Dorothea Kazazi has announced that the next OSMF board meeting will be on Thursday 27 January, at 13:00 UTC. The email contains a lot of useful information, including the agenda.
For the cover image, inspired by Yousuke Ozawa’s SatelliteFonts, we scanned OpenStreetMap for the alphabet. Maybe you have a letter-recognising AI to extend the list?
Supaplex expressed, in his OSM diary, his opinion about the editing of NSI objects in Taiwanese Hokkien language (not Taiwanese Mandarin). He explains that some Chinese contributors’ changeset boundaries are so big that most QA tools can not visualise the changeset, which might raise suspicions about the changeset. Unfortunately, even though the whole article is composed of Chinese characters, most Chinese users are not familiar with the Hokkien variety, and could not read the article.
redsteakraw presented three requests regarding the handling of POIs in OSM. His requests: 1. simple editor: 2. POIs with expiration dates: and 3. a temporary layer for POIs. These ideas stimulated a diverse discussion.
Clifford Snow found that Nominatim’s QA tool is very good for cleaning up existing data in preparation for building and address imports.
Mannivu illustrated > the creation of a custom link in JOSM.
G1asshouse took advantage of the comments section of Mateusz Konieczny’s diary entry, on editor usage statistics (which we reported last week), to express his frustration with some underlying issues he claims to have noticed in the StreetComplete app.
Requests have been made for comments on the following proposals:
window:shape=* for defining the basic shape of a window for 3D rendering and general mapping.
Voting is underway on the proposal to deprecate embassy=embassy and promote embassy=yes instead, until Wednesday 2 February.
Community
AngocA celebrated > that all open notes in Colombia have been successfully closed and explains how he formed a working group to achieve this.
The OSM editor usage statistics for 2021 have been published.
RATP, the transport provider for Île-de-France, France, opened two new metro stations, extending its network. Less than one hour after being officially open to the public, their data was already updated on OpenStreetMap.
The Open Source Festival 2022 will be held as a hybrid event on 24 to 26 March in Nigeria. The call for papers closes on 26 January at 23:30 UTC. Among other things, the call explicitly applies to ‘Geospatial Technologies (OpenStreetMap, QGIS, Location Intelligence)’.
TreeTracks answered the question of how far across the state of Victoria, Australia you can drive on gravel roads.
Local chapter news
The OSM US local chapter will hold elections for its board of directors from 2 to 9 February. The deadline to become a member of OSM US to participate in the voting is 31 January. All information about the election process is on the wiki.
Events
HOT hosted Neema Lugangia, founder of the Tanzanian non-profit Agri Thamani, for an ‘Ask Me Anything’ interview about her work using maps for advocacy for universal nutrition.
The HOT Training working group is continuing an advanced JOSM training course. Those who want to attend should have JOSM installed.
OSM research
Yair Grinberger, Marco Minghini, Godwin Yeboah, Levente Juhász, and Peter Mooney, from five different universities, examined the extent and nature of engagement between the academic research community and the larger communities in OSM. An analysis of OSM-related publications from 2016 to 2019 and seven interviews conducted with members of a research group engaged in OSM-related research are described.
Maps
MyOSMatic officially crossed the 200,000 maps rendered threshold, having rendered the very first test request on 3 May 2016.
Open Data
In GraphHopper’s GitHub repository open-traffic-collection there are URLs to traffic information portals containing open data. Maybe this is the beginning of OpenStreetMap based navigation with traffic jam avoidance?
The National Library of Scotland is looking for volunteers to help transcribe place names and footpaths from 18th and 19th century maps. The results will be released as an open dataset.
Software
call-me-matt has programmed a Telegram bot that can monitor the monthly number of OpenStreetMap changes made by mappers. The bot notifies you if your nominated mappers have reached a certain number of changes. If you have Telegram messenger you can try it out.
Dutch mapper TauvicR wrote > about the BuurtKaart > project, which allows a neighbourhood map to be created collaboratively to help find potential neighbourhood improvements to be implemented via citizen referendums.
Programming
Amanda has published, on GitHub, a Rust CLI (command line interface) programme anglosaxon, which is able to convert big XML files to other formats, e.g. CSV. It could be used to convert an OSM changeset dump file to CSV format. This is not possible with DOM based tools because the uncompressed dump file is too large for them to handle.
Releases
Opensnowmap has implemented a new routing engine with PGrouting, which makes all piste:type relations routable; lifts and way directions are taken into account and access tags are evaluated.
OrganicMaps 2022.01.15-3-android was released. The main improvements are updated maps, fixes in routing and search, and improved translations.
Did you know …
… Sarah Heidekorn wrote part 11 of the ‘How to become ohsome’-blog series? With the introduction of new contribution endpoints the user is now able to track the creation of, changes in the geometry or the tagging of, or deletion of objects in OpenStreetMap.
… the Historic Place, an open map of the world? In 12 languages and with special maps!
… the Open Brewery Map, which shows a brewery map of the world? The map was made by the still very active Sven Geggus and was featured > in the very first issue of the Wochennotiz, the German edition of weeklyOSM, on 23 July 2010.
… Leigh Dodds’s guide to Overpass queries? A great help in learning some of the more powerful features of Overpass.
…the traffic sign tool > , which can be used to compile tags for some German traffic signs?
Other “geo” things
Several mappers tried to display the size of the ash cloud from the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcano by comparing it with France, Czechia and Bolivia.
HeiGIT gGmbH, the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology, is looking for a full-time senior spatial data science expert (m,f,d). Core tasks include the cross-departmental establishment and development of the increased use of advanced Machine Learning and Data Science methods in all groups and subject matters of HeiGIT.
HeiGIT gGmbH, the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology, is looking > for a full-time senior science manager for research and innovation management (m,f,d). Core tasks include the cross-departmental development, initiation, and implementation of new research projects and activities of HeiGIT.
HeiGIT gGmbH, the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology, is looking for a full-time international public relations manager (m,f,d). Core tasks include science communication and international outreach.
Even Google Maps does not always get its address nodes right. However, in Munich, at Ständlerstraße/A8, there are some addresses that do not belong there.
Thank You for Your comment. You are absolutely right. It was a mistake from my side.
Crazy, artificial “intelligence” is on the third rank, 68 million map edits last year, more than all the mobile editors “on the ground” together. No Rapid import requests at all. So every single object was meticulously checked before it was added, right? https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Editor_usage_stats#Tables_and_figures
So you assume every edit with Rapid has used AI? AFAIK, the Rapid editor is just a fork of iD and it is possible to add map changes, which are not supported by AI. I am not 100% sure, but if i remember correctly instead of iD the default editor for employees of FB or Amazon is also Rapid.
Congrats, but there seems to be a mistake: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/amenity=scooter_parking is not in RFC.
Thank You for Your comment. You are absolutely right. It was a mistake from my side.
Crazy, artificial “intelligence” is on the third rank, 68 million map edits last year, more than all the mobile editors “on the ground” together. No Rapid import requests at all. So every single object was meticulously checked before it was added, right?
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Editor_usage_stats#Tables_and_figures
So you assume every edit with Rapid has used AI? AFAIK, the Rapid editor is just a fork of iD and it is possible to add map changes, which are not supported by AI. I am not 100% sure, but if i remember correctly instead of iD the default editor for employees of FB or Amazon is also Rapid.