(English) weeklyOSM 336

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12/20/2016-12/26/2016

Mapping

• The very old proposal to introduce a validation date for keys is again being discussed.
• Rory McCann reports on Townlands.ie, which can now display the historical names. The validity date for keys described above is used for this.
• Philip Hunt presents his work on the automatic recognition of building outlines and makes further suggestions for improvements. John Whelan takes the opportunity to ask on the talk mailing list, if there is already a directive for such contributions to the database.
• Daniel J H writes a diary about routing circular junctions. This post gives information about how OSRM distinguishes between roundabout intersections, named, and unnamed roundabouts. It also gives information about the criteria for a junction to be a roundabout.

Community

• The OpenCage Data Blog interviewed Julio May about OpenStreetMap in Costa Rica.
• Pascal Neis’ HDYC now also supports OpenStreetCam profiles.
• Alan described how the STV (single-use) voting system works and why it would be better suited than the majority voting system currently used by OSM US.
• It has been speculated for a while that Niantic are using OSM data within Pokemon Go (to determine where certain game creatures appear). Since just before Christmas, we’ve now seen a lot of Pokemon Go players updating OpenStreetMap. In many cases their edits are to be welcomed and perfectly valid, but unfortunately a small number are adding unlikely nonexistent footpaths, parks and water features in their locality. However what Niantic are doing is purely speculation – Grant suggests that in the absence of hard evidence we should try and persuade US-based Pokemon Go players to perform TIGER fixup and map missing amenities 🙂 Using Pascal’s search tool for suspicious changesets, it’s easy to find such changes.
• The app Transportr (that we’ve reported on previously) asks if a change from osmdroid to Mapbox would be a software freedom issue for their users.

Events

• In Solsona, a small town with 10,000 inhabitants near Barcelona, cartography students, headed by teacher Fermí Garriga, meets to collect data in OSM. Since google has “many disadvantages” and the data of the cartographic institute of Catalonia are partly faulty, but the participants map with their local knowledge, OSM-based maps are the best choice, Elpuntavui.cat said (auto translation).

Humanitarian OSM

• Douglas writes a very detailed summary of the HOT and FSD workshops in Uganda, which focused on the use of crowdsourcing and geodata for financial services.
• There is page at HOT to make donations for OSM Latam event. Help the Latam event if you can!

switch2OSM

• Faced with high costs from commercial providers, a Pokemon map decides to “just serve their own OSM tiles” (and saves a lot of money in the process).

Software

• Lukas Martinelli published a video demonstrating the current status of Maputnik (that we reported on earlier).
• You may have seen OSM diary entries by Mapbox’s data team such as this one showing potentially problematic changes to OSM. Many of the issues listed in those were revealed by OSMCha, originally written by Wille Marcel. In this diary entry Manohar from Mapbox goes into more detail about OSMCha and what they have found from using it.

Programming

• OpenStreetMap Carto was released in version 3.0.0. It uses Mapnik 3 for the first time and is a crucial step towards HStores on our main page.

Releases

Mapbox releases a new version of their Android SDK which comes with the following enhancements like clustering, integrated support for Mapbox Android services and much more.

Provided by the OSM Software Watchlist.

(*) unfree software. See: freesoftware.

Did you know …

• … the page mapcontrib? It is up with new features: The ability to create heat maps a new tag and presets handling and has the theme creator to translate all the theme information in English, French and Italian (for now).
• … the beginner’s guide to use JOSM by Ramya Ragupathy?

Other “geo” things

• Geomatics Canada presents “The five most interesting things that happened in geomatics in 2016”.
• Uber explains in great detail how to deal with geodata and describes the different tools they use for this.
• National Geographic presents 15 maps of 2016 who show “cartography at its best”.
• National Geographic released a video of NASA with some impressive shots of Earth from space, with the title “A Year on Earth as Seen From Space”.

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This weeklyOSM was produced by Laura Barroso, Peda, Rogehm, SomeoneElse, YoViajo, derFred, jinalfoflia, keithonearth.