20/02/2025-26/02/2025
[1] Emergency and weather alert map view from OSM Hack Weekend | Map data © OpenStreetMap Contributors.
Community
- ENSTP’s OSM Club is back and you are invited
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to participate. On the agenda: training, conferences, projects, and many other surprises. This event marks the beginning of the activities of the OSM community at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Travaux Publics in Cameroon.
- Jean-Christophe Becquet delivered
a presentation titled ‘Encouraging Contributions in Your Area’ at AlpOSS
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, the open-source and free software event held in Isère, France. Drawing from experiences within the OpenStreetMap ecosystem across various regions and themes, this presentation outlines a methodology for fostering engagement around a digital commons.
Events
- [1] You can read about the OSM Hack Weekend, hosted by Geofabrik in Karlsruhe, Germany, which discussed and worked on things related to KDE Itinerary, Transitous, and emergency and weather alerts, involving OSM.
- You still can register for the 5th annual OpenStreetMap Local Chapters and Communities Congress, which will be held online on Saturday 15 March 13:00 to 16:00 UTC.
Education
- Raymond Lay introduced QMapCompare, a newly released plugin for QGIS that allows users to compare multiple maps within the platform using a range of visualisation techniques.
OSM research
- Peschanski, Jurno, and Hilsenbeck Filho, from Wiki Movimento Brasil, have published
an open access paper in Texto Livre (Open Text), supported by UFMG (Brazil), discussing some successful case studies on open solutions in digital extension projects. The uMap of the roads and bridges damaged or destroyed during the Rio Grande do Sul disaster of 2024 was mentioned. The problematic bridges and highways were mapped in OpenStreetMap by Fernando Trebien (we reported earlier) and the uMap was created by Raquel Dezidério Souto.
Maps
- hflan proposed renaming that body of water between Mexico and the USA the Gulf of OpenStreetmap. Using the same MapQuest tool you too can find where the Gulf of Have a Dream is.
OSM in action
- OpenStreetMap in the wild: a few weeks ago, the French Department of Doubs posted
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on LinkedIn about one of their new recruits, Adrien Zhang. Some contributors spotted the OSM logo displayed on his desktop. The department uses
an instance of InfoRoute to share traffic information, also shown on his desktop, that relies on OSM as a base layer.
Open Data
- As we reported earlier, the OpenLandMap is provided by OpenGeoHub, displays a lot of thematic layers, and uses OpenStreetMap as one of the available base layers. This project works with open data and is based on open-source software including Geoserver, React, plumber R and OpenLayers. What’s new is that it now includes Bing aerial images.
- Kailash Nadh and Madhav Pai highlighted the significance of OpenStreetMap as a digital public good and a key component of digital public infrastructure in their recent talk titled ‘Open Data in Mobility’. The session took place on Friday 21 February, during Day 2 of Namma Raste, a three-day in-depth exploration of Bengaluru’s urban mobility that brought together experts, policymakers, and citizens to shape a safer and more sustainable transportation future.
Software
- User RollTideRoll_asdfjkll reported that Bing imagery is inaccessible in JOSM, prompting the reopening of a related issue ticket. Mikel Maron confirmed there is ongoing coordination with Microsoft to inquire whether all OSM editors could use the key currently used by iD. As of this writing, Microsoft has not yet responded.
- David Karlaš updated his script that adds helpful buttons to the OpenStreetMap website. The updated script now includes direct links to OSMCha and the Level0 editor and works with the recently updated layout of the OpenStreetMap website.
- Lucas Jellema has published a guide on using CartoDB and OpenStreetMap in QGIS.
Did you know that …
- … there are more than one thousand OSM datasets on data.europe.eu, the official portal for European data?
Other “geo” things
- Reddit user Throwboi321 has conducted a GIS analysis to investigate the hypothesis that kebab quality declines the closer you get to a railway station. By integrating OSM data for navigation networks and railway station locations with Google Maps reviews as a proxy for taste, they aimed to assess the validity of this claim.
- Diego Alonso has given us a rundown
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on the highlights of the QGIS 3.42 (Münster) release candidate.
- Burghardt, Demidova and Keim have edited an open access book about volunteered geographic information, which was published by Springer Nature in 2024, and included articles from the VGIscience programme, developed by the Institut für Kartographie of the Technische Universität Dresden (Germany).
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 MatthiasMatthias, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, TheSwavu, barefootstache.
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