(English) weeklyOSM 422

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14/08/2018-20/08/2018

Mapping

• The JOSM PT_Assistant plugin for public transport mapping gained several new features :
  • A wizard to help set up the JOSM environment for mapping public transport and other route relations
  • The double split map mode
  • Various bug fixes and improvements
  • Routing Helper, which can be invoked from within the Relation Editor.

  This last addition may have a big impact on how bus itineraries are mapped from now on.

  User Polyglot is creating screencast videos to show how it works and with various tips and tricks, both for working with JOSM and for mapping route relations in particular. They will be linked from the wiki documentation page.

• Delhi-based mapper contrapunctus discovers that mappers themselves benefit from what they have added to OSM. This was proved several times during a recent trip to Himal Pradesh, and during his survey of the longest bus route forming a big circle around the city.
• The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research is supporting the so-called Terrain Projekt (automatic translation) that aims to develop a portable routing device for blind or visually impaired people. One subproject has now introduced an early prototype in the German OSM forum (automatic translation). A paper on this topic is closed access but will be released to the public soon.
• The Open Data Institute (ODI) published a blog post explaining contributions from large corporations such as Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and others to OSM. The blog post includes a list of success factors for such corporate projects, which could be summarised as: be more open and cooperative than OSMF’s direct editing policy requires.
• User higa4 analysed the state of mapping coverage of Japan.
• Eric Gunderson, Chief Executive of Mapbox, tweeted “done with buying satellite imagery…”. Only time will tell if this is hyperbole.

Community

• OSM now has a caching server in South Africa as tweeted by OpenStreetMap ZA. As you can see on the map, the new cache server delivers tiles to countries in Southern African countries.
• Mastodon the free Twitter clone is also gaining ground in the OSM community. We now know of two instances: French and English.
• AMEDD, a Malian NGO, hosted a training workshop on August 13-18 about OSM and free GIS in Koutiala, organised by Saliou Abdou (International Volunteer from Francophonie deployed as an OSM facilitator, a program supported by Les Libres Geographes) with the active contribution of OSM community members from Mali and Benin.
• Kinshasa is one of the cities selected by the World Bank as part of the Open Cities Africa project with the aim of strengthening collaboration between the local OSM community and public institutions and contributing to better disaster risk management.OSM-RDC and Potentiel 3.0 designed and organized three days of focus groups for the OSFAC of Kinshasa. Kapay Yongolo was responsible for these three days. Supported by Christian Shadrack, they worked with leaders from the 17 districts of Kisenso and two districts of Matete to identify and map infrastructure at risk during epidemics and floods.

Events

• Christine Karch announces the next hack weekend in Karlsruhe on 20th and 21st of October 2018. If you want to participate register on the wiki page.
• The UK Mapping Festival 2018 published an appetiser article for the upcoming conference. Topics covered include: secret techniques used by Soviet agents to map London during the Cold War; the evolution of sensing technologies and, an overview of OpenStreetMap.
• The SotM US program is online.

Humanitarian OSM

• Youthmappers also take care of mapping for humanitarian purposes.
• Missing Maps blogged about a training session, led by an American Red Cross GIS team, for the Viet Nam Red Cross and the American Red Cross Viet Nam Delegation. The target was enabling participants to organise community mapping, especially with mobile data collection, and to use GIS tools with open data to generate maps, particularly for use during natural disasters.
• HOT received a grant from NetHope, a consortium of NGOs that specialises in improving IT connectivity among humanitarian organisations, with 22 OSM communities as beneficiaries. In a blog post HOT shared its experience teaching school children in Peru using OSM tools and a 360 degree camera to create augmented reality content.
• Code for Pittsburgh planned a hackathon with the HOT Team during the 2018 National Day of Civic Hacking, a Code for America project. During the event OSM was introduced to the participants and the theory was immediately converted into practice by mapping 1543 buildings and other features as part of HOT projects.

Maps

• Christoph Hormann highlights in a diary entry the stricter rendering of areas that now happens following an upgrade of osm2pgsql. The changes enforce higher standards of QA for mappers, and make life for data consumers easier. Although the change is not limited to multipolygons, the most prominent objects which disappeared from the map were multipolygons. Many of these have already been fixed.
  For technical details of the changes refer to the post.
• Wikimedia’s map feature improvement project has ended. Wikimedia states that, currently, no more follow-up work is planned. The announcement follows the successful implementation of a couple of new features such as OSM maps and map internationalisation, back-end stability and other improvements that were on the Wikimedia Wishlist.

switch2OSM

• Amazon has probably also taken a liking to OSM. Some employees introduced themselves in the German forum and, obviously, also get help with their edits there.

