(English) weeklyOSM 527

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18/08/2020-24/08/2020

Mapping

• Following on from erroneous tagging on a building in Melbourne (Australia) that then appeared in Microsoft Flight Simulator, here is another example from Portugal: The Statue of Christ the King in Almada, Portugal, was mapped as a modern residential building with many floors! ‘It’s the old bad habit of classifying statues, fountains, piers, etc., as building=yes‘, says Luis Forte.
• Vollis proposed the new tag amenity=funeral_hall to enable proper mapping of (or parts of) buildings dedicated to funeral services, that may or may not be religious, often within a cemetery or linked to one.
• Supaplex030 is proposing the tag kerb=regular to explicitly distinguish kerbs (curbs) with ‘normal’ standard height from kerb=raised. The voting is open until 3 September.

Community

• Nirab Pudasaini created a lot of graphics analysing his own OSM twitter dataset containing over 45,000 tweets containing “OpenStreetMap”. Cluster analysis reveals some sub-communities such as osm.fr, OSM enterprises with Mapbox and Mapillary, the OSM community from the Americas, the sub community from Africa, clusters focused on teaching and learning about OSM, clusters around map based data viz centred around @qgis, and many more.
• User Arjun has written a blog post about ‘Downloading Vector Data for Highways, National Parks and Other Common Features from OpenStreetMap for Geospatial Analysis’.
• Regional Ambassadors Chomba Chishala and Yusuf Suleiman wrote about how YouthMappers are contributing to the 2030 agenda for sustainable development.
• Christopher Beddow started a poll on Twitter about how people contribute to OSM, specifically if they use mobile phones as their primary or only method. Many users commented in response about editing OSM on mobiles as compared to on a computer.
• The OpenStreetMap Ops team has now enabled a new secondary database server, which once fully tested will likely become the primary server.
• The August newsletter of OpenStreetMap US has been published.
• María Fernanda Peña Valencia shared her experience being part of YouthMappers and encourages other students to join the network.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• What type of memberships are there in the OSM Foundation? Apply for a free membership if you have mapped on 42 or more days in the past year.
• Didn’t reach the 42-day mapping goal, but contributed to the success of OpenStreetMap? Then you too can become a voting member of the OSMF for free. Here is the form where you can specify these activities.
• While keeping up activities on proprietary social media platforms to be visible in those spaces, OSMF board member Tobias Knerr assures us that all effective participation in the OSM community will remain possible through free channels (free means accessible through open-source software and open protocols, and not requiring an account at a third-party service to access).
• OpenStreetMap US has made an application to become an official local group of the OSMF (we covered earlier). Joost Schouppe asked, on behalf of the OSMF Board, for people to express their opinions on the wiki page by 5 September.
• OSM Kosovo, or Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova (FLOSSK) submitted an application to the OSMF to become an official local group. Mikel Maron, on behalf of the OSMF, asked for expressions of opinion by 7 September.
• OSM Buildings has existed since 2012. Cesium has applied for the right to use the name ‘Cesium OSM Buildings’ and has been approved by the OSMF Board. According to the project OSM Buildings had expressed concerns and asked for the opportunity to clarify the situation. OSMF and Cesium published on the product ‘Cesium OSM Buildings’ (we covered earlier). It was also announced that Cesium is now a silver sponsor of OSMF. OSM Buildings now fears that the use of the project name by Cesium will affect the continued existence of the project.

Events

• The call for venues for State of the Map Africa 2021 is open! Find all the details on what is required and how to submit your proposal on the wiki page. The deadline for proposals is 20 October. The winner will be announced on 31 October.
• FOSS4G Tokyo/KANSAI/Tokai (regional events in Japan) have announced > their joint online event FOSS4G 2020 Online, and invited event sponsors and session participants.
• FOSS4G Hokkaido > , one of the regional events in Japan, will be held online on 26 September. Applications for sessions have started.
• Nakaner has been invited to present OpenStreetMap at the Eurobike 2020 expo, as almost all apps and devices for cyclists nowadays include OSM data. The (free of charge) expo will take place online on 3 September. The conference language is English.

