weeklyOSM 509

14/04/2020-20/04/2020

Actual Category

• The French service “Ça reste ouvert” has now also been launched in Finland, Ollaan auki was introduced on 17 April and it is supported by Gispo (automatic translation) and the Finnish OSM-community. (Info: OSM-user houtari)
• The app “Ca reste ouvert” now exists (automatic translation) in German and covers Germany (www.bleibtoffen.de), Switzerland (www.bleibtoffen.ch) and Austria (www.bleibtoffen.at).

Mapping

• Andrew Harvey has created a proposal for the tagging of mountain bike tracks with path=mtb with the incorporated feedback of the previous discussion and is looking for feedback.
• Voting for Joseph Eisenberg’s proposal to mark the location of a motorcycle taxi stand with amenity=motorcycle_taxi has started. In many countries, predominantly in Southeast Asia, but also elsewhere, motorcycles as taxis are very common and a major transport mode.
• Andrew Harvey informed the tagging mailing list that voting for the proposal on the key locked=* has started. The aim of the key is to store information if a feature such as a gate or barrier is usually or conditionally locked or accessible.
• Ty S brought the proposal for urgent_care=* to voting, but cancelled it later in favour of the existing tag walk-in=*.
• François Lacombe made a comprehensive description of the state of the French power network in OSM in his diary. In his round-up he includes the type and number of different features in France, the sources of data, a short description of the data and provides an outlook.
• Voting has started on the modified amenity=refugee_site proposal.
• Pixel8Earth reported on their experiments to use a GoPro camera for large scale 3D mapping, on medium.com. They include a lot of useful information such as the calibration or how odometry can help. The article ends with a promising conclusion.
• Multipolygons in OSM are a constant source of discussion topics. This time a user ‘fixed’ potential issues from the OSM-Inspector, here ‘touching inner rings’ for scrub, heath, bare_rock in surrounding woods. But the original creator did not agree with the fix and not all mappers in the discussion (automatic translation) on the German forum see touching inners as an issue.

Community

• If you missed the numbers for ‘last modifier’ in Pascal Neis’s ‘How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?’ statistics, we’d like to share Pascal’s tweet with you which says the numbers are back.
• OpenStreetMap Ireland organised a week long, online mapping campaign on its present #osmIRL_buildings task, which started on Monday 20 April and is running until the following Monday (27 April).
• eiskalt-glasklar wrote (automatic translation) a diary post where he laid out his thoughts and wishes for a new version of public transport tagging schema.
• Geomob, ‘a series of regular events in European cities for location based service creators and enthusiasts’ held for the first time an online geomob on 7 April. Ed Freyfogle of OpenCage, together with Steven Feldman of mappery.org, summarise this attempt in a podcast. Advantages and disadvantages are discussed as well as consequences from the experiences of this first online meeting. Ian Landsman also wrote an interesting blog post about hosting online conferences.
• Maggie Cawley and Jennings Anderson presented the results of an OpenStreetMap US community survey. Besides old but apparently true stereotypes of the typical OSM mapper being a 30 to 50 year old, white man, there are some interesting new findings. For example, 44% of respondents are using OSM professionally.
• Proposals for this year’s OSM Awards can still be submitted until 10 May 2020.
• Valeriy Trubin continues his series of interviews with OSMers from Russia. He spoke with Alexey Kalinin (automatic translation), who created a paper map of southern Urals using OSM data, and Alexandr Zeynalov (automatic translation), who is the keeper of the keys to the RU-OSM servers.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Chris Beddow, from the OSM Foundation’s Microgrants Committee, is calling for applications for the recently introduced program. All OSMF members can apply for the funds. Further details can be found on a dedicated wiki page.
• Allan Mustard, from the board of the OSM Foundation, summarised his impressions of the talks he has recently held with members of OSMF’s Board of Directors and of the OSMF Advisory Board, corporate OSMF members and local chapters. He identified OSM’s core infrastructure, communication to local chapters and communities, vector tiles, frustration with the OSMF board, diversity/inclusion as well as artificial intelligence/machine learning as important topics. Interestingly none of his important topics are about mapping, which is surprising in a mapping project. This is probably due to the people he talked to. If you speak with mappers you may get completely different answers such as questions about multipolygons or an area data type, public transport mapping, a ‘gold standard’ for tagging, the non-representative proposal process for new tags, poisoned or quasi non-existent relations between regionally divided communities and probably many, many more.
• Some OSMF working groups have published new minutes of their meetings. The topics discussed in them include:
  • Local Chapters and Communities Working Group meeting of 23 March (Local Chapters Survey, comparison of national OSMF websites)
  • Microgrant Committee meeting of 17 April (submission form, next steps)
  • Diversity and Inclusion Special Committee meeting of 9 April (revision of the Diversity Statement, current work)
  • Licensing Working Group meeting of 12 March (Brexit, Attribution Guideline, Change of Licence)

