weeklyOSM 434

06/11/2018-12/11/2018

Mapping

• Gregory Marler made a Youtube tutorial showing how he is using his own 360 degree images from Mapillary for editing with JOSM.
• It looks as if the mapping done by Grab (the Uber of South-East Asia) does cause major problems. Quote from Russ McD “…what we are seeing is another major organisation, allowing a bunch of amateurs loose on a training ground they call OSM. They are all being paid, while us volunteers, mop up the mess.” But read it for yourself.
• We recently reported that Telenav has open-sourced the machine learning based street sign detection and the resulting training data that recognises nearly 100 sign types. Telenav makes use of it with its OpenStreetCam platform, a service very similar to Mapillary. The OpenStreetCam JOSM plugin visualises detections in the latest version. Martijn van Exel describes a Power Validator Workflow, that enables you to validate entire trips with many detected signs very quickly on the OpenStreetCam website.
• The question as to whether Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire should be labeled as independent country or as part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands was discussed in the forum. The thread gives some insight into different levels of independence of territories belonging still more or less to a kingdom

Community

• For the past two weeks, the French community has been working (automatic translation) on the completeness of coverage of police stations and gendarmerie brigades (regional police) in France. This project was launched following the recent availability of good quality open data of gendarmerie reception points and their opening hours. The particularity of this update was that each gendarmerie is referenced by a unique key facilitating subsequent updates (address, phone, opening_hours). This project will also clarify the amenity=police without names and identify municipal police. It also involved working on the documentation in the wiki. Collaboration is ongoing with the National Gendarmerie Digital Mission.
• [1] Arun Ganesh tweeted a teaser for the upcoming SOTM Asia on November 17 – 18, 2018 in Bangalore, India with a series of beautiful visualisations of 10 years OSM in India.
• The download service from Geofabrik has a lot of users and Frederik Ramm, who operates it, is always trying to minimise traffic by offering data extracts as large as required but also as small as possible. One of the largest extracts for which no subdivision exists, is California. The question how California could be divided extract-wise revealed that Californian’s sensitivities play the most important role.
• User Nop announced (automatic translation) an update of his Editor Statistic in the OSM Wiki.
• Five years after typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines, user seav recounts the OSM related help in his user diary. Read how the typhoon has transformed OSM and its community in the Philippines.
• The OpenStreetMap Foundation of Colombia has implemented OSM tools in Spanish (especially for Latin America and Colombia), such as the Tasking Manager and Umap and developed other tools that are hosted in a high availability data centre in Germany. A fundraising campaign asks for your help to sustain this infrastructure for at least two more years.
• The World Bank features an article about OSM and the rise of the local mapping communities. The blog post highlights the participatory mapping in Asia and Africa, something that a regular reader of WeeklyOSM may already be aware of, given the increasing number of such projects we have mentioned, as well as the fact that developers from Silicon Valley, African city planners and even humanitarian workers all work together around our OSM project.
• tyr_asd used his OSM user diary to express his appreciation to the OSM community in Graz, Geofabrik and the Disastermappers Heidelberg.

Imports

• Jeff Underwood, from Facebook, posted comprehensive documentation titled So how does Facebook’s AI Assisted Road Import Process work? about their machine learning based data generation for OSM in the user diaries. Facebook is currently uploading data for Thailand and partners with HOT in Indonesia.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Tobias Knerr (OSM Tordanik) announced that he will stand as a candidate for the upcoming OSMF board election.

Events

• HOT announced that the HOT Summit 2019 will take place from September, 19 to 20 in Heidelberg, Germany.
• FOSS4G 2018 Okayama (Okayama) was held on Nov 4th and 5th, FOSS4G 2018 Tokyo was held on Nov 9th and 10th. Tweets related to both events were collected .
• The Montana GIS and Geospatial meetup group has hosted a mapathon in Helena, Montana for GIS Day on November 14. The participants were made familiar with OSM tools and contributed to the HOT task #5355 – Missing Maps: Myanmar.

Humanitarian OSM

• MapAction, a humanitarian mapping organisation, published a report about the help that three volunteers and two staff members have provided in Malawi after the severe flood in January 2015.
• On 28 November, a Missing Maps Mapathon will take place (automatic translation) in Grenoble from 18:00 to 21:00.

Education

• The Volksfreund from Trier reports (automatic translation) about the start of an EU funded Erasmus+ project where teachers from five countries met in Saarburg, Germany, for an extensive OSM training. In particular, the article highlights a live link to Severin Menard, who reports on his experiences in Africa. The whole project will run for two years with the aim of inspiring many pupils in the participating European countries to take part in “humanitarian mapping”.

Open Data

• The UK Geospatial Commission will announce a GBP 1.5 million competition for crowdsourced data on 26th November. The amount is approximately the same as OSM’s total running costs for its entire 14 year existence.
• The Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) has published the new openelevationservice on GitHub, a Flask application which extracts elevation from various datasets for Point or LineString 2D geometries and returns 3D geometries in various formats.
• SmugMug, the new owners of Flickr, announced major changes to the Ts&Cs for free Flickr accounts. A maximum of 1000 photos will be retained for these accounts which may affect OSM contributors and bloggers who have used Flickr for photos and other images.

Software

• OSMCha received important updates. Now OSMCha is compliant with the GDPR legislation and it has a new way to receive flagged OSM features. Wille published two blog posts about this new release.
• Tessio Novack and colleagues at Heidelberg University published an open access paper about generating customized pleasant pedestrian routes based on OpenStreetMap data and Openrouteservice. They present and evaluate how factors such as greenness, sociability, and quietness are extracted from OSM and used to adapt routes.

