(English) weekly 248/249 – 14.04.-27.04.2015

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14.04.–27.04.2015

About us

Unfortunately, we have had to publish this version as a double issue #248/249, because we had a team meeting in Spain to map historical areas and talk about the translation of “weeklyosm” to Spanish. We are looking for help for our Spanish team.  See here for an automatically-translated version of the thread.

… and … because of the terrible earthquake in Nepal, we have changed the sequence of some items.

Humanitarian OSM

• In HOT’s GitHub you can find different tracing guides that address the specific features of different fields of application. To encourage use in Nepal, there are already some guidelines.
• After the earthquake in Nepal HOT has been activated. The OSM Tasking Manager offers tasks of varying difficulty.
• DigitalGlobe (supplier of aerial images of Bing and MapBox) has released aerial images of before and after the earthquake in Nepal to use. Kevin Bullock writes on the hot list.
• Ralph Aytoun writes  about the experiences with inexperienced mappers on the HOT mailing list.
• MapBox has visualized the progress of OSM in the two days after the earthquake in Nepal.
• Despite the mapping party, helpers are still needed for the Ebola HOT task in Guinea.
• The Asian Development Bank has supported the training of government officials in the GIS area for crisis prevention and management. An integral part of this is OpenStreetMap and its tools.
• HOT is looking for paid staff in Jakarta.

Mapping

• love_locks=no?
• Pascal Neis describes a slightly modified method of counting OSMstats.
• Unfortunately Jochens Topf’s Challenge could not reach its goal, but nevertheless made a difference.
• Florian Lohoff writes in his blog, that Ostwestfalen-Lippe (“OWL”) now has its own task manager (translation).
• User bdiscoe writes about  the history of the oldest still in use node (no. 10).
• Mapillary for Raspberry Pi. (via @jesolem)  (Translation)
• If you experienced a mishap when mapping, then please don’t write it in the changeset discussion, but please include on a high-traffic mailing list or IRC to do a revert! We don’t want Europe to turn brown again.
• The new version of QAeditor from Adrian Stabiszewski (English) contains more options: Show streets without sidewalk tag, ways without incline tag and ways without surface/smoothness tag
• The house number evaluation is now available for the whole of the Netherlands.
• The house number evaluation for Tyrol is available again.
• There’s active discussion on the tagging list about how to tag each individual pitch or site at a camp site. Bryce Nesbitt encourages campers to help fill in camp site maps this summer:
  http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Ddrinking_water
  http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dsanitary_dump_station
  http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dtoilets
  The dump station tagging is new.  Similar tagging for Marina facilities is under development.
• User richardwest and a few others added a few Elsan Points along Canals in the UK:
  https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2591597652/
  https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2755755468/
  https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2891630633/

Community

• The list of accepted projects for the Google Summer of Code was published. OpenStreetMap was awarded grants for eight interesting projects.
• The University of Salzburg and the University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil jointly published a presentation about the heterogeneity of and tagging inconsistencies in OSM.
• How important is OSM in the field VGI (Volunteered Geographic Information) and Citizen Science? There was a lecture about it at the congress of the Association of American Geographers (AGG)!
• Open Cage Data interviewed Jerry Clough, author behind the blog “Maps Matter“.
• Belgium Mapillary offered a workshop at a mapping party in Brussels
• User R0bst3r is amused about strange tags that he has found with Taginfo, for example, Surveillance cameras without stun guns and toilets with mail=yes (English).
• Zeromap has found gaps in the feedback process of MapBox. Mapbox now explains how the process works internally.
• User naoliv shows that only bridges can give a beautiful map.
• The OpenBeerMap celebrates its 1st birthday soon. Soon they expect 1500 entries. (Translation)

Imports

• Frederik Ramm proposes to the import list to delete an earlier import of explosion places of nuclear weapons because we map objects and not results. He gets much approval, but also rejection.
• Vincent Frison wants to import building heights in Paris.

Events

• The program of State of the Map US is online.

Maps

• The site historic.place shows data for historical objects on a map.
• Omniscale offers its WMS and tile services now under the new platform maps.omniscale.com. More in the blog.

#switch2OSM

• The Map on this website about vegan restaurants in Bern recently won the Swiss Press Award. The map is created using the simple uMap tool, with an OSM swiss style.

Open-Data

• UN-Habitat released an Open Data portal.
• Yesterday you had to search for OSM border relations with Nominatim and you downloaded using their ID. Today you can use OSM Boundaries of user wambacher. Konrad Lischka explains how to do this. (automatically-translated version)
• Does open data need open data formats? ESRI thinks not! (Translation of a blog post on heise.de)

Licences

• Gary Gale writes on Geohipster.com why OSM is struggling in business and why he is in favor of a license without share-alike.

Software

• Excessive abuse / use of Overpass API has meant that the block mechanisms in the future will work in a slightly different way.
• Routing profile for wheelchair user in OpenRouteService.org goes into beta testing . Current coverage: Germany. Any data contributions regarding sidewalks, inclines and kerbs are highly appreciated.
• OSMAnd now for iOS (OsmAnd Maps).

• Peter Karich explains the use of elevation data in GraphHopper.
• Graphhopper is relevant. 🙂 (via @graphhopper)
• The American Red Cross provides an API to be able to give live access to OSM metadata.

Other “Geo” things

• Routing in polygon layers is possible.
• Android urinates on an Apple logo in Google Maps .
• Others create tools to collaborate on maps as well – Maplim
• GPS is now over 20 years old. However, only since 02 May 2000 has the highest quality signal been available to to everyone.