weekly 259-260-261-262 – July

30.06.-27.07.2015

Campus with 3D Buildings [1]

About us

• Since issue #262, Marc Gemis from Belgium has joined the German Wochennotiz team and adds news from Belgium and from the French community.
• We are also happy to announce that Ruben Lopez Mendoza from Ayacucho, Peru has joined the Spanish weeklyOSM team. Bienvenido Ruben!

Mapping

• OSM may continue to use Bing imagery even after the takeover by Uber.
• SK53 asks on twitter how to tag this new electricity tower design.
• Martijn van Exel announces a Maproulette challenge about missing railroad crossings in the USA.
• Mapbox published the internal OSM mapping instructions that are used by their data team.
• Yandex (a Russian search engine with a map portal) now offers a Street View service. The images (not the map and aerial photographs) may be used for mapping. (automatic translation)
• OpenHistoricalMap builds maps on its own infrastructure using OSM tools. (via @GuerrillaCarto)
• On GitHub it has been possible for some time to represent a GeoJSON file via an OSM Layer (example). Now a link to the MapBox “Improve this map” feature has been added to help resolve (via iD or OSM Notes) any map errors.
• On the talk-fr list there has been a discussion about the border between France and Italy in the Mont Blanc area. This was followed by a discussion on the tagging list about how to map border disputes.
• Marc Zoutendijk explains how you can find strange tagged POIs with the OpenPOIMap. To do this click in the top right corner of OpenPOIMap “User POIs” and use a query e.g. amenity=shop.
• In a twelve-part series, Tlatet analysed the quality of POIs in OSM (specifically retail in England).
• Andreas Weber and Dennis Nienhüser (FZI Karlsruhe) have created a system for use with a Segway that recognises traffic signs so that they can be uploaded it to OSM (Video).

Community

• User escada is the belgian mapper of the month of July.
• Chris Rodier introduces its new treelike visualization of the OSM World. (via Twitter)
• edward17 reported by the Ukrainian weekly task no. 18 (building mapping with the HOT-Task Manager) (automatic translation)
• Alex and Michael (two students) are spending their holidays traveling across East Germany to map the railway infrastructure there (automatic translation). See the aims of their project.
• Esri’s on the “vector tile” bandwagon too – they’ve presented their Vector Basemap at the Esri International User Conference, that follows the open Vector Tile Specification.
• After some criticism last year, Mapbox improved the default attribution on their customer maps. Harry Wood asks if there’s been any further progress. (via. Twitter)
• Jochen Topf writes about abnormalities in the decimal places of coordinates of new OSM objects.
• Mapillary discusses how their traffic sign recognition is based on a trainable algorithm and user feedback (to label a road sign as right or wrong), which improves the classification accuracy.
• Three Step-by-Step-Guides help to access the OSM World.
• The mapper’s “uniform” is now available in Portuguese as well.
• That’s pure coincidence. 😉

Imports

• Stephen Dawkins suggests importing bus stops in some areas from the latest NAPTAN dataset.
• In Austria people are discussing whether to import the tree register of the city of Linz into OpenStreetMap.
• The import of trees in the area of the city of Nice is also considered by the French OSM mailing list.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The draft minutes of OSMF´s board meeting as of 2015-06-15 is now available in the OSMF-Wiki.
• On July 20 the first public OSMF board meeting was held. The minutes and an audio recording of the meeting will follow soon.

Humanitarian OSM

• HOT would like to publish a quarterly newsletter to improve the communication within the project and is looking for help.
• A request for “OSM Damage Assessment” shows that a lot of the OSM universe is still uncharted territory for researchers. 😉
• A new microtasking platform has emerged at the University of Heidelberg. Currently human settlements and roads in South Kivu in the DRC are being checked for the Missing Maps Project.

Maps

• Users ccalista explains in her blog how current OSM data can be loaded into OsmAnd via Overpass to test the most recent changes with OsmAnd.
• Andy Allan proposes (in an issue of the OSM Carto project) to introduce a directive to decide what new features are to be included in the rendering of the main style on osm.org and which are not.

• Adrien Pavie published OpenLevelUp!, an online map for watching objects in the specific floors of indoor-mapped buildings
• The Austrian “Der Standard” reported on the company Pentamap, a spin-off from the Geodetic Institute of the Technical University of Graz. The company works on an off-road routing in the Alps for mountain rescuers and hunters using aerial photography and digital terrain models and OSM data. (automatic translation)

• [1] The University of Leicester has created a map of the campus based on OSM data and OSM Buildings. (via @GISPowered)
• The GPSies website hasbeen redesigned. See the blog post here.
• Mateusz Konieczny presents a new default map style version and asks for feedback (see other diary entries for previous posts on the same topic).
• On the British OSM mailing list, one topic is a suggestion for a rendering style specifically for the UK.
• Omar Ureta visualised OSM-based tiles with Stamen-Watercolour style with terrain elevation data of the regional administration.

