09/03/2021-15/03/2021
Mapping campaigns
- Two schools in Portugal and Romania, both members of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Erasmus+ project, are carrying out a three-day mapathon together with UN Mappers.Starting on Monday 22 March ‘remaining works’ in Terceira are on the programme. On Tuesday and Wednesday, work will be carried out on a previously unpublished project of the UN Mappers. It looks like they want us to support the blue helmets of the MINUSMA-Peacekeeping mission in Mali (which includes the Romanian blue helmets).
Mapping
- User Supaplex030 has performed a detailed analysis of parking spaces (both on- and off-street) in the Berlin suburb of Neukölln. This necessitated detailed mapping in OSM of parking, and other things which affect availability of parking places (driveways) along the street.
- Simon Poole showed how minor geometry errors can creep into maps, even those from major providers.
- Benjamin Herfort describes in part 4 of ‘How to monitor humanitarian mapping in the HOT Tasking Manager’ the global statistics available – such as the number of projects, participants, buildings, roads, etc. – and the various possibilities to dig into these metadata.
- Paul The Archivist explained how he approaches the detailed 3D mapping of a town centre: in this case Hertford, north of London. There are useful tips on workflows and being selective about which buildings are mapped in detail.
- A request has been made for comments on the following proposal:
ref:find_a_grave=*
linking to the FindAGrave identifier in order to provide more information about the person while limiting the data volume occupied on OpenStreetMap.
- Voting is underway for the following proposals:
place_of_worship=holy_well
for places where Catholics, in countries like Ireland, celebrate the well’s patron saint with a mass once a year, collect ‘holy water’ and leave votive offerings (till Thursday 25 March)emergency=lifeguard
to indicate where a lifeguard will be while they are on duty (till Tuesday 30 March).
- The area around the village featured in changeset 100 million is now densely mapped.
Community
- Bert -Araali- Van Opstal complained about the behaviour of some members in the Discord channel devoted to OSM.
- Pascal Neis has previewed some proposed new #map view filters for the ‘Latest OpenStreetMap Edits per Tile’ in his resultmaps. Features like OAuth, login for saving the filters, list of friends and so on are not yet implemented. Pascal is asking for feedback.
Imports
- It is proposed to import building outlines from official data in Norway. The timescale from proposal to starting the import is somewhat ambitious, being only two weeks.
- Abdullah Abdulrhman reported the completion of importing governorates’ administrative boundaries in Saudi Arabia to OSM and asks the community to review this work to make sure everything is OK.
Local chapter news
- OSGeo Oceania announced the opening of its Microgrants program. The program will support local activities linked to open geospatial software or data with up to $250 AUD.
- OpenStreetMap Belgium’s Mapper of the Month for March is Gustavo Soares (PlayzinhoAgro).
Events
- The call for sessions (talks, workshops, and discussion panels) is now open for State of the Map 2021, which, as last year, will be held online. The deadline for proposals is Sunday 4 April.
Humanitarian OSM
- HOT presented a map of COVID-19 response remote mapping activity around the world.
- HOT also presented a story map of their disaster actions in 2020. The context of the actions is presented along with global contributor statistics.
Maps
- Amateur radio operators are keen to discover new technologies and this includes mapping. Many applications make use of OSM, such as the positional tracking service APRS with its APRS-Map, which displays the distribution of KiwiSDR receivers, or the popular Repeater Map, which shows the position of amateur radio repeater stations. However, amateur radio operators are not just consumers of but also contributors to OSM. You can find them everywhere, writing for weeklyOSM, just mapping, or on the OSMF board. So it is not surprising that there are amateur radio functions in OSM community projects like the optional QTH locator layer, which is a special geographic co-ordinate system, on the OpenTopoMap.
Software
- Roland Olbricht was delighted to announce the first contribution by an Overpass user other than himself to the Overpass blog. Antoine Riche provided an in-depth look at how to use some of Overpass’s new features to count roundabouts in France.
- Via Epona is an app aimed at helping you to discover the French terroirs (traditional farming regions) by bicycle. Its first public version is coming out on Sunday 21 March, the second day of spring.
- qeef has refactored ‘Divide and map. Now.’, a tool for collaborative mapping. In his current diary entry he summarised how the clients now look.
Programming
- OpenStreetMap has once again been accepted as a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code. Now there is a search for projects and people to mentor them. The current list is here.
Did you know …
- … paleochannels (as recently discussed on the tagging mailing list) are former courses of a river within a floodplain. Changes in some rivers, such as the Mississippi, have been intensively documented, while others are plainly visible on aerial imagery.
- … there are services that let you compare maps from different sources? One of these is CompareMaps.drona.ro, which offers an easy comparison of Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, Bing Maps, and HERE Maps.
- … of the many ways to get in touch with the OSM community?
Where can I get help, where can I find people to talk to? ### International – Multilingual Channels * international mailing lists * Forum from Android to Wiki team and from Albania to Venezuela * Discord * Mastodon * Matrix * Slack * Telegram * Twitter * IRC channels
Other “geo” things
- The pop artist Ed Ruscha documented the buildings of Sunset Strip in the 1960s with a wealth of photographs. Now Stamen have created an immersive experience from the photo archive, which is in the Getty Collection.
- The Myriahedral Projections representation shows the many ways we can cut up the globe and place it flat on a piece of paper.
- Matthew Earl has succeeded in projecting the footage of the Perseverance Rover’s approach to Mars onto satellite imagery from the Mars Express Orbiter. Here he explains how he did it.
- Déjà vu. Google Maps allows editing again.
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 AnisKoutsi, Climate_Ben, Lejun, Nordpfeil, PierZen, Polyglot, rogehm, SK53, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, derFred, richter_fn.