Open Data

• Open Addresses surpasses half a billion addresses according to a Tweet from Michal Migurski.

Programming

• [1] Biswesh Mohapatra detailed the work he did on JOSM’s PT_Assistant plugin for his GSoC 2018 project. He resolved numerous bugs and added some useful new functionality for working on public transport itineraries and stops, but also for editing bicycle and foot route relations.
• Thomas Hervey wrote a diary post about his work on the iD editor during his Google Summer of Code project. He added support for user notes to iD and is now working on adding QA tools like KeepRight.
• Princi Vershwal wrote an article on medium.com about adding vector tile support to iD as part of her Google Summer of Code project. In the article she explains how she implemented a basic rendering of vector data.

Releases

• kocio announced the roll out of a new OpenStreetMap Carto stylesheet release in a diary post. The new release added some icons for three “leisure=” and three “shop=” values, improved the label distance on waterways and railways and made some further improvements.
• User Wambacher has updated his OSM Software Watchlist, which includes almost all OSM-related software along with the date of their latest release.

Did you know …

• … Cartography Playground, a simple and interactive website for explaining cartographic algorithms, problems and other matters?
• … Maposmatic which creates maps of cities from OpenStreetMap data with an index of streets and many different overlays like fire hydrants or the well-known waymarked trails by Sarah Hoffman (aka lonvia).
• … of OpenInfraMap? User Laurent Combe asks (automatic translation) about the frequency of updates.
• … about the map that puts surveillance cameras under surveillance?
• … the universities and colleges that participate in youthmapper?

OSM in the media

• La RZ radio, Buenos Aires, interviewed Juan Blas Tschopp, an Argentinian OSM contributor. The topics covered not only OpenStreetMap, but also Geochicas and the upcoming SotM Latam 2018 event.

Other “geo” things

• Shaded Relief introduced a new equal-area pseudocylindrical projection called Equal Earth Projection as a response to the demand for fair maps. In particular those allowing direct comparison of the areas of places in different parts of the world, avoiding the notorious artefacts of a massive Greenland and a tiny Africa. The creators compare their work with other equal-area projections in the article and highlight the advantages of the new way to display maps.
• Niantic’s Pokémon Go has been using OpenStreetMap data from the outset, moving to full use of OSM for the map background in December 2017. On the occasion of the second Pokémon Go festival in Chicago, the boss of the company reflects on the first two years in an interview with The Guardian.
• Pennsylvania State University introduced nice looking, new mobile-friendly visitor maps with 3D views of campus and OSM as basemap for surrounding areas. At the end of the article you can find links to example maps for the university park.
• Map porn at its finest is in the article The World’s Newest, Most Gloriously Designed Maps from Atlas Obscura.
• Very nice idea. An interactive acoustic map collects the sounds of Monroyo, Spain. Esparagon.es reports that the artist Anna Katarina Martín created this map during a stay in Monroyo from July 9th to August 5th with the help of residents. She succeeded in making the inhabitants aware of everyday noises that otherwise “went completely unnoticed”. (automatic translation)

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Takatsuki	みんなでエディタソン#01	2018-08-26
Düsseldorf	Stammtisch	2018-08-29
Dar es Salaam	FOSS4G & HOT Summit 2018	2018-08-29-2018-08-31
Manila	Maptime! Manila	2018-08-30
London	Missing Maps Mapathon	2018-09-04
Praha – Brno – Ostrava	Kvartální pivo	2018-09-05
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch	2018-09-05
Bochum	Mappertreffen	2018-09-06
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle pour tous	2018-09-11
Berlin	123. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch	2018-09-13
Munich	Münchner Stammtisch	2018-09-13
Posadas	Mapatón de parajes y caminos	2018-09-15
Berlin	Berliner Hackweekend	2018-09-15-2018-09-16
Buenos Aires	State of the Map Latam 2018	2018-09-24-2018-09-25
Detroit	State of the Map US 2018	2018-10-05-2018-10-07
Bengaluru	State of the Map Asia 2018	2018-11-17-2018-11-18
Melbourne	FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2018	2018-11-20-2018-11-23

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 Anne Ghisla, Nakaner, PierZen, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, jinalfoflia, sev_osm.