weeklyOSM 522

14/07/2020-20/07/2020

Mapping

• Michael Reichert would like to revert a series of surface and tracktype tags added without local knowledge by an armchair mapper. A discussion followed on the feasibility of mapping these tags only from imagery and whether reverting would be justified in all countries affected.
• Cycling infrastructure has been selected as the UK quarterly project for Q3 2020. The project’s wiki page lists details of the types of things that can be done as part of the project. Of particular note is the availability of large quantities of cycling-related data from Transport for London which needs merging with OSM.
• Adamant36’s request to add RapiD to the list of editors on the OSM map resulted in a robust discussion on GitHub.
• Supaplex030 describes (automatic translation) in his blog how measuring vibrations with a smartphone sensor gives excellent results to objectively classify the flatness of surfaces and map them with smoothness=*.
• The MITFAHR|DE|ZENTRALE has published a guide (automatic translation) on how to find railway stations without bike parking facilities.

Community

• Stephan Knauss asked what happened to the FOSSGIS affiliate link for Amazon.de. Frederik Ramm replied that the link still exists but the revenue is declining. The statistics have been updated for those who are interested.
• Andy Allan had a productive day working on the OpenStreetMap website.
• Deane Kensok blogged about a partnership between Esri and Facebook to provide data from the ArcGIS user community to OSM. These datasets are OSM-tagged, compatibly licensed, and available to use for building maps in RapID and JOSM (via a plugin).
• In Geomob Podcast #24 Ed Freyfogle interviews Peter Karich, co-founder of routing software maker Graphhopper. Graphhopper is a unique success story – they have built a thriving business on top of an open-source software project and OpenStreetMap data.
• In Geomob podcast #25 Ed chats with geo industry veteran Randy Meech, co-founder of StreetCred. Perviously Randy was CEO of Mapzen, and CTO of MapQuest.
• At the close of the State of the Map 2020 a live quiz with an OpenStreetMap theme was held, in which our team member ‘Nakaner’ took first place. A few days after the conference finished, Ilya Zverev published the quiz as a standalone game Test your knowledge of OpenStreetMap history and technology, or use the code to create your own quiz!
• Ed Neerhut wrote in Geospatial World about the importance of maps in a crisis.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• openstreetmap.org was offline for a short period of time. Due to a memory-leakage issue with creating planet dumps, the server (ironbelly) was running out of memory, which interfered with its other role as NFS (Network File System) server for the web site. In order to prevent this in future, user images will be moved to Amazon’s S3.
• The minutes of the Local Chapters and Communities Working Group meeting of 15 June have been published.
• OpenStreetMap US has applied to become an official OSMF local chapter. The supporting documentation is available on the OSMF wiki.
• The OpenStreetMap Ops Team tweeted a reminder that any Bitcoin donated to the OSMF would be used to build a stronger project.

Humanitarian OSM

• Nominations for this year’s Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Board of Directors election have closed. The candidates have till 31 July to present their ideas and engage with the membership on how they would contribute to HOT in an elected role. You can find the list of candidates, the details of their nomination, and links to their candidate statements on the wiki page.
• HOT published in a blogpost what was achieved with the 2019 HOT Microgrants.
• Mikel Maron wrote a blogpost about what HOT needs to work on until 2025.

Maps

• The LandlordTech project has created a survey in order to collect and display data on new forms of housing injustice caused by surveillance, tracking, data accumulation, and algorithmic methods intruding into domestic and neighbourhood spaces.
• John Nelson wrote about firefly cartography and how these glowing maps attract feedback like no other type of map that he has made.
• Michal Migurski announced that Facebook is releasing an update to Daylight – a 56 gigabyte export of validated OSM data.
• A YouTube video about South Korea’s map service policy depicts Google’s fight for better map data, and the companies profiting from the situation.

Licences

• The minutes of the Licensing Working Group meeting on 9 July have been published. The Attribution Guideline, for which the Board of Directors would prefer a stricter version than the one LWG proposed, was given a lot of attention. Simon Poole also announced that he is stepping down from the LWG.

Software

• New features have been added to the browser extension OSM Smart Menu. Now users can create links using URL Templates [1], rename existing links [2] and access the link list from any website [3].
• John Vargas-Muñoz et al. have published a paper reviewing the use of machine learning to improve OSM data and machine learning based techniques that use OSM data for applications in other domains.

Programming

• hauke-stieler has developed a new task management tool, as an alternative to the HOT tasking manager or MapCraft, and called it Simple Task Manager (STM). On the mailing list Hauke explains (automatic translation) in detail what made him do it and how to work with the STM.
• [1] Victoria Crawford reports on Twitter about her map, which shows which roads in Hackney run toward the rising sun during the year, according to her, inspired by puntofisso, which in turn refers to Cédric Scherer’s (@CedScherer) 30DayMapChallenge. She has published her code on GitHub.
• Alexey Pechnikov reported (automatic translation) about his experiences with creating PostgreSQL / PgRouting routing systems using OpenStreetMap data.

Did you know …

• … that the OpenStreetMap wiki has an A to Z to help you figure out how to tag objects?
• … that you can view 19th century maps of Europe on Mapire?

Other “geo” things

• The Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and Google Earth Engine (GEE) have announced that 32 projects, from 22 countries, will be awarded a total of US$3 million towards production licences and US$1 million in technical support from EO Data Science, to tackle some of the world’s greatest challenges using open Earth data.
• Alexander Zipf reported on work done at Heidelberg University to develop a new routing algorithm for pedestrians. The algorithm minimises the exposure of pedestrians to traffic noise pollution while taking into account the route distance.
• The history of indigenous peoples and their political movements is an important issue in Taiwan. Researchers in east coast county Hualian have trained members of the Bunun people to use GPS devices, and in an expedition surveyed traces of the abandoned settlements where their ancestors lived. They found (automatic translation) 50 historic remains such as abandoned houses in the remote area.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Ludwigshafen a.Rhein (Stadtbibliothek)	Mannheimer Mapathons e.V.	2020-07-23
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch	2020-07-29
London	London Missing Maps Mapathon (ONLINE)	2020-08-04
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch	2020-08-05
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #19	2020-08-10
Zurich	120. OSM Meetup Zurich	2020-08-11
Munich	Münchner Stammtisch	2020-08-12
Kandy	2020 State of the Map Asia	2020-10-31-2020-11-01

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This weeklyOSM was produced by AnisKoutsi, Joker234, MatthiasMatthias, Nakaner, Nordpfeil, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, TheSwavu, derFred, mOlind, richter_fn.