#switch2OSM

• The German Eisenbahn-Bundesamt (Federal Railway Authority) uses OpenStreetMap as a background map for a citizen participation.
• Facebook uses OpenStreetMap data in some places. The data in some places switch with other data sources, so that there are some false error messages. via @penorman)

• The Vehrkehrsmanagementzentrale (traffic management center) of Lower Saxony published a new website. There are shown traffic jams and construction sites all over Germany. The map display on Tablet and Desktop uses OSM maps.

Open-Data

• The Austrian Federal Office of Metrology and Surveying (Bundesamt für Eich- und Vermessungswesen, BEV Österreich) has published all address details with pinpoint accuracy. Thomas Ruprecht is in contact with the BEV, to allow the use of these data and the administrative boundaries for OSM.
• The Belgian Council of Ministers adopted a new open data strategy. Basically, all the records are to be published from 2020 under CC0 license.

Software

• As the main client of MapDB has withdrawn, Jan Kotek is looking for new sponsors for the project.
• Michael Zangl presents the first release of its OpenGL MapView of JOSM, (part of the Google Summer of Code).
• Do you or your company want to sponsor a new QGIS-Feature?
• Developer Dennis Nienhüser has released a new Version 1.11.3 of Marble for Windows.
• The Geometalab of the University of Rapperswil is working on an extract-tool for OSM data for various formats: GeoPackage, Shapefile, FileGeodatabase and Garmin (.img).

• Version 1.1.1 of the iOS-Port of OsmAnd was released.
• The OSM-based and open source Geo Search Engine Photon now also supports “Reverse Geocoding”, i.e. output of address to a transferred X / Y coordinate.
• User Amaroussi asks on Twitter, how to deal with the imminent end of Flash in respect of Potlatch. Luckily in the future there will still be ID, Level0, Merkaartor, JOSM, Vespucci and, er, Potlatch!.
• NGA and DigitalGlobe have jointly published Hootenanny. A free and open project to facilitate the handling of large amounts of spatial data. (via un-spider)
• MapBox published a first release of a minimalist C ++ 11 protobuf de- and encoder. (via @springmeyer)
• Mapbox has created a node.js and browser Javascript client for Mapbox services (geolocation, routing, etc.). (via @tmcw)
• The backend code of the OSRM project can now be compiled under Windows as a DLL. (via @tdihp)
• Omniscale published a tool called Magnacarto, which can convert map styles from CartoCSS format into Mapnik XML or MapServer mapfile.

Did you know …

• … about the 3D rendering from F4Map?

Other “geo” things

• Marina Schwab and Daria Kern of Aalen University compare OSM API with the Google Maps API (German PDF) – apparently OSM scores well with younger audiences.

• With Deep Dream one can visualise neural networks. This also works with maps.
• MaptimeBER (Berlin) now has 500 “Map Lovers”. Congratulations. (via @MaptimeBER)
• The University of Kentucky has some Videos on the theme of “maps”.
• Google has introduced a new (open) hardware system that can be used for indoor navigation.
• Why is Uber buying map companies?
• FixWikiMaps and Nacis announce the MapLift event. During the week from August 28 until September 04 maps are to be improved in Wikipedia.
• FATMAP presented detailed 3D maps for skiers. (via @mprioleau)
• Garmin offers a GPS specifically designed for the needs of caravan drivers.
• HERE now offers highly accurate map data for autonomous driving. (via @here)
• Riccardo compares 6 ways to create online maps.
• Nokia sells HERE maps to Audi, Daimler and BMW for €2.8 billion.
• MapBox has supplemented its Landsat Live pipeline by an automatic atmospheric correction to obtain clearer and more vibrant images.
• Wired reports on Russian maps during the Cold War. (via osmf-talk)
• Osmocoder is a newly developed geocoding service by the company 123map.
• The geocoding module from MapBox now supports auto completion of town or street names as you type in the search box.
• MapBox has opened a development office in Berlin, Germany. The focus of the Berlin employees will be working on OSRM.
• China expanded its own navigation system “Beidou-2” by 2 more satellites.
• The official US government FAQ about … GPS 🙂 is super interesting (via @konklone)
• Active Wikipedians from Sweden have built an all-round camera of four mobile phones, in particular for recordings for uploading to Mapillary.