weeklyOSM 504

10/03/2020-16/03/2020

Mapping

• Joseph Eisenberg noticed that the usage of man_made=goods_conveyor for industrial conveyor belts and systems was proposed but never approved, although the tag has been used over 4,000 times to date. Therefore he suggests adding it to the Wiki pages for ‘Key:man_made‘ and ‘Map Features‘.
• Jennings Anderson from the University of Colorado, Boulder published a paper about the role of corporate editors in OSM, such as Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook. The paper also investigates the influence they have, and where they are mapping.
• jguthula, from Amazon, highlighted that ~94% of the gates in OSM do not have access information. He recommend adding the missing information, who can use these gates, and summarises the values for access=* tag.
• An article on improveosm.org details how the OpenStreetCam plug-in for JOSM, with its new features, can help with the mapping of missing features recognised from road signs.
• OSM’s main map style no longer renders barrier=hedge with area=yes as an area following an update in August 2019 but instead renders them with the standard green line. It took a while until someone mentioned this in the German forum and the regular discussion (automatic translation) about mapping an object as polygon or line has started.
• The voting for place=refugee_site proposal, as suggested by Manonv and Kateregga1, finished and the proposal has been rejected with 28 votes for, 12 votes against, and 1 abstention.
• Apple analysed (automatic translation) the territory of Russia with its Atlas tool. The detected errors are uploaded as tasks to the MapRoulette service and are waiting for us to fix them. Join!

Community

• In April 2018 (we talked about it here), members of OSM Togo community launched the GirlsMap initiative, which aims to organise OSM training sessions just for ladies, in order to increase their proportion within the local and global OSM community. Since then the initiative has spread over other African countries: Benin, Mali, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Madagascar. In Togo, Benin or Madagascar they have already organised their second or third workshops. The DRC community had planned to start their first one on 20 March, but unfortunately they had to postpone it to a later date, due to the COVID-19 situation.
• A discussion about how best to make imagery available in OSM editors seems to have degenerated from ‘what do we do next’ into ‘whose fault is it’ and finger-pointing over the 16 months that it has been open. See also here and here for more of the discussion.
• Russian user Zkir (Kirill Bondarenko) shared (automatic translation) his impressions of the SotM BALTICS 2020 conference.
• In early March the ‘Open Data Day’ conference took place in Moscow (Russia). It was held in the architectural landmark (constructivist architecture) Communal House of the Textile Institute on Ordzhonikidze street. The RU-OSM community shot panoramas (automatic translation) of the surrounding area and the building itself, and mapped it in OSM, including a 3D representation of the building.
• The German OSM Telegram group is trying (automatic translation) to restart regular organised weekly mapping tasks, an idea that got lost in 2010 in the German community, although attempts have been made to revive the idea. The current task (automatic translation) is about checking the opening hours for doctors and pharmacies.

Imports

• Lanxana informed us about the plan to import pharmacies in Catalunya, Spain, which consists of verifying and completing data on existing pharmacies by experienced mappers with the help of a Task Manager project. However, the licensing of the data and open issues about the import procedure have raised some questions.

Events

• The Maker Faire Vienna 2020, originally scheduled for 16 and 17 March, has been rescheduled to 3 and 4 October 2020.
• You map informal transit and take pictures? Post them on Wikimedia Commons to participate in the WikiLovesAfrica contest and Jungle Bus Paratransit Contest. Learn more here.
• Thomas Skowron shared his experience of the talks given at the German FOSSGIS conference, which have been held remotely due to the coronavirus.

Humanitarian OSM

• Russell Deffner, from HOT, explained why the organisation has not yet responded to the Coronavirus threat. Due to missing formal requests from partners, which HOT requires to become active, he suggested organising efforts with local OpenStreetMap Chapters and Communities and to use HOT resources, such as the Tasking Manager, if needed.
• Ryan Arcadio wrote an article about how maps and mapathons can aid the Philippines amid coronavirus and other disasters.
• MapSwipe, in which Prof. Alexander Zipf, of the University of Heidelberg, played a major role, was awarded a main prize at the ‘Mobile World Congress’ trade fair in Barcelona, Spain.

Maps

• [1] ‘indoor=’ is a new renderer for indoor data in OSM. The map, with global coverage and based on Simple Indoor Tagging, has been provided by François de Metz and is available on GitHub. Further details are provided in a blog post.
• In the last weeks many OSM users have noticed an increase in grey tiles in the OpenStreetMap carto style. The reason for this was the omission of several cache servers in Russia, Chile and France. The OSM operations team therefore is asking for help in providing servers, even if Twitter user Anonymaps thinks OSMF has better things to do.
• OSM Paraguay wrote a how-to on setting up a tile server for Paraguay.

Licences

• Полина Новикова asked for clarification on the difference between a Derivative Database and a Produced Work under the ODbL.

Software

• OSM’s API now supports JSON responses, which should simplify usage for web apps. JSON support, which has been made happen by mmd and others, is documented on the OSM wiki.
• Facebook’s Michal Migurski announced the company’s Daylight Map Distribution offering; a kind of Facebook-reviewed OSM dataset, which helps users by filtering intentional or unintentional questionable edits.

Did you know …

• … that the Russian company NextGIS has a YouTube-channel where various training videos on GIS technologies are published?

Other “geo” things

• Süddeutsche Zeitung carried (automatic translation) an article on Martin Waldseemüller, the inventor of America. Christoph von Eichhorn’s article explains how Waldseemüller’s 1507 map was the first to show a continent called ‘America’ and that two of the six remaining copies are probably fakes.
• The Geospatial World published some of the best maps tracking Coronavirus updates. There you can find maps like: The Esri Story Maps, WHO Situation Dashboard, Johns Hopkins University, HealthMap and many more.
• Forbes features an article about the importance of geodata for the fight against the Coronavirus.
• Mapbox discusses a variety of different maps, in a blogpost, which visualise the spread of the Coronavirus.
• Yandex has created a map of the coronavirus spread in Russia and the world.

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This weeklyOSM was produced by Elizabete, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, Sammyhawkrad, SeverinGeo, Silka123, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred.