weeklyOSM 561

13/04/2021-19/04/2021

Mapping

• Edoardo Neerhut has written a post on the Mapillary blog looking at the quality of pedestrian data in OpenStreetMap. Five cities with distinct characteristics were analysed to see how closely OpenStreetMap matches the reality on the ground.
• User mahdi1234 has published a short article on how to determine, with simple shell commands, how many post boxes, tracks, or steps one has mapped.
• The local OSM community in Penza, Russia, has managed to map most of their building outlines and addresses in just a few weeks. The number of buildings with addresses rose from 8.5 to 26.7 thousand (+214%). The results and the progress are visualised in Kachkaev’s OSM diary.
• Frederik Ramm has seen changeset comments consisting only of hashtags and reminded mappers of the need to write good changeset comments.
• Requests have been made for comments on the following proposals:
  • Light electric vehicles to define a set of tags to map restrictions associated with a range of new types of vehicles.
  • After Kai Poppe had proposed just ‘discouraging’ the use of railway=preserved, the most relevant comments hinted at using the more definite term ‘deprecating’. The proposal has been renamed and is still open for comments. The proposal was explicitly written to reflect the current state of tagging, where railway:preserved=yes is used more frequently. One very adamant point made in the discussion on the tagging mail list was that this proposed change would encourage excessive namespacing. The author therefore asks for more opinions on this specific matter – whether to keep the now more in-use tagging or to replace it with something completely different (such as railway:*+usage=preserved).
• Voting is underway for:
  • railway:signal:*:shape allowing mappers to map the visual appearance of railway signals that have the same meaning (till Friday 7 May).
  • amenity=clubhouse for a location used and operated by a club (till Wednesday 5 May).

Local chapter news

• Jess Beutler has stepped into the role of the first OSM US Program Director and is working on a part-time basis to strengthen and expand the impact and breadth of OSM US program offerings.

OSM research

• Franz-Benjamin Mocnik has written a paper investigating which aspects of OpenStreetMap data are consistent with Benford’s Law.

Humanitarian OSM

• Gloria Urrea, University of Colorado at Boulder, and Eunae Yoo, University of Tennessee, partnered with HOT to conduct research that has produced insights for HOT and the other organisations that use the Tasking Manager. Here, they summarise their research project, which examines the impact of users’ experience on project completion and retention.
• With a microgrant from HOT, the OSM Senegal community and Healthsites.io have been mapping hospitals and clinics across Senegal, aiding in the country’s COVID-19 response. (We reported earlier updates on this project in WN548, WN549 and WN552.)

Maps

• The School District of Philadelphia has launched an online dashboard to track COVID-19 cases within their schools’ student and staff populations.

Open Data

• Open data tree inventories can be uploaded to BaumCloud (the tree cloud). The tree registers of Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Bonn, Leipzig, Chemnitz, Gelsenkirchen, Rostock, Krefeld, Troisdorf and Wesel are currently available for download.
• ILDA has made > a regional open data barometer for 24 Latin American countries, with Uruguay, Argentina, and Colombia being the more advanced in this aspect.
• Code for Kusatsu has obtained permission from Kusatsu City to trace from their aerial imagery. Instructions on how to do this have been written by user K_sakanoshita on the wiki page > .
• Stefan Lehmkühler (of the initiative ‘Changing Cities’ and direct candidate of the Green Party for the Berlin House of Representatives) has visualised > the Berlin police’s cycling accident data from 2018 and 2019 on a map and calculated how much the accidents cost over the two years per length of street. The data on the economic costs of an accident come from the Federal Highway Research Institute – the death of a person, for example, went into the statistics at EUR 1,121,888; for a minor injury, costs of EUR 4,959 were applied.

Software

• Greg announced the release of FHODOT, a new online tool that allows mappers to make efficient use of the rich source of open UK address and postcode data provided by the Food Standards Agency, particularly through JOSM. You can find more information in the readme on GitHub, where the source code is also published.
• If you want to use the Microsoft open source version of JDK to run JOSM on a X86 processor, then see Johnwhelan’s OSM Diary on how to download and install it on your system.
• MapComplete’s developer has announced that 500 unique contributors have made edits via MapComplete. Additionally, a small breakdown is given of which themes have proven to be popular in 2021. Peter invited the community to create their own theme on the platform.

