týdeník 755

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02/01/2025-08/01/2025

CubeTrek web app for managing and visualising GPS tracks in 3D [¹] | © Cube Trek | Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

Mapping

Requests for comments have been made on these proposals :
- catenary_mast:*=* to add further specifications on catenary masts, a vertical support structure used in railway electrification systems to hold up the overhead wires (also known as catenary wires) that supply electric power to trains.
- pratictioners=* to tag the number and field of professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, or therapists, available at facilities like clinics, legal offices, or wellness centres, aiming to enhance the mapping of professional services.
- epigraph=* to tag inscriptions or dedications on features such as monuments, buildings, or plaques, allowing for the documentation of text content and cultural significance.
- sensory:* to tag features providing sensory accessibility, such as tactile paving or audible signals, aimed at improving map usability for people with sensory disabilities.

Community

Ciarán Staunton has analysed the current progress of the Ireland OSM community’s #osmIRL_buildings mapping project using the ohsome Dashboard.
A post on the OpenStreetMap Community forum discussed efforts to improve mapping in Thailand by reducing the risks of armchair mapping.
David Schneider has used OSM points of interest data to identify ’18-hour neighbourhoods’, lively places near rail services that attract foot traffic from around 6 am to midnight.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is seeking applicants for the role of Core Software Development Facilitator, funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund for two years. The facilitator will coordinate the development of OSM’s core software stack, including communication with the community, maintaining a lightweight roadmap, supporting developers, and overseeing the budget. Applications, including CVs and cover letters, are open until Tuesday 21 January and the position is 100% remote.

Events

The FOSSGIS conference team is pleased to announce ► that registration for FOSSGIS 2025 is now open. Volunteers are needed to help with session management and video recording, since the recordings and livestreams depend on someone operating the camera.
Christian Quest revealed that Panoramax will have a booth at FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels, Belgium, taking place on 1 and 2 February, located on the second floor of the K2 building (K2-A-4). There will also be a presentation about Panoramax, a full FLOSS alternative for ground-level imagery sharing, on Saturday at 11:50 CET in room AW1.120. Attendees can expect some goodies at the booth.
Geomob Berlin will take place at 18:00 CET on Wednesday 12 February. Volunteer speakers are currently needed.
At the 38th Chaos Communication Congress held in Hamburg, the German OpenStreetMap community hosted ► an assembly within the ‘Bits and Bäume’ area. The team conducted workshops on iD and JOSM editors, facilitated OSM meetups, and held an ‘ask-us-anything’ session on data usage. Using FOSSGIS e.V.’s large-format printer, they created 54 custom A1 maps for participants. Additionally, stickers were distributed, and EUR 453 in donations was collected for OpenStreetMap-related activities.

OSM research

Piero Campalani, Massimiliano Pittore, and Kathrin Renner have assessed the quality of the OpenStreetMap roads data in Burundi at a national level, with a view to its fitness-for-use for disaster risk mitigation purposes, which were adopted in the context of a recent multi-hazards risk assessment and mapping exercise on behalf of the International Organisation for Migration.

Humanitarian OSM

Contributors can support the OSM France project for Mayotte response via the tasking manager to support the response and recovery efforts in the Island after the passage of cyclone Chido. Only intermediate and advanced OSM users can contribute in this project. The HOT Open Mapping Hub ESA is inviting contributors to map for nearby Mozambique, where mappers of all levels of experience can contribute.

Maps

Andrea Abuín has updated the Map of Mithraea using OpenStreetMap and Leaflet.
Andy Townsend tooted that he has made another map style to explore OSMF’s experimental on-the-fly-updated vector tiles. He said he created this because he wasn’t a fan of the demo map style previously used.

OSM in action

Data Guy has analysed OpenStreetMap road network data in various global cities to find the most ‘complex’. They examined road network graphs from 79 of the world’s largest cities, assessing factors such as the number of nodes, the number of edges, graph density, and average node degree.