Events

• Students of the University of Delaware organised a mapathon for Earth Day on 22 April 2020. The participants were asked to improve the mapping of the African country Malawi. During the event the mappers completed 1,222 buildings and 50 km of roads.

Humanitarian OSM

• HOT is launching Rapid Response Microgrants: COVID-19 which aims to bolster the mapping of unmapped areas with vulnerable communities, which are at risk of being forgotten without assistance with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Maps

• Internet portal fontanka.ru has created a project to support local businesses in St. Petersburg. It is called ‘Buy from your own‘ (automatic translation). Due to the coronavirus local businesses in main cities are on the verge of shutting down. The businesses that need help are displayed on the map.
• Heidelberg University’s GIScience Research Group published an article about a visualisation of the completeness, in OSM, of health facilities in Sub-Saharan Africa made with its OSM History Explorer ohsomeHEX.
• Sergey Myshlyakov (an OSM user from Russia) created a map (automatic translation) of the spread of Sosnowsky’s hogweed in the Moscow region. The information was obtained by automatic analysis of satellite images.

Open Data

• The Federal State of Brandenburg, Germany, changed the General Terms and Conditions for some of its geodata, which were already provided under a free and open licence but required attribution, in a way that allows OSM (automatic translation) to use the data. The attribution note does not necessarily have to be included in the direct visual context of a product made with OSM data, usually a map, if the data from this source represents only a minor share.

Software

• [1] Egor Smirnov, from ITMO University, (automatic translation) St. Petersburg, explains in his diary why he developed (automatic translation) YourMaps, a service to export data from OSM.

Programming

• Geofabrik’s blog provides a useful article for all of those whose tile server stopped updating recently. Frederik Ramm helps identify what the issue may be, as there may be more than one, provides some background information, and outlines solutions for the issues.

Releases

• Roland Olbricht introduced the new Overpass API version 0.7.56. The first update in over a year brings new functionality such as filtering ways by the angles of their inner vertices and the possibility of restricting a recursion to only some members of a set.
• CyclOSM v0.3.5 has been released with new features such as mountain bike difficulty scales, inner tube vending machines, and railways at low zooms… A short overview can be seen in the release twitter post and the full change log here.
• The HOT NGO has released Tasking Manager version 4. All improvements are detailed in the release notes. The new version is available in the source code repository and on 6 May, the new version will be launched on the HOT Tasking Manager.

Did you know …

• … that OSM can be embedded into Drupal CMS?
• … the sites sunders.uber.space and osmcamera.dihe.de, where you can view the surveillance cameras mapped in OSM? These sites are made using the code from the project osmcamera.
• … Pascal Neis’ updated webpage resultmaps featuring all the tools he offers for OSM?

OSM in the media

• softwareengineeringdaily.com published a podcast with Saurav Mohapatra and Jacob Wasserman, from Facebook, to talk about the tools which Facebook has built to deal with OSM data.

Other “geo” things

• The esri.com Africa GeoPortal has made available analysis-ready OpenStreetMap data for all of Africa on their platform.
• Yandex took panoramas (automatic translation) of the empty streets of Moscow.
• The Gigarama project took a bird’s-eye view of the construction of an antivirus centre in New Moscow.

Upcoming Events

Many meetings are being cancelled – please check the calendar on the wiki page for updates.

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 Nakaner, PierZen, Polyglot, Rogehm, Silka123, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred.