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05/01/2021-11/01/2021
Disparity between IGN & OSM shows need for gardeners 1 | © cquest
Mapping campaigns
- OpenStreetMap Uganda, with support from the OpenStreetMap Foundation, has begun mapping 15 newly created cities in Uganda. Currently three cities (Mbarara, Masaka and Jinja) have been mapped and are being validated.
- OpenStreetMap Ghana is mapping Accra to increase map coverage in the capital. This is to support Ministries, Metropolitan Municipal and District Assemblies, local organisations, individuals and other stakeholders by giving them access to quality map data. You can contribute to this project through the HOT Tasking Manager.
Mapping
- IpswichMapper described how to facilitate the tagging of housenumbers in StreetComplete by processing building data upstream with JOSM.
- Voting is open till 21 January for the
traffic_calming=circle_bumpsproposal. These are groups of small bumps, installed as traffic calming devices. - As we have reported the Potlatch online Flash-based editors are no longer supported. They are not available anymore on the OSM website, but contributors with one of these editors as their default will need to re-save their editor settings, according to a comment on GitHub.
Community
- Christian Quest categorises
>
OpenStreetMap contributors as hunters, gatherers and gardeners, roughly corresponding to phases of the population and use of the OSM database itself. The post is particularly a plea for more gardeners to maintain and improve OSM data, and for more tools to help them. - Mikel exploits a somewhat tenuous link, between incoming US president Joe Biden and the townlands mapping project of OSM Ireland, to publicise the work of OpenStreetMap.
- Anne-Karoline Distel has made a short video introducing OSM for heritage groups in Ireland.
- Mateusz Konieczny is proposing a minor revision to the rules associated with proposal approval.
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Imports
- The recent availability of open data from the French national mapping agency, IGN, prompts some words of advice and caution >
from Christian Quest. Frédéric Rodrigo offered a sneak preview > of an analysis of the data within Osmose.
OpenStreetMap Foundation
- Allan Mustard, chair of OSMF, announced that the Foundation will shortly be running an online survey. The survey will be available in a range of languages and is currently being translated.
- The OSM Foundation is setting up a Software Dispute Resolution Panel (as we reported). Now, they are looking for five volunteers to join the panel.
Local chapter news
- OpenStreetMap Belgium interviewed January’s Mapper of the Month, Jorisbo.
Humanitarian OSM
- Bo Percival has been writing short OSM diary entries to outline a series of rapid assessment and design sprints organised by the HOT Tech team. The sprints cover five days and have focused on topics such as group mapping.
- HOT described work done by volunteers to map the floating informal settlement of Makoko using drones and canoes. This informal settlement, much of it built on stilts, is a French- and Egon-speaking enclave in Lagos (as we reported last year).
- HOT’s lead of transformation and community, Rebecca Firth (osm RebeccaF) has announced the newly formed Community Team, with Pete Masters as director. She welcomed team members in her diary. The team aims to reorient HOT’s work and to serve OSM communities around the world.
- Ruben Martin, a new HOT staff member in the Community Team, shared an OSM Diary of his first week with HOT and humanitarian mapping.
Education
- Betaslb has published > an OSM blog post showing how they work with free software and data in public schools. The students of the Jerónimo Emiliano de Andrade School in the Azores used uMap to create a map ‘Futebol em Portugal é intercultural!’ with the birthplaces of the football players of the Portuguese first division. The students wanted to show that football is intercultural and that phenomena such as racism, xenophobia and intolerance do not belong in this world.
> Maps
- Daniel Hofmann (daniel-j-h) has created a map of public toilets with a cute url: ineedto.pe. Data are based on OpenStreetMap, with standardised attributes available with a click. The code is available on GitHub as an example of domain-driven development.
- With COVID-19 vaccination centres opening across many countries, there is widespread interest in how accessible they are to the population. HeiGIT, in Heidelberg, have used OpenRouteService to calculate this for nearly all centres in Germany.NHS England has a map (pdf file) of locations showing all places further than 10 miles (16 km) from the nearest centre.You will find more maps and analyses, especially calculating and illustrating lines of equal distance around positions and regions, in this and next week’s weeklyOSM.
- Walter Nordmann’s website now has a map of healthcare facilities in the DACH countries (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland). Naturally it is based on OSM data.
