deptho wonders why one would map sidewalks/pavements separately from the associated road and not use the sidewalk tag on the road object. Commenters say that it can improve pedestrian routing and mapping kerb drops can help people with limited mobility, but that just mapping sidewalks separately isn’t a panacea.
The RapiD editor has allowed users to trace from Google’s Open Buildings layer since 2022. Recent changes have made more data available and the licence is now compatible with OSM. Particularly useful is that this dataset includes a precision threshold, which should help mappers avoid false positives (which have been a problem with the default Microsoft Buildings layer).
Community
AngocA crafts a real “hold it in your hands” OSM model, which was inspired > by a Wikpedia model.
b-unicycling and a friend of hers started a regular’s table called the “Kilkenny History Mappers”. The local newspaper and radio station reported about it.
courtiney (formerly of Tomtom, now a freelance writer and a member of OSM’s Communications Working Group) elaborates on how to use OSM channel data for effective communications. She is looking into developing an open-source version of the tool she used to share with the community.
The German “Focus of the Week” (a weekly mapping activity started during the coronavirus pandemic) has been suspended until further notice, as fewer people have been taking part recently.
SGorskiy describes > in detail how he finds drinking water with the help of Organic Maps and OsmAnd.
The next monthly video-meeting of the OSMF board, will take place on Thursday 27 July 2023 at 15:00 UTC in the video room (opens ~20 minutes before the meeting). The preliminary agenda is on the wiki and this is where the draft minutes will be added.The topics are:
Treasurer’s report
Secretary’s report
Sovereign Tech Fund application
Board rules of order regarding circulars
Review Strategic Plan revision
Corporate Membership revision
Change to Courtney Williamson’s status to volunteer, cancellation of contract
Support as financial intermediary to regional State of the Map sponsorships
EU Transparency Register
Vector tiles
Monthly presentation – OSM community in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Local chapter news
OpenStreetMap US, in partnership with Mapillary, will be running a 360 degrees camera grant programme for OSM community members in the United States.
Events
The annual Wikimania conference will take place in Singapore and online from 16-19 August. Andy Mabbett indicates that several sessions on maps are planned and asks if any OSM contributors are going.
Education
Miku has released a progress report on her Google Summer of Code 2023 project. The project focuses on customising Nominatim’s address lookup algorithm based on the address system used in Japan.
OSM research
Val Ismaili looked at the validity of OSM data in a region in the UK on Medium. He contrasts data collected by Transport East (Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Thurrock and Southend-on-Sea) with OSM found data in several tables. The approach (actually comparing a range of OSM data with what local people thought was present) is significantly better than some studies that only look at one factor (e.g. “land area occupied by buildings” was one recent one).
Maps
Lisa Hornung shared on Mastodon a map of gelaterias in Italy. The publication of the map generated a short discussion on why there are fewer gelaterias in southern Italy on OpenStreetMap.
switch2OSM
[1] Home Assistant, an open source home automation application, now uses OpenStreetMap and Nominatim in its user onboarding feature.
Andy Townsend updated the “switch2osm” OSM tile server installation guide page for the Debian 12 operating system.
Open Data
Google released Open Buildings V3 that contains 1.8B building detections in Africa, Latin America, Caribbean, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. The data is shared under the CC BY-4.0 and ODbL v1.0 license. An import proposal derived from this dataset is currently under discussion. As noted in that thread, an important feature of this dataset that should help avoid false positives is a confidence score.
Software
Jochen Topf, the developer of Taginfo, describes the external links he has added to Taginfo’s Tags pages with instructions on how to extract / analyze them from external tools (Overpass, OSM Tag History, and ohsome). ohsome gives the option to select countries to analyze historical OSM data.
Eugene describes how to use OsmAnd more efficiently with the help of the “online map plugin”.
Programming
Mustapha Mekhatria describes how he creates a map with Highcharts and OSM data.
richlv uses the LearnOverpass app to learn how to create Overpass queries.
Releases
The GraphHopper Maps Android app released a new version and it can be found in the F-Droid app store.
Did you know …
… steveattewell’s GitHub attempts to support retrieving map features from OpenStreetMap?