weeklyOSM 498

28/01/2020-03/02/2020

Mapping

• The team behing the Osmose quality assurance tool announced that an in-line help panel with a description of potential errors is now available. The additions also feature a guide on how to fix them, and other useful information.
• Marc summarised the current tagging situation of camping sites following the approval of tourism=camp_pitch. However, rather than improving the data, he felt that the situation had worsened.
• OpenStreetMap passed the milestone of its 80 millionth changeset on 23 January.
• Don’t know what to map? You could help to make the map of Estonia better. A simple tool from user SviMik will help you to do this.
• Andrew Wiseman, of Apple, has put together a MapRoulette challenge with the idea of adding missing roads associated with Pascal Neis’s unmapped places in various countries. The Unmapped Places Leaderboard may be interesting for internal challenges with students 😉
• Hauke Stieler started the voting on his proposal of duty_free=*, a tag that should indicate whether a shop offers duty-free shopping.

Community

• In a tweet the Osmose team pointed to GitHub, where the source code and now the documentation is maintained. The developer also welcomes help with translation.
• The Russian OSM community has checked that all Russian border crossings are in order. MapRoulette was used as a tool for tasks.
• Rory McCann, newly elected member of the OSMF board, listed his contributions made in January 2020 to the various areas of OSM, such as mapping, coding and the OSMF board, in a blog post.
• Valeriy Trubin continues his series of interviews with OSMers. He spoke with Yevgeniy Usvitskiy (automatic translation) about humanitarian mapping and HOT and with Vladimir Marshinin (mavl) (automatic translation) about the data working group (DWG) and data licences.
• User Vascom has started (automatic translation) to assemble weekly maps for Maps.Me. So far, he has covered all regions of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

Imports

• In early January 2020 the Russian OSM-community completed (automatic translation) the import of data on Russian theatres, which started in 2017. Now OSM is richer by 693 theatres.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Christoph Hormann explained his concerns about how the OSMF Board risks codifying the English language and Anglo-American cultural mores as predominant within the OSM community. A long discussion, mainly with members of the board, follows.
• OpenStreetMap Česká republika z.s.(an organisation supporting OSM in Czechia), has applied to become a Local Chapter of the OpenStreetMap Foundation. Joost Schouppe, member of the OSMF board, is asking the community for their opinions on the application.

Events

• Ilya Zverev gave a talk at the recent FOSDEM about reverse geocoding. He outlined the basics, presented a few unexpected challenges that a geocoder developer might face when working with OpenStreetMap data, and invited people to help improve the reverse geocoder he created.
• Peter Rushforth, from the Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation, announced plans to hold a workshop about maps together with the World Wide Web Consortium and the Open Geospatial Consortium and invited interested parties from OSM to participate.

Humanitarian OSM

• Missing Maps describes their activities during an anti-malaria campaign in Burundi in an article on their homepage. The country’s health authorities asked Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders for help. Missing Maps traced nearly 90 000 buildings in the region of Ruyigi, as large parts had not been mapped before. The article explains how the mapping activities helped and also the role OsmAnd and KoboToolbox played during the indoor residual spraying campaign.
• ManonVi elaborated on a proposal for the tag place=refugee_site. He describes why this tag is necessary. The request for comments started on 1 February 2020.

Maps

• Mapillary started the CompleteTheMap challenge for the northern hemisphere to improve its imagery. The top 3 contributors in terms of number of unique kilometres between 14 February and 15 March 2020 will be awarded with prizes.
• Alexander Chertov created a map of speed limit cameras installed on Russian roads. He took data about cameras from the highway police website and used OSM as a basemap.
• Anton Rapesco created a map of all the lights of Moscow. To do this he used open data from the Moscow open data portal.

switch2OSM

• Golden Cheetah, a tool for analysing data from power meters (mostly for bicycle computers), switched to OSM from Google. The new 3.5 release uses OSM data.

Licences

• User unen wrote in his OSM user diary entry that the Turkish parliament voted in favour of the proposed amendment to the National Geographic Information Systems Law. It requires official approval for a lot of mapping activities in Turkey and seems to forbid OSM.