Software
- On Sunday evening (10 January), at the traditional online meeting of the ‘Code for Niederrhein, Moers’, a map display was programmed (the coder was Jan), which will show a buffer (an integer number of kilometres) around any OSM relation that is tagged with a
wikidatavalue. A little patience is required with the query. After about 20 seconds it zooms to the result. So far it is only a proof of concept, without much consideration of usability. If you want to see your own movement zones, you can make appropriate adjustments to the URL of the query. Here are the links to GitHub: 1 and 2. Your feedback will be very much appreciated. - Within the COVID-19 restrictions for Germany there is talk of a 15 km circle. Around what is not yet clearly defined everywhere, but Norbert Kück solved the problem using Leaflet, allowing any point to be clicked on the map and a 15 km radius circle to be drawn around it. The THW Markt Schwaben > website allows you to search for a specific address to use as the centre and to specify the circle’s radius.
- 2kmfromhome is a website that draws a circle of a fixed radius from a given point, using OSM as a base layer. It was created during the first Irish COVID-19 lockdown, but has been used across the world over the past year. The 15 km option may be particularly useful for German readers of weeklyOSM.
- The StreetComplete developers presented their thoughts on an option that, in contrast to the previous query-response mode, allows existing data to be displayed, checked, supplemented and corrected.
- The Maps.me GitHub repositories have now been cloned, and a preliminary website is available for the Maps.me fork OMaps, which has arisen in response to the problems with Maps.me we reported earlier.
> Programming
- Pierre Béland discussed some ideas for enhancing Toby Murray’s ChangesetMD (a Python programme for replicating changeset metadata in a PostgreSQL database) to respond to local communities’ needs for analysis. Pierre has published a fork on GitHub along with test files (Linux shell script and Windows Powershell).
Did you know …
- … Flopp.net? Some states in Germany have restricted the movement of their populations due to COVID-19. Flopp.net allows you to set a movement radius and use it to draw a circle around a point on an OSM map.
- … about EasyPresets? It is a JOSM plugin that helps you create and use your own custom presets.
- … the Windy.com website? You can follow the current weather situation worldwide, for many different meteorological elements, over the next nine days, using the slider. The site uses OpenStreetMap as a base map.
OSM in the media
- Simon Poole, president of the Swiss OSM local chapter, was interviewed about OSM on the SRF2 radio channel. The write-up > on SRF’s website will be more accessible to non-German speakers. Shortly afterwards there was a noticeable uptick in new mappers.
- Taiwanese technology review website and podcast Daodu reviewed and translated > the article by Joe Morrison (which we covered earlier) describing an unofficial alliance between Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple against Google. Supaplex feels that local journalists have little awareness of the OSM community in Taiwan, which meant the discussion missed the local context.
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Other “geo” things
- Congratulations to Bernard for correctly identifying the one true Sitka spruce on Campbell Island (we asked last week). Your complimentary copy of weeklyOSM should be available in your browser, in about a week’s time.
- Joe Morrison speculates that Google Maps’ dominance of the global mapping market may have reached a peak.
Upcoming Events
| Where | What | Online | When | Country |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tamia Tahsil | Naksha 2021  | 2021-01-10 – 2021-01-16 |  | |
| Lyon | Rencontre mensuelle (virtuelle) Lyon | ✓ | 2021-01-19 |  |
| Missing Maps DRK Online Mapathon | 2021-01-19 | |||
| 135. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn | 2021-01-19 | |||
| Berlin | OSM-Verkehrswende #19 (Online) | 2021-01-19 |  | |
| Lüneburg | Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online) | 2021-01-19 | | |
| San Jose | Virtual Civic Hack & Map Night | ✓ | 2021-01-22 |  |
| Warszawa | Virtual community meeting. | 2021-01-22 |  | |
| 臺中市 | 2021 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 新手教學工作坊 | 2021-01-24 |  | |
| Bremen | Bremer Mappertreffen (Online) | 2021-01-25 | | |
| Ville de Bruxelles – Stad Brussel | Virtual OpenStreetMap Belgium meeting | ✓ | 2021-01-26 |  |
| Warszawa | Virtual community meeting. | 2021-01-29 | | |
| 臺北市 | OSM x Wikidata #25 | 2021-02-01 | | |
| Missing Maps London Mapathon | 2021-02-02 | |||
| Landau an der Isar | Virtuelles Niederbayern-Treffen | ✓ | 2021-02-02 | |
| San Jose | Virtual Civic Hack & Map Night | ✓ | 2021-02-05 | |
| Dresden | Dresdner OSM-Stammtisch | ✓ | 2021-02-04 | |
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 Elizabete, Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, PierZen, Polyglot, rogehm, SK53, Sammyhawkrad, Supaplex, TheSwavu, YoViajo, alesarrett, derFred.