Open Data

Mapscaping is offering a global elevation data download tool that allows users to easily access free elevation datasets. The tool supports datasets including SRTM, ALOS, and Copernicus DSM, providing resolutions from 30 m to 500 m. Users can select areas via a map interface and download data in GeoTIFF or ASCII Grid format, making it suitable for geospatial analysis or GIS projects.

Software

^[1] CubeTrek is an open-source web app for managing and visualising GPS tracks in 3D, tailored for outdoor activities like hiking, skiing, and trail running. It offers features such as replay mode using Google Earth data, advanced statistics, calendar heatmaps, activity matching, and integration with Garmin Connect and Polar Flow. Tracks can be imported via GPX or FIT files, and the platform allows users to explore topography interactively.
Carlos Felipe Castillo has provided an overview of OSMnx, a Python package for downloading, analysing, and visualising geospatial data from OpenStreetMap (we reported earlier). The article demonstrated ► its capabilities, such as generating street networks, visualising edge centrality, calculating routes with travel times, and extracting features like buildings and rail networks.
running-routes.com is a new website that helps generate interesting running routes tailored to your location and target distance while prioritising privacy. It downloads OpenStreetMap data locally, processes it into a graph, and uses a genetic algorithm to create routes with minimal backtracking. All computations occur on your device, ensuring your location and data remain private, with no third-party APIs or external services involved.
Mapscaping’s OpenStreetMap Category Viewer is an interactive tool for exploring and downloading OSM data. Users can select specific categories, for example amenities, highways, or natural features, and fetch data for a defined area.
The WhoDidIt tool has been brought back online after being taken offline due to problems with its database. Following troubleshooting and community engagement, the tool is back, allowing OpenStreetMap contributors to view and analyse recent changesets.
GeoDownloader is a pay-for-use service that simplifies downloading OpenStreetMap data through a user-friendly interface, enabling users to visually select areas, filter by tags or geometry types, and export data in GeoJSON, GeoPackage, or Shapefile format. Designed for small-scale projects, the tool avoids complex Overpass queries and costly external services, hosting indexed OSM data locally. The service is free for up to 100 features and offers a low-cost option for larger datasets, with plans to expand filtering and file format support.

Programming

overtureR is an R library to work with Overture Open Data. An alpha version is available on GitHub.
Minh Nguyễn shared new examples of topological queries using QLever, a tool enhancing spatial analysis on OpenStreetMap data. Demonstrations include retrieving all the street intersections in Chicago, calculating compactness of city boundaries in Oklahoma, and identifying the longest straight trunk road segments in California. These examples showcase QLever’s scalability, allowing analysis from urban areas to national scales, and its potential to complement Overpass API for unique queries.

Releases

Jochen Topf gave an update on taginfo, introducing new features such as displaying a tag’s status from the OSM wiki on key pages, highlighting inconsistencies, and a report for ‘discardable’ tags, such as those used by editors like iD and JOSM. Additional improvements include a CSV export option for tables, enhanced tools for wiki maintainers, and an interactive keyboard shortcut guide for experienced users.

Did you know that …

… that there are several browser add-ons that can enhance your OSM mapping experience?
… that Jason Davies, one of the contributors to the D3 graphics package, has created a webpage demonstrating several dozen map projections of the Earth with smooth transitions between each?
… that GPX traces uploaded to OpenStreetMap with their visibility set to private are not displayed in the Public GPS Traces layer, even if the permissions are later changed to public? Marcos Dione tooted that the current system only processes newly uploaded traces for display.
… that OSMyBiz is an OpenStreetMap-based platform that allows small businesses to manage and update their business information on the map? It makes it easy to edit OSM listings and provides tools to verify and promote local businesses.

OSM in the media

An article in Le Monde has spotlighted the role of open-source software and digital commons in modern technology, mentioning OpenStreetMap as an exemplary community-driven project. The piece emphasised the critical importance of resources such as OSM for public services and sovereignty initiatives, including France’s national geographic agency using OSM for digital twins of territories.

