weeklyOSM 523

21/07/2020-27/07/2020

Breaking news

• Dorothea reminds us to celebrate the 16th anniversary of OSM on 8 August. She provides some ideas on how that can be done!

About us

• Happy Birthday OSM-Wochennotiz! It was ten years ago this week that the first issue (automatic translation) of the Wochennotiz was published.

Mapping

• Matthew Woehlke has proposed the new tag sport=four_square for a sport called Four square.
• Michael Montani’s proposal to introduce a natural=bare_soil tag for ‘an area covered by soil, without any vegetation’ is currently open for voting until 7 August.
• Following the British Geospatial Commission’s announcement that unique identifiers for addresses and streets would become available as open data (we reported earlier), proposals have been produced for ref:GB:uprn (unique property reference number) and ref:GB:usrn (unique street reference number). Discussion has taken place on the Talk-GB and Tagging mailing lists.
• JesseFW provided us with an explanation as to why the coastlines on Carto hadn’t been updated since January 2020. It seems that the coastline update was another victim of the Río de la Plata edit war (which we reported on earlier).
• User mahdi1234 published a guide for beginners on visualising changes in OSM over time. He shows in detail how to create a time lapse with OSM data.

Community

• Christoph Hormann objects to the framing of craft mappers in OpenStreetMap as conservatives opposed to change. He feels that this is part of a new narrative being communicated in OSMF politics; that is, the need for change in OpenStreetMap, and craft mappers’ opposition to change.
• On the Geomob podcast Steven Feldman chats with recent FOSS4GUK keynote speaker María Arias de Reyna, a senior software engineer at Red Hat and former President of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. The episode deals with María’s current work, and her recent talk at FOSS4GUK, but also imposter syndrome, and science fiction.
• Øukasz recounts their experience of two recent interactions with CartONG, one with developing a tagging schema for refugee camps and the other with importing a UNHCR refugee camp dataset. Léonie Miège, from CartONG, responded in a blog comment.
• Richard Fairhurst has written a new guide for data owners wishing to contribute to OSM. It is an output of cooperation with two local councils in the UK, which were recently funded by the Open Data Institute to investigate using and contributing to crowdsourced open map data such as OSM.
• OpenStreetMap US has published its July 2020 newsletter.
• Igor Eliezer has made a video showing how the 3D modelling of the Museu Paulista (São Paulo, Brazil) was re-worked in OpenStreetMap using the JOSM editor. The 3D preview at the beginning and end of the video is from the F4Map website and, during modelling, in Kendzi3D within the JOSM editor.

Imports

• Alex Hennings has reviewed Facebook and ESRI’s proposed ‘not-an-import’ imports (we reported earlier) of ArcGIS datasets through RapiD or JOSM MapWithAI plugin and found them wanting. Of particular concern was the lack of solicited community review on the imports-us mail list.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OSMF board would like to consult the community on its hiring plans for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer. This is the first position based on the hiring framework which osmf-talk discussed a few days ago.

Events

• Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2020 have been published.

Humanitarian OSM

• HOT is conducting an online survey of people who have used RapiD to find out what their experience was. The data will be used to understand how RapiD could be made more accessible and usable for a variety of users.

Maps

• Nuno Caldeira congratulated, through Twitter, the Portuguese National Emergency and Civil Protection Authority for using OpenStreetMap data, and correct attribution, in a tweet about a large forest fire that occurred last week in Portugal.
• Taiwan, a nation in the Far East with special political status, has lots of outlying islands. Dadan Island in Kinmen is one of the most remote. MG, the Italian mapper, shares the Kinmen information website he created, The Kinmen Rising Project on the OSM Taiwan Telegram channel, showing photos from his journey with OSM as the base map, and of course he mapped a lot of POIs on the island.

Software

• A research paper analyses the growing amount of freely available spatio-temporal information (such as aerial imagery) to support and guide mappers in their work. Artificial neural networks identify regions of interest where OSM is likely to require updating.
• Venkanna Babu Guthula has released Label-Pixels, a tool for semantic segmentation of remote sensing images using fully convolutional networks (FCNs), designed for extracting road networks from remote sensing imagery.

Releases

• Sarah Hoffmann announced release 1.3.0 of osm2pgsql with the addition of the (still experimental) new flex output. Jochen Topf, the main contributor for this release, explained how this gives more flexibility when exporting data from OSM to PostgreSQL.
• The iD editor was updated and now has touch support, so it can be used on tablets (smartphone sized screens aren’t fully supported yet). Other highlights are integrated quality checks and multi-selection editing.
• With the release of the latest version of iD, the ‘locator overlay’, a semi-transparent overlay when zoomed out, has been rebuilt. Via the OpenStreetMap editor-layer-index, the new overlay is now available on OpenStreetMap.org, and soon on the HOT Tasking Manager and other instances of iD.

Did you know …

• … Finde.cash displays banks and ATMs with the respective ATM networks on a map? It also offers route planning by foot, bicycle or public transport, and four background options including OpenCycleMap. Missing ATMs can be inserted directly. The map is worldwide but the menu is only available in German.
• … MyOSMatic, the free of charge web service to generate city maps using OSM Data, which are available in PNG, PDF and SVG ready to print? Menus are available in 25 languages.
• … the ‘OSM Quality Ranking’ (Beta) assesses and ranks 51 US cities by OSM data quality, checking geometry and tagging for streets, roads, and relations?

Other “geo” things

• Brooklyn Historical Society’s map collection includes over 1,500 digitised historical maps spanning the seventeenth century to the present.
• Nathanael Peterlini examined (automatic translation) difficulties cartographers face when trying to please all of their users’ political views. They look at the cases of Kosovo and Palestine and how they are treated by Apple, Google, and OSM.
• Garmin has been the victim of a ransomware attack. As a result, many of their online services were interrupted or are still down.
• An update to Google Maps has allowed docked bike share riders in cities such as Chicago, Montreal and London to see end-to-end walking and cycling directions for their journey integrated with bike and dock availability. Cities Today gave some background to the new service.
• Tagesspiegel interviewed 21,000 people about what scares them on the street and what Berlin’s bike paths should look like in the future. The results are explained (automatic translation) with a series of graphics.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
London	London Missing Maps Mapathon (ONLINE)	2020-08-04
Mannheimn	Mannheimer Mapathons – Treffen im Luisenpark	2020-08-04
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch	2020-08-05
San José	Civic Hack & Map Night (online)	2020-08-06
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #19	2020-08-10
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen	2020-08-11
Munich	Münchner Stammtisch	2020-08-12
Berlin	146. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch	2020-08-14
Zurich	120. Mapping-Party/OSM Meetup Zurich	2020-08-15
Cologne Bonn Airport	130. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch (Online)	2020-08-18
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	2020-08-18
Cologne	Köln Stammtisch ggf. ONLINE	2020-08-19
Kandy	2020 State of the Map Asia	2020-10-31-2020-11-01

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 Anne Ghisla, MatthiasMatthias, Nakaner, Nordpfeil, PierZen, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, TheSwavu, derFred, richter_fn.