Programming

• A “GDAL Coordinate System Barn Raising” has raised $144,000 to enable improvements to coordinate system libraries needed for the GDAL, PROJ, libgeotiff, PostGIS, and Spatialite open source toolchain.
  The new libraries provide for higher accuracy transformations between coordinate systems that avoid transforming everything through WGS84 and eliminate the extra steps that this entails.
• Andy Allan, a long time OSM contributor, blogged about Moderation, Authorisation and Background Task Improvements for OpenStreetMap. He gives a summary of the recent OSM codebase developments, including the help from the Ruby for Good team which contributed many improvements to OSM during their annual development event.
• In his blog Christoph Hormann explains (automatic translation) how to deal with Mapnik’s broken support for SVG area patterns, i.e. the representation of areas such as forests and meadows. He developed a script that can easily change the format, PNG or SVG, to get the appropriate format, i.e. SVG for printing and PNG for online maps.
• Neat: the new interactive Openrouteservice API documentation built on top of vue.js welcomes its new LeafletJS map component. Develop and test your requests made really easy:
  1. build your request graphically
  2. call the service
  3. visualize it on the map and finally…
  4. download it.
• Christoph Hormann shares his German presentation with us on open map projects of the OSM community that he has used for his speech at the German Society of Cartography and Geomatics.

Releases

• The German website mobilesicher.de reports (automatic translation) that the OSM based navigation app Magic Earth has removed the ties to Google, Facebook and Twitter from the app and is not sharing user data any more.

Did you know …

• Anonymaps points out a Mapbox tweet about Porsche, that is using OSM based navigation from Mapbox although it owns a small indirect stake in HERE. We would like to point out that the ownership percentage stated by Anonymaps is wrong.
• … the curated list of OSM related software?
• … osmoscope by Jochen Topf to fix bugs in OSM? You tried and Osmoscope doesn’t give the data to JOSM? This is probably because your browser does not have a certificate for the JOSM address or you haven’t enabled remote control. Try to access https://127.0.0.1:8112/version in your browser, with JOSM running locally. A certificate error may occur, if so you can enter an exception for it and from there on you should be able to fix many errors in the OSM database. 😉

OSM in the media

• The Brazilian online magazine reports on Geochicas’ attempt to use ‘Las calles de las mujeres’ to draw attention to streets named after important women.

Other “geo” things

• A blog post from Heidelberg University’s GIScience group revisits Wheelmap and the usage of crowdsourced geographic information for improving accessibility.
• Mapillary launches an open-source software development kit
• In Germany there is the first cycle path (automatic translation) consisting of solar modules. The start-up company, Solmare, developed a 90m long test track with low voltage modules and installed this in Erftstadt/NRW. The company sees this development as a very successful future technology. The tagging of the cycle path was suggested with surface=solar_panel. There are further solar cycle paths e.g. in the Netherlands (automatic translation) (still without tagging…).

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Mumble Creek	OpenStreetMap Foundation public board meeting	2018-11-15
Mannheim	Mannheimer Mapathons	2018-11-15
Freiberg	Stammtisch	2018-11-15
Pamplona	Mapatón Pamplona – Médicos sin Fronteras	2018-11-16
Barcelona	Mapes i Birres (Trobada trimestral usuaris d’OSM)	2018-11-16
Como	ItWikiCon 2018	2018-11-16-2018-11-18
Como	Mapping Party during ItWikiCon 2018	2018-11-17
Brno	State of the Map CZ 2018	2018-11-17
Bengaluru	State of the Map Asia 2018	2018-11-17-2018-11-18
Vantaa	OSM GeoWeek 24h HOT Mapathon	2018-11-17-2018-11-18
Wakayama	オープンデータソン in 雑賀崎	2018-11-18
Cologne Bonn Airport	Bonner Stammtisch	2018-11-20
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	2018-11-20
Derby	Pub Meetup	2018-11-20
Reading	Reading Missing Maps Mapathon	2018-11-20
Melbourne	FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2018	2018-11-20-2018-11-23
Toulouse	Rencontre mensuelle	2018-11-21
Karlsruhe	Stammtisch	2018-11-21
Lübeck	Lübecker Mappertreffen	2018-11-22
Alajuela	ES:State of the Map Costa Rica	2018-11-23-2018-11-25
Manila	【MapaTime!】	2018-11-24
Dublin	Monthly Mapping Party	2018-11-24
Ivrea	Incontro mensile	2018-11-24
Graz	Stammtisch Graz	2018-11-26
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen	2018-11-26
Arlon	Espace public numérique d’Arlon – Formation Contribuer à OpenStreetMap	2018-11-27
Reutti	Stammtisch Ulmer Alb	2018-11-27
Düsseldorf	Stammtisch	2018-11-28
San José	Civic Hack Night & Map Night[1]	2018-11-28
Toronto	Mappy Hour	2018-12-03
Praha – Brno – Ostrava	Kvartální pivo	2018-12-05
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch	2018-12-05
Toulouse	Rencontre mensuelle	2018-12-05
Bochum	Mappertreffen	2018-12-06
Dresden	Stammtisch Dresden	2018-12-06
online via IRC	Foundation Annual General Meeting	2018-12-15
Heidelberg	State of the Map 2019 (international conference)	2019-09-21-2019-09-23

Note: If you like to see your event here, please put it into the calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM. Please check your event in our public calendar preview and correct it, where appropriate.

This weeklyOSM was produced by Nakaner, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, geologist, jcoupey, keithonearth.