Other “geo” things

MundoGEO noted ► the publication of Proceedings of the VII Jornada de Geotecnologias do Estado do Rio de Janeiro – (JGEOTEC) 2024 (we reported earlier), which is available for free download and includes research in various areas, with emphasis on multitemporal analysis, the use of drones and other equipment to acquire high-resolution images, as well as real-time data collection.
The Indus River Basin is highly exposed to the impact of riverine floods. A group from HeiGIT travelled to Islamabad, Pakistan, to strengthen local capacity in disaster risk management and geospatial analysis.
Miguel García Álvarez announced the Cartographer’s Tale weekly newsletter, in which he will share his fondness for maps. Already available in Spanish, he will now be publishing it in English.
Cesium for Unreal supports importing Photorealistic 3D Tiles from the Google Maps Platform using Cesium ion. This tutorial walks you through adding these tiles to Unreal Engine projects, using the CesiumGeoreference component to accurately position scenes on a global scale.
Carlos Felipe Castillo revisited ► John Snow’s historic 1854 cholera outbreak analysis in London, considered the first geospatial analysis in history. Using modern tools including uMap and digitised datasets, Carlos recreates Snow’s identification of the Broad Street water pump as the outbreak’s source.
Since 2021 the United Nations Human Settlements Programme has been working with local leaders in the Juiz de Fora municipality (Brazil) to advance inclusive and transformative solutions to urban challenges. Using KoboToolbox, their collaborative ‘Territories of Citizenship’ project aims to leverage up-to-date and accurate data to inform policies and improve service delivery for urban communities.
Gregory Marler shared his excitement about seeing the next-stop display on an Xplore Dundee bus in GPS debug mode. The short video captured the screen revealing raw GPS data instead of the usual route information, offering a rare glimpse into the system’s backend operations.
The YouTube video The Wrong Map of Syria No One Noticed highlighted a cartographic error where multiple maps inaccurately represented the border between Syria and Jordan. The video delves into the origins of this mistake, its widespread presence in digital and physical maps, and the lack of scrutiny it received despite being publicly accessible for years.
Barbara Petchenik was the first woman to serve as Vice President of the International Cartographic Association (ICA). She was committed to designing maps in such a way that they could be understood by a broad target group, especially children and people without specialised knowledge. The ICA organises a competition for children and young people every two years and the theme for 2025 is ‘Maps in everyday life’.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2025-01-10
Bangalore South	OSM Bengaluru Mapping Party		2025-01-11
Model Town Tehsil	13th OSM Delhi Mapping Party		2025-01-12
København	OSMmapperCPH		2025-01-12
Chambéry	Mapathon en ligne saison 24/25 CartONG		2025-01-13
Richmond	MapRVA Meetup with OSM US		2025-01-14
Grenoble	Atelier de janvier du groupe local de Grenoble		2025-01-13
中正區	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #72		2025-01-13
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2025-01-14
Zaragoza	Asamblea extraordinaria de la Asociación OpenStreetMap España (Online)		2025-01-14
	[Online] Map-py Wednesday		2025-01-15
Karlsruhe	Stammtisch Karlsruhe		2025-01-15
	~~[Online] Map-py Wednesday~~		2025-01-16
Utrecht	Nieuwjaarsborrel OSGeo.nl, OSM.nl en QGIS Gebruikersvereniging Nederland		2025-01-19
	Panoramax monthly international meeting		2025-01-20
Hannover	OSM-Stammtisch Hannover		2025-01-20
	Missing Maps London: (Online) Mid-Month Mapathon [eng]		2025-01-21
Lyon	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon		2025-01-21
Bonn	184. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn		2025-01-21
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2025-01-22
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	✓	2025-01-21
Lübeck	149. OSM-Stammtisch Lübeck und Umgebung		2025-01-23
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2025-01-24
Chambéry	Mapathon en ligne saison 24/25 CartONG		2025-01-27
Stadtgebiet Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen		2025-01-27