weekly 283

12/15/2015-12/21/2015

• WeeklyOSM says: “Merry Christmas!” to all the readers of our blog. The next issue will be published before the end of the year!

Mapping

• The Mapbox Data Team did a “tracing sprint”, a fun exercise where twelve people raced to draw the same building the fastest. (The data was not uploaded.) It’s interesting to see the different perception which these twelve people had on the same satellite imagery.
• Andrey Golovin from Mapbox shows how to efficiently trace complex buildings from satellite imagery in JOSM with the utilsplugin2 and building_tools plugins.
• Improve OSM, the suite of tools used to find errors in the OSM road network has been updated. Various JOSM plugins like MissingRoads and TrafficFlowDirection have been combined. Turn Restrictions have also been added to the errors which are detected by the plugin. The website has been redesigned, too.
• Pratikyadav from Mapbox data-team writes about their Mapping Project Guide, which gives guidance for the team to run a lead a mapping task from inception to completion in line with the best practices of mapping and ensuring the highest quality of contributions to the map. Also asks for feedback on the same.
• “ruprecht”, the Heidelberg University’s student newspaper (~10.000 copies), reports about CAP4Access activities in its current issue (page 11, in German). We hope that some of the readers get interested in MapMyDay.org and OpenStreetMap.org and perhaps become new active contributors, which in the long run would also be beneficial for the wheelchair profile on OpenRouteService.org.
• After a complaint of German city Landshut Government about several outdated POIs, mappers of this region have thought about ideas to achieve the data being up-to-date. The guys have explained their approach with the tag “last check”, which is not without controversy, in their Wiki.
• User brrt is asking the European power mappers community to kindly answer a survey about power mapping in OSM. The aim from the survey is to gain a better knowledge about how power data in mapped in OSM. This is part of his master thesis dealing with the open source SciGRID power network model, which based on power data from OSM.
• A proposal, introducing a new value for the key office=*, office=adoption_agency, is open for voting.

Community

• User te_mark uses his semester abroad to take a photograph of a tree with node number 1. The history of the node is a bit odd, and the last editor of the node is personally known to the DWG!
• According the online edition of EL Espectador, Freddy Rivera is one of the heroes of flesh and blood who anonymously contribute to build a more inclusive and caring society. The Colombian TV channel Caracol performs annual competition “Titanes” and honours outstanding achievements in various categories. Freddy Rivera won the prize in the category “Technology and Connectivity” for his “Offline Wikipedia” and his dedicated mapping of the whole city where he lives. (via talk-br) (automatic translation: Journal; Website)
• A complaint from John Goodman at talk about the incorrect search behaviour on the page led to an interesting discussion about existing and missing functionality of Nominatim and the main page.
• A new website of taginfo for twenty Italian regions has been set up. The data is based on extracts from taginfo and are updated daily.

Imports

• Daniel Simpson wants to import address data and street names in Red River Parish in Louisiana, USA.
• Kudarisenmon informs in the Japan mailing list about his preparations to import of “building outline” in Shizuoka city, Japan.
• Ivan Garcia has successfully finished the cleanup and conversion (to boundary relations) of all the administrative limits in the Jakarta province that were previously in OSM.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Following the publication of the results of this year’s OSMF elections Richard Weaits provided an evaluation. There followed an interesting discussion on the STV electoral system, including interesting analyses from Christoph and Roland.
• Rob Nickerson has published the minutes (Google Doc of the initial meeting of OSM UK.)

Humanitarian OSM

• A Mapping project for Niger was set up with the OSM Community. A report from one of its members, Fatiman Alher, a geography student about her experience mapping the vast territory of Niger.

Maps

• Jens von Bergmann describes a perfect bike map, and explains why he doesn’t like a lot of the other bike maps.

switch2OSM

• Swiss Railways (SBB) use OSM for their maps around train stations.
• German Railways (DB) uses OSM data for maps around stations but this feature is well hidden in the DB Navigation App. To see this feature you need to: 1. Search for a connection; 2. Chose a connection; 3. Click on a station in the listing for the booking; 4. Scroll down to the bottom; 5. Click on “Station Layout -> display”. Your are ready!

Open Data

• [1] Brendan has described on his blog how to use the recently-released UK LIDAR data to generate 3D images of buildings including draping aerial photography images over the raw building data. All data and tools used are available under open licences.
• In their new series, Meaningful Geocoding, Mapzen shares the principles and practices of geocoding that they are incorporating in building Pelias, their open source geocoder that powers their search entirely on open data.

Software

• After Peter Pridal, Stefan Keller reported about the start of the project OSM2VectorTiles.org. It is a joint project of the HSR Rapperswil and Klokan Technologies to simplify the installation of an OSM tile server.
• The project POSM started by Stamen together with Spatialdev and the American Red Cross. Sara Dean from Stamen writes that POSM will “make OpenStreetMap, OpenMapKit, and Field Papers, all network-centric mapping technologies, available for field deployments in extremely remote areas of the world to support the Missing Maps effort.” Also read the comment by Jubal Harpster from Spatialdev.
• Releases
  

  Software	Version	Release Date	Comment
  Locus Map Free	3.14.0	2015-12-17	Google Drive, more enhancements
  OpenLayers	3.12.1	2015-12-17	Fix of 3.12.0
  Mapillary for Android	1.69	2015-12-18	Map-in-Camera fixes
  QGIS	2.12.2	2015-12-18	–
  Mapillary for iOs	4.1.1	2015-12-21	Map-in-Camera fixes

Programming

• mvexel started to rewrite MapRoulette with the Python framework Django. Martijn will make it possible to use Overpass queries for creating new MapRoulette challenges and he is looking for help. (weeklyOSM says: amazing ;-))
• Tirex has been moved from OpenStreetMap SVN to Github. Other repositories will follow soon because there are plans to shut down OSM SVN. (Note that JOSM has its own SVN)

Did you know …

• … Geowebchat?
• … the website with GIS jobs worldwide?

Other “geo” things

• How the world looked when Jesus was born, according to Roman geographers

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