Programming

• Stephan Knauss advised the dev discussion list that he had found and fixed a bug in the script ‘trim_osc.py’. Everyone who uses the script, for example via the switch2osm manual, is affected. Changed relations disappear from the database. A fresh import will be necessary.
• Stephan Knauss has found the cause of the memory leak in his rendering pipeline (we reported earlier). The cause is the PostgreSQL JIT feature, which has been active by default since version 12. In osm2pgsql, JIT is already dynamically disabled. In a GitHub issue, Stephan explains how you can identify and work around the problem.

Did you know …

• … OSM Relation Analyzer? This tool allows you to check relations and discover gaps in otherwise linear features.

OSM in the media

• German computer magazine c’t reported > (sign up required to read full article) on NUNAV’s apps with collaborative routing. In the article, graphmasters, the app’s developers, stress the usage of OSM.
• As we reported earlier, Code for Charlotteville has started an OSM-based project targeted to people with mobility issues. The project has attracted some attention from local media, which hopefully attracted some more volunteers.
• GIS Lounge published a podcast about OpenStreetMap as a community of communities.

Other “geo” things

• The page of the town of Bitche in France was blocked on Facebook because of its name.
• Digital Earth Africa reported on GeoMAD, a comprehensive new data service that combines an entire year’s worth of satellite observations into a handful of images. Combining Geomedian and Median Absolute Deviation (MAD) data, the service allows users to access annual cloud-free mosaics of the African landscape, as well as view statistical variations over time. The data is available annually from 2017 to 2020.
• Google has released Google Earth Timelapse, ‘The World’s Largest Video’. Using 24 million photos from two satellites, Google has created a time lapse view showing changes to the Earth since 1984 in 4D. It is 4.4 terapixels in size.
• The ABC News reported on the significant inaccuracies in Google Maps noticed by some mayors in outback Queensland, as well as how outdated the imagery in Google Street View is, both of which might discourage tourists from visiting.
• How to obtain, process, and visualise bathymetry data: an article about styling Ocean Depth Data in Mapbox Studio.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
臺北市	開發者地圖大亂鬥		2021-04-24
Biella	Incontro mensile OSMers BI-VC-CVL (online)		2021-04-24
Budapest	Birthday of the gimmisn house numbering tool, height measurement, displaying vector tiles		2021-04-26
	Birthday of the gimmisn house numbering tool, height measurement, displaying vector tiles		2021-04-26
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)		2021-04-26
Área metropolitana de Madrid y Corredor del Henares	Mapatón Madrid streets		2021-04-27
Viersen	OSM Stammtisch Kreis Viersen		2021-04-27
	Mapatón online de Médicos Sin Fronteras		2021-04-28
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Treffen (online)		2021-04-28
Osborne County	OpenStreetMap U.S. Virtual Mappy Hour	✓	2021-04-29
Haute-Sanaga	[Virtual Event] GeOsm : Let’s put ourselves on the map!		2021-04-30
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public meeting		2021-04-30
Salt Lake City	Map The U Spring 2021		2021-04-30 – 2021-05-01
gmina Krośniewice	Virtual meeting of the Polish OSM Association		2021-04-30
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon	✓	2021-05-04	gb
Landau an der Isar	Virtuelles Niederbayern-Treffen	✓	2021-05-04
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch (Online)		2021-05-05
	Stuttgart: Virtueller Stammtisch am 5. Mai 2021		2021-05-05
	Missing Maps DRK Online Mapathon – Einführung JOSM		2021-05-06
Dresden	Dresdner OSM-Stammtisch	✓	2021-05-06
gmina Krośniewice	Virtual meeting of the Polish OSM Association		2021-05-07
臺北市	OSM x Wikidata Taipei #28		2021-05-10
Zürich	OSM-Treffen Zürich		2021-05-11
20095	Hamburger Mappertreffen		2021-05-11
Köln	Stammtisch Köln	✓	2021-05-12
Chippewa Township	OpenStreetMap Michigan Meetup	✓	2021-05-13
Osborne County	OpenStreetMap U.S. Virtual Mappy Hour	✓	2021-05-13
Berlin	155. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch (Online)		2021-05-13
gmina Krośniewice	Virtual meeting of the Polish OSM Association		2021-05-14

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 Anne Ghisla, Climate_Ben, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, PierZen, Polyglot, TheSwavu, derFred.