Anne-Karoline Distel blogged about drinking water refill stations and has published a video tutorial on creating a preset and adding refill options to a shop using OsmAnd.
publicerination imported the ‘StreetSmArts Murals’ dataset in San Francisco.
Voting on the proposal to deprecate maxspeed:seasonal:winter is open until Tuesday 4 July.
Mapping campaigns
The Champs-Libres team continued their series on mapping railway stations accessibility with a post on how to map access to railway platforms.
Community
adreamy has summarised ► the similarities and differences between emergency=assembly_point, which is a gathering place and also a temporary shelter; bunker, which is a more robust shelter; and amenity=shelter, which describes a shelter from bad weather.
DW Chung will soon be participating in this year’s Google Summer of Code. Their project, ‘OSRM Python Bindings’, aims to create a route-finding Python library based on the Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM).
JM-Lemmi updated all paths in the forests of the Weinsberger Berge, Germany, by riding his bike 515 km to achieve this.
Events
The website for OSMScience 2023 (we reported earlier) is now up and running. The deadline for submitting abstracts is Tuesday 1 August.
Maps
Chris Whong has built an interactive map that shows you, using GTFS data from New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Turf.js, travel isochrones from your selected NY subway station on a OSM base map (via Lat × Long).
Programming
Kshitijraj Sharma explored the possibilities of the Segment Anything Model, developed by Meta, for feature detection on aerial imagery and eventually mapping in OSM editors.
Brian Sperlongano published a guide on how to run your own OpenMapTiles vector tile server on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for less than USD 20 per month.
Releases
The June release of Organic Maps includes the addition of GPX importing, fixes for bookmarks, updated maps, and support for MRGS and UTM coordinates.
Did you know …
[1] … the OSM-based Waymarked Trails map? It helps monitor super-route and route relations and offers fruitful documentation on hiking trails using OSM tags, including network, reference, level of difficulty (sac_scale), trail symbols (osmc:symbol) and elevation profiles. The OSM hierarchy of routes and super-routes allows the presentation of elevation profiles and downloading trails at various level of detail in kml and gpx formats. See the other sports covered by Waymarked Trails on their website.
Other “geo” things
Natalie Stechyson (CBC News) discussed declining map-reading skills in the age of GPS. Although some bemoan the apparent decline in people’s map-reading skills, George Bevan pointed out that in many ways, maps are more embedded in our day-to-day lives than they’ve ever been, noting how much we all use GPS, satellite views, and Google maps.
Since 2007 negotiations► have been going on between Germany and Switzerland to conclude a new treaty that will see the High Rhine border being redefined as the centreline rather than the currently used thalweg. In preparation, surveyors have been marking out the new border, which has resulted in the border moving 8 m closer to Switzerland on the Holzbrücke Bad Säckingen.