19/07/2022-25/07/2022
Mapping
- Andrea Spinelli wondered how to add a point of interest with iD at a specific coordinate. Officially, this function is not desired. Developers recommend the use of
Cmd
+Opt
+M
, or equivalent, to open the measurement panel, which shows the exact location of a selected node. In comments following the blog post, readers shared their alternative approaches. - A bicycle route linking Stuttgart in Germany to Strasbourg in France has been created, as reported last week. Without signposts along it, a discussion has started about whether it meets OpenStreetMap’s inclusion criteria. At the moment there are opinions on multiple channels for and against, including the French mailing list
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and the German forum
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.
- EdoBoo reported, in their OSM Diary, that their visit to Forte di Montecchio motivated them to revise the mapping of this fortress with more detail.
- Mapping public transport seems to remain a challenge for new mappers, although the wiki contains a step-by-step tutorial.
- ngumenawesamson, from HOT, presented a detailed classification of aspects of data quality on OSM, under 10 headings. It is planned to use this classification to identify actions which can be taken, within HOT projects, to reduce some of these issues.
- Voting on
Documentation of key prefixes and suffixes
, to establish the convention of documenting key prefixes at pages namedKey:prefix:*
and key suffixes at pages namedKey:*:suffix
on the wiki, is open until Sunday 7 August. - Voting on the following proposals has closed:
school=entrance
, to deprecate the use of the tagschool=entrance
, was approved with 26 votes for, 3 votes against and 0 abstentions.amenity=library_dropoff
, for mapping a place where library patrons can return or drop-off books, other than the library itself, was approved with 12 votes for, 1 vote against and 0 abstentions.
Community
- The national mapping agency for Great Britain, the Ordnance Survey (OSGB), recently released a new map, OS Map, as a website and a mobile app. The map provides both free and subscription layers. The free layers integrate data from a range of sources: OSGB open data, OSGB closed data and OpenStreetMap via MapBox. The UK community has noticed problems with the latter layer as it includes private paths, which has resulted in irate landowners deleting perfectly valid OSM data.
- User TrickyFoxy raised the question of whether registration for OpenStreetMap by mobile users (especially with Google) is too complex and linked to different issues on GitHub, one of which has been open since 2015. As Tom Hughes pointed out at the time, any solution must enable new mappers to accept the contributor terms.
Education
- Introducing young people to responsible mapping through education and training is certainly more meaningful than hunting for nodes. Great examples are the actions of Muni Mappers from Uganda and Laura Mugeha at the Technical University, Nairobi, Kenya.
OSM research
- Roberto Pizzolotto, of the University of Calabria, published a scientific trajectory of OpenStreetMap. It showed that the main themes (a conceptual network) chiefly related to technical matters. Collaboration among scholars and institutes (the social network) was not strong, and knowledge and ideas circulated within a limited network.
Maps
- For the May Contain Hackers 2022 event in the Netherlands there is a special map based on OSM, which Evelyn also prepared for OsmAnd.
switch2OSM
- The French association Randonner Leger
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, wrote
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a guide about using OSMAnd for trekking purposes.
Software
- Canadian contributors reported reliability problems with OSM tile servers. The OpenStreetMap operations group is aware of latency problems for North American users as the one US rendering server, Pyrene, no longer has the capacity to keep up with demand. It is planned to add a new server soon in the east of North America.
- Benjamin Clark, from Meta, shared the 2022 development plans for MapWithAI’s RapiD editor for OpenStreetMap in a GitHub project issue. It is open to comments and feedback.
- Ilya Zverev wondered how to edit tags directly from openstreetmap.org. He built a solution which works as a browser extension available for Firefox and Chrome.
Programming
- Paul Norman took the recent outage of the standard tile layer as motivation to describe the means of monitoring system health.
Did you know …
- … there are many ways to contribute regularly to OSM?
Desktop:- OSM Streak
- MapRoulette
- Pic4Review
- Unmapped Places
- Find Suspicious OpenStreetMap Changesets
- OSMCha
- NotesReview
- Many Tasking Managers
Smartphone:
We are sure we have forgotten some. Please write to us and let us know, we will add them next week.
Other “geo” things
- The Tour de France Femmes bicycle race has a live map of the event which uses the Leaflet library, known for its use of OpenStreetMap as a base layer provider, among others.
Upcoming Events
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 Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, PierZen, SK53, TheSwavu, derFred.