The US OpenStreetMap chapter has launched a new Mapping for Impact campaign. In partnership with the Rising Tide Effect association, they’ll map swimming pools in New York, in order to raise awareness of swimming skills education.
Mapping
MapComplete has created a Twitter account on the occasion of its two year anniversary. For a Mastodon account weeklyOSM recommends the use of en.osm.town.
bxl_forever asked, on Mastodon, for a suitable tag for colourful crossings, e.g. in Brussels.
Anne-Karoline Distel has posted a video titled ‘Mapping the history around Ballyadams Castle’.
Push-f is waiting for your comments on his proposal to introduce the new tagging net=* to indicate whether a net (e.g. volleyball or table tennis) is available at a sports pitch.
The voting on amenity=ticket_validator, to tag ticket validators to gain access to something like public transport or parking garages, finished with with 31 votes for, 1 vote against, and 0 abstentions.
Voting is underway until:
Friday 10 June for aeroway=aircraft_crossing to mark a point where the flow of traffic is impacted by crossing aircraft.
Thursday 9 June for substation=* to improve tagging of power substations and transformers mixing on the same node.
Community
Following a request, Donat Robaux vented > some anger against GéoDAE and other defibrillator databases which are either too complex to use, lack proper maintenance, or are actively guarded > .
You can vote on the proposal to add the translate extension to the OSM Wiki now.
Imports
User nyampire published a simple analysis > of results from a community survey about the proposed Plateau Building dataset import plan > . The import plan is acceptable for most of the Japanese community, but the article focused on the negative answers and how to address them.
OpenStreetMap Foundation
The official Twitter account of the OSMF requested verified status (‘blue tick’), and was rejected. Some replies suggest that this may be because the account, managed by the Communications Working Group, is not very active.
The OSMF Japan chapter has started hosting > aerial imagery published by local governments. These aerial images are under Open License or Japanese survey law. As a result OSMF Japan chapter has the appropriate waivers or permissions from governments. OSMF Japan would like to expand > coverage with local mappers.
Education
Mark Litwintschik explained, in his tutorial ‘The Streets of Monaco’, how to extract the street network data of Monaco from OpenStreetMap, import it into PostgreSQL and render it using a tile server. The tutorial also shows you how to highlight the Formula 1 track using QGIS.
OSM research
Geoinformatics researchers from Heidelberg are using social media and OpenStreetMap data to provide navigation services with up-to-date traffic information that allows them to determine optimal routes and calculate travel time. The project is called ‘SocialMedia2Traffic’ and will be integrated into OpenRouteService.
Hao Li reported on a published a paper that proposes a method for detecting wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) accurately and automatically via remote sensing. By leveraging OpenStreetMap and multimodal remote sensing data this novel joint deep learning method is able to simultaneously tackle land use, land cover, and WWTP classification.
Humanitarian OSM
[1] The UN Mappersheld a week-long workshop in Nairobi on Unite Maps services and OSM. Personnel from UNSOS, the UN Peacekeeping mission operating in Somalia, learned how to contribute to open geospatial data and engage with the OSM community. OSM Kenya also participated in the workshop and provided useful inputs.
Stefano Bovio used matter.js and OpenStreetMap data for an experiment where the typical ‘You are here’ point is influenced by gravity and buildings are obstacles on its path through the map.
Tracestrack has initiated an open source project aiming to create a language vector overlay style for Openlayers. The vector layer overlays on top of a raster base map. This hybrid approach combines the power of mapnik and Openlayers, to support more sophisticated multi-language, region-specific rendering. Currently, the vector tiles are published from pnorman/openstreetmap-cartographic. Tracestrack has published an OpenLayers-Cartographic-Label-Style demo on Github.
Christoph Hormann has written, in his blog, about ‘Tree depiction in traditional maps and plans’ and, in a second article, about ‘Trees in OpenStreetMap‘.
Software
A Bolivian TV host said that OSM-based Trufi App is ‘an app fallen from heaven’. Congratulations @Trufi.
A few days ago you may have noticed the performance of the OSM Wiki was unusually slow. This was due to a web scraper misdirecting itself.
Programming
Stéphane Guillou has released his R package ‘osmexport’, which is useful for downloading, reading, preparing and visualising OpenStreetMap data from exports you would get from the OSM website’s ‘Export’ page or the other diverse download tools in the OSM ecosystem.
… Mariotomo’s blog post, where he explained some of the problems faced by our readers in countries with poor and/or expensive internet connections? He has a relatively simple solution which may be of interest to others: using a bash script to pull items from the RSS feed.
… Waymarked trails hiking maps? This site offers bicycle trails, mountain bike routes, inline skating, equestrian trails and winter sports trails.
Other “geo” things
EOX IT Services GmbH has launched EOGuesser, a browser game where one has three tries to locate the daily satellite view on an OpenStreetMap based map.
Christopher Beddow discusses, in his blog, the transition from map making to ‘world building’, and helps the reader understand how building worlds can go beyond just making a map.
HeiGIT, the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology, is still looking for a Senior Science Manager – Innovation & Research Manager GIScience (m, f, d), 100%, permanent.
HeiGIT is also looking for student assistants for a number of tasks related to geoinformatics and the use of OpenStreetMap data.