Humanitarian OSM

• HOT and the GAL School of Peru have been working together to support the Peruvian and local governments in their COVID-19 response, by mapping the Cusco region and providing analytical tools and expertise to make use of the data.

Education

• Have you always wanted to learn QGIS? Ujaval Ghandhi has made his QGIS and Python courses, including full material and data packages, available for free for self-study. More QGIS Tutorials and Tips are available from Ujaval Ghandhi.

Maps

• The French geography blog decryptageo > featured Tatsuo Mitsuchi’s > fork of anvaka’s website. Tatsuo Mitsuchi created a website where the orientation of a city’s road network is represented by different colours.
• Elana Levin Schtulberg creates beautiful drawings by colouring regions of city maps in a ‘painting-by-numbers’ style.
• Thomas Froitzheim presented PhoneMaps > , an easy-to-use smartphone app with Europe-wide free OSM offline vector maps and improved routing on bicycle and hiking trails as well as on mountain bike tracks.
• Supaplex continued writing about the history of mapping in Taiwan. In the metropolitan area of Hsinzhu, there was an almost empty space compared to other areas of Taiwan on OpenStreetMap. Unfortunately there used to be only low-resolution Bing imagery available. Now better data is available most of the ponds on the tableland have been mapped.

Open Data

• Mapillary has announced that computer vision extracted data is now available globally on OSM. Previously only traffic signs were available in JOSM, and other data was available by request in iD. Now data including pedestrian crossings (crosswalks), traffic lights, bicycle parking, and many other classes are available globally, thanks to image contributions from Mapillary users.
• OpenAQ aggregates environmental sensor data from all around the world. Sensor.Community published a guide to building your own similar measuring station.

Software

• The tool used in ‘Generation Streets‘, a game available on Steam, to generate 3D worlds based on OpenStreetMap has been open sourced. Rvtgen3d is the command line tool and is part of the rsgeotools toolset, now available on Github.

Did you know …

• … city-roads?

OSM in the media

• [1] The typo heard around the world’ (we covered earlier) continues to garner press coverage in English, French, Russian, Italian, Taiwanese Mandarin, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, and German (we won’t insult your intelligence by providing auto-translate links but do have a read of Ilya Zverev’s take on the issue). In other news, some scientists believe there may be areas in the upper Amazon basin where the news of Nathan Wright’s typo has not yet spread.
• Rebecca Firth explained > (video in English) how the OpenStreetMap humanitarian team (HOT) is using open source software to put one billion people on the map over the next five years.
• Antônio Heleno Caldas Laranjeira wrote > about territories hidden by Google Maps.

Other “geo” things

• The Cloud GIS Market Status and Forecast report lists OpenStreetMap among the most significant players.
• Google has updated their map style with more details and colour.
• David Pollack wrote about ‘GPS and The Future of Indoor Navigation’.
• Matt Parker published a YouTube video about his attempt to determine if the effect of terrain is included in estimates of country sizes and whether this would affect the rankings of mountainous countries.
• Peter Van Geit had planned to spend six months this year fast hiking 5,000 km and exploring new passes across the Indian Himalaya. After the pandemic hit, foiling his plans, he started a new project — creating detailed hiking maps of the area.
• What happens in our brain when we look at a map? Do grid lines help us to orientate? The team led by Prof. Dr. Frank Dickmann, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, has investigated > these questions.
• Robert Murrah investigates why maps are important for our response to the COVID-19 pandemic

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon	2020-09-01
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-09-01
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch	2020-09-02
San José	South Bay Civic Hack & Map Night	2020-09-03
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #20	2020-09-07
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle	2020-09-08
Berlin	147. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch	2020-09-10
Munich	Münchner Treffen	2020-09-10
Zurich	121. OSM Meetup Zurich	2020-09-11
Leoben	Stammtisch Obersteiermark	2020-09-12
Ashurst	Trek View New Forest Pano Party	2020-09-13
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	2020-09-15
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-09-15
Kandy	2020 State of the Map Asia	2020-10-31-2020-11-01

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 AnisKoutsi, Elizabete, LorenzoStucchi, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, NunoMASAzevedo, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, Sammyhawkrad, Supaplex, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, jinalfoflia, k_zoar.