(English) weeklyOSM 577

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03/08/2021-09/08/2021

About us

• Mariotomo, from Panama, explained some of the problems faced by our readers in countries with poor and/or expensive internet connections. He has a relatively simple solution: using a bash script to pull items from the RSS feed which may be of interest to others.The weeklyOSM team are interested to hear of similar issues or solutions. Our aim is to reach as many as possible in the broad OpenStreetMap community wherever they are.

Mapping

• TomTom has introduced a new QA tool. The announcement coincided with OSM’s 17th anniversary.
• Reddit user midforty asked, on the OSM subreddit, about mapping unofficial hiking trails. They had mapped one which someone else had then deleted. Various opinions are expressed about whether this is good practice or not in the comments.
• Requests have been made for comments on the following proposals:
  • catholic=* for a more precise tagging of the Catholic denomination.
  • transformer=* for refining power transformers classification.

Community

• You are invited to upload photos from various OSM 17th birthday parties to the wiki.

Imports

• Kirill Setdekov posted on the OSMF-talk mailing list hoping to make a request to import Google’s Open Buildings for Africa into OSM. The post met strong opposition by mappers in several African communities who deemed that the building footprints were of low quality and would only exacerbate poor quality edits in the region.

Events

• [1] Arnalie reflected on how State of the Map worked from the perspective of an organiser, and made some recommendations for future online only events.

OSM research

• Researchers from HeiGIT have studied the impact of large data imports on OpenStreetMap by comparing contributor activity both when imports are active and when they are paused.

Maps

• RobJN recently created an MVT (Mapbox Vector Tile) layer of property data (UPRNs) in Great Britain, but many labels were duplicated. In his latest post he describes how he overcame this issue by styling the layer in JOSM. The general principles are more widely applicable to other MVT layers.

switch2OSM

• Niceboard posted on Hackernoon explaining why they switched from Google Places to Mapbox for their Autocomplete API.

Software

• José Juan Montes showcased the DDD project’s capabilities in generating and showing 3D scenery built from OpenStreetMap data.
• Felix Delattre has announced a new version of mod_tile and renderd (to generate raster tile images and deliver them via a web server). At the same time the software packages have just became available in the official sources of the brand new stable Debian 11 (bullseye) and Ubuntu 21.04 (hirsute).

Releases

• The Android version of OsmAnd 4.0 has been released. This version offers cloud backup, the ability to colour tracks by altitude, speed or slope, and other interesting new features. Note that this release introduces new subscription models.

Did you know …

• … you can easily extract administrative boundaries such as country, state and regional borders or equivalents from OpenStreetMap using OSM-Boundaries?
• … of the South-pointing chariot (our historical map-related item of the week)? A Chinese invention which used a mechanism to take movement of the chariot’s wheels and ensure a pointing device was always oriented to the south.

OSM in the media

• Bloomberg CityLab reported on HOT’s various projects for mapping informal settlements (slums) in less-developed nations.

Other “geo” things

• This week OpenCage’s geo weirdness thread returns to Europe to take a look at Belgium.
• Whilst doing some mapping in the London suburb of Mill Hill, SK53 noticed roads named after famous scientists with one female (given) name amongst the (male) surnames.
• Bloomberg reported that the attempt to establish a union at Mapbox failed. Although more than half of the voting employees had become union members, Mapbox opted to exercise their legal option to force an additional ballot. A majority of those voting in this ballot did not support union recognition.
• Matt Parilla asked the rhetorical question ‘why does sunlight come from the north in shaded relief maps?’. He shows in the answering thread that it is related to how the human brain interprets light and shade to detect objects in three dimensions.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Bonn	142. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn	✓	2021-08-17
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #26 (Online)		2021-08-17
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2021-08-17
Köln	Stammtisch Köln		2021-08-18
	OSM US Mappy Hour		2021-08-19
	DRK Missing Maps Mapathon		2021-08-19
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2021-08-20
潍坊市	OpenStreetMap(中国大陆)第一次线下聚会		2021-08-20 – 2021-08-30
Amsterdam	OSM Nederland maandelijkse bijeenkomst (online)		2021-08-21
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)	✓	2021-08-23
	105. OSM-Stammtisch Viersen und Umgebung		2021-08-24
Derby	East Midlands OSM Pub Meet-up : Derby		2021-08-24
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Treffen (online)		2021-08-25
Zürich	Missing Maps Zürich Mapathon		2021-08-25
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public meeting		2021-08-27
Autrans-Méaudre en Vercors	WikiCamp L’Escandille		2021-08-28 – 2021-08-29
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2021-09-03
京田辺市	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第26回 一休寺		2021-09-04	jp

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by SK53, Sammyhawkrad, TheSwavu, derFred.