Category: weeklyOSM

weeklyOSM 346

02/28/2017-03/06/2017

About us

  • Dale Kunce accuses us of selective news coverage about HOT and points out the Validation Fridays. As barely 50% of the added data is validated till date, HOT hopes to have a quality gain and more feedback to the mappers, who are new mappers in many cases, through their initiative.

  • March 8 marks the International Women’s Day. WeeklyOSM extends congratulations to all women within our community!

Mapping

  • Tagging mailing list discusses the new tag motorcycle_friendly as the RFC and voting phases didn’t happen as expected.

  • Tyndare reports on talk-fr about his use of the conflation plugin to work with French land registry data within JOSM. He provides documentation both on the wiki and in a video.

  • [1] Frederik Ramm initiates a discussion, on the Tagging list, about issues concerning the mapping of time zones as geometries. A long and detailed discussion follows.

  • A former modification of motorway exits by hsimpson triggers an extended discussion, in the Tagging mailing list, about where a way branches at motorway exits. There is a discussion in the German forum as well.

  • Users sabas88 and sbiribizio from the Italian community experimented with the "geography" of Wikidata and built a service to assist in matching the Wikidata element to the OpenStreetMap database.

Community

  • South Korea has its first forum thread. We wish to say: 오신 것을 환영합니다, 한국

  • Martijn van Exel has created a small survey on Maproulette tasks. Please participate in the survey so that Martijn gets a picture as complete as possible.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

  • The Data Working Group (DWG) publishes the minutes of the February 8th meeting and its activity reports for the year 2016.

  • On OWG’s issue tracker on GitHub, there is a discussion on the rules for a banner policy for advertising banners on osm.org in the future.

  • The Operations Working Group (OWG) publishes its activities report for February.

  • Gregory Marler summarizes his thoughts about the purpose of the UK local chapter.

Events

  • Do you want to learn how to create and publish interactive and personalized maps? Come and participate in the Mapbox Studio workshop. It will be held this March 25th at the Mapbox Peru Office. It will be addressed for an open group.

  • Framasoft, a group of FOSS enthusiasts, will provide technical support to the SotM France 2017 from June 02 to 04 in Avignon.

Humanitarian OSM

  • HOT aims to map buildings over an area of 500,000+ square kilometers by the end of April. The Malaria Elimination Campaign completed Guatemala and is currently validating Honduras and Botswana maps in Zambia. It is to begin soon in Zimbabwe, Cambodia and Laos.

  • Trudy Namitala describes in a HOT blog post why we need women and girls in mapping. Hint: Especially in Africa women often lack the information about help facilities for gender based violence, family planning or maternity services. Look at the list in the wiki.

  • Emir Hartato announces the completion of his Masters thesis on Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) for Disaster Management. However, his full work may be published only after review.

  • Various people, including Simon Poole, have expressed surprise that HOT is advertising on Google. Are they running short of volunteers? Do they want more donations? Let’s not forget that the OSM Foundation’s donate link will still happily take any spare cash that you might have…

Maps

  • After ongoing discussions about debugging tiles infos (we reported earlier), Tom Hughes took the time to develop a new info box about a tile’s detail.

  • Todd Neumarker introduces new Trailfork cards for the Garmin Edge series. You can find more information here.

switch2OSM

  • The game 911 Operator uses OpenStreetMap data for a world wide coverage.

Open Data

  • On the occasion of the international Open Data Day on March 4, the Guardian reported Open Data projects in five countries around the world. OSM has, of course, featured as one of them with CARTEAU in Burkina Faso and the Open Source Flood Map in Indonesia being OSM based.

Programming

  • Paul Norman searched and found benefits in replacing string arrays with hstore in the previous representation of the tags in the slim tables of osm2pgsql databases.

  • The Engineering Working Group calls for mentors for the next round of Google Summer of Code 2017.

  • The next version of Overpass API is out. The release notes provide a summary of changes.

Releases

Other “geo” things

  • Christoph Hormann reports about the changes in Sentinel-2’s image format.

  • The company SIGRA asks whether OsmAnd could be adapted for autonomous driving.

  • Amazing Maps presents a map from the time of Charles the Great.

Upcoming Events

This weeklyOSM was produced by Nakaner, Peda, Polyglot, Rogehm, Spec80, SrrReal, YoViajo, derFred, jinalfoflia, keithonearth, piligab, vsandre.