  • On December 3rd, the International Day of Persons with Disabilites, a mapping event MapMyDay for more accessability takes place. The World Health Organisation and Wheelmap call to map accessible places with the Wheelmap-App.
  • State of the Map 2016 will be held from September 23 to 25 in Brussels

Humanitarian OSM

  • Students at Portmarnock Community School started a 24 hour mapping event around the
    #MapLesotho initiative.
  • OpenStreetMap day was celebrated at Kennedy Community School in St. Joseph, Minnesota, USA.

Maps

  • The developers of OpenRailwayMap ponder on using OpenHistoricalMap as a data source for abandoned and razed railways instead of OpenStreetMap. Michael asks at Historical mailing list what needs to be consider while copying data from OSM to OHM.

Open Data

  • The Dutch King Willem-Alexander has given the community of Wikimedia the Erasmus Prize 2015. This award is awarded to the individuals or institutions that have made outstanding achievements in the cultural, social or social science field.
  • The Surveying Authorities of Ireland and Northern Ireland have released records as Open Data under the CC-BY 4.0. The data are still not available for OSM.

Software

  • OSMBuildings includes a new option to print on a region of a map via 3YOURMIND directly in 3D. (via @OSMBuildings)
  • The offline OSM based app maps.me offers now spoken routing instructions. You can also define start and destination now freely on the map for a route calculation.

Programming

Did you know …

  • … the map of all countries where Edward Snowden applied for asylum with an actual status?
  • … the Smart Navi Watch for pedestrian navigation, with a SmartWatch being a part of a student work by Konstantin Kayed and Mirco Strössle, which was developed at the Hochschule Rapperswil under the guidance of Stefan Keller?

Other “geo” things

 

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