Programming

• OsmApiClient is a C# package to handle the communication between your .Net project and the OSM API. See the GitHub project, or nuget package.
• User Artem Svetlov wrote (automatic translation) a script that could be used to generate beautiful maps of urban electric transport routes in any city. That’s why he called on everyone to help tidy up this data in OSM. The script is available on GitHub.

Releases

• MapTiler announced MapTiler.jp as a service in Japan, in cooperation with local map provider MIERUNE. It provides maps using data from OSM and the Japanese government.
• The map style of OSM’s main map has been updated to v4.25.0. Joseph Eisenberg detailed the changes in the current OpenStreetMap Carto release in his user diary.
• JOSM published stable release #15806; they note that ‘with 58 enhancements and 26 bugfixes, this is one of the biggest monthly releases ever made’.
• The new release of OpenMapTiles comes with rendering support for disputed borders, roads under construction and the Kurdish and Amharic languages.

Did you know …

• [1] … the SolidaryCityMap by openDEM, which shows places where you can participate in city life without papers and money? In the forum openDEM explains which OSM tags and other data sources the SolidaryCityMap evaluates and asks for further ideas.
• … about the “Atlas of risks and threats” of the Russian emergencies Ministry? OSM is used as a basemap.
• … about a site that collects sounds of various environments from all over the world? It also uses OSM as a basemap.
• … about the Oontz website, whose owner recorded the sounds of Sergiev Posad (a city in Russia) and placed them on a map based on OSM.
• … about the Russian app HandyPet (automatic translation), with which you can try to find a lost pet? The smartphone app uses OSM as a basemap. Unfortunately, the required attribution is not specified properly.

Other “geo” things

• Simon Weckert shows you how to easily create a traffic jam on Google Maps. Also reported by Slashgear. 😉
• GISGeography has a list of its ‘Top 25 satellite maps’ and provides some information for each of them. The term ‘satellite map’ is used very broadly and includes not only a range of classic satellite maps such as Google, Bing, Landsat and others, but also the JavaScript library Leaflet and images produced by the NASA weather satellites NOAA and GEOS.
• Apple has given its maps of the United States more detail, including buildings. The buildings shown in the linked article do not appear in OSM.
• Yandex has made (automatic translation) a map on which you can see a day in the life of the Moscow ground transport system over about a minute.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Dortmund	Mappertreffen	2020-02-07
Rennes	Réunion mensuelle	2020-02-10
Grenoble	Rencontre mensuelle	2020-02-10
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #13	2020-02-10
Toronto	Toronto Mappy Hour	2020-02-10
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle pour tous	2020-02-11
London	Move 2020 (featuring OSMUK)	2020-02-11-2020-02-12
Zurich	114. OSM Meetup Zurich	2020-02-11
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen	2020-02-11
Munich	Münchner Stammtisch	2020-02-12
Wuppertal	OSM-Treffen Wuppertaler Stammtisch im Hutmacher 18 Uhr	2020-02-12
Nantes	Rencontre mensuelle	2020-02-13
Berlin	140. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch	2020-02-14
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	2020-02-18
Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend February 2020	2020-02-15-2020-02-16
Mainz	Mainzer OSM-Stammtisch	2020-02-17
Viersen	OSM Stammtisch Viersen	2020-02-18
Turin	FOSS4G-it/OSMit 2020	2020-02-18-2020-02-22
Derby	Derby pub meetup	2020-02-18
Cologne Bonn Airport	126. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch	2020-02-18
Ulmer Alb	Stammtisch Ulmer Alb	2020-02-20
Rennes	Atelier découverte	2020-02-23
Takasago	Takasago Open Datathon	2020-02-24
Singen	Stammtisch Bodensee	2020-02-26
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch	2020-02-26
Lübeck	Lübecker Mappertreffen	2020-02-27
Riga	State of the Map Baltics	2020-03-06
Freiburg	FOSSGIS-Konferenz	2020-03-11-2020-03-14
Chemnitz	Chemnitzer Linux-Tage	2020-03-14-2020-03-15
Valcea	EuYoutH OSM Meeting	2020-04-27-2020-05-01
Guarda	EuYoutH OSM Meeting	2020-06-24-2020-06-28
Cape Town	State of the Map 2020	2020-07-03-2020-07-05

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 Elizabete, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, Silka123, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, geologist.