20.01.–26.01.2015
Some news about us
- In December last year, Stephan interviewed the people who started weeklyOSM, our international offshoot (a summary is available in English). We’ll schedule an interview with those behind the French and Czech editions later.
Mapping
- [1] User marczoutendijk has released a tool named Taglocator that shows where tags are used. Please use OSM Forum for feedback.
- jgpacker’s regular “learn-a-tag” update: driving_side=*
- Mapillary will browse recorded images in the near future according to road signs.
- The French quality assurance tool OSMOSE now covers the Caribbean.
- There’s a long-running discussion about amenity=bicycle_repair_station on the “talk” mailing list (see also “imports” below).
- On the Brazilian coast, there are “Food services” for which there are currently no tags that fit. Restaurant, pub, kiosk, fast food, cafe – nothing fits. Can the tagging mailing list, or anyone else, help?
Community
- Open Data Cage spoke to the people behind the Mapazonia project , a project to map the Amazon region.
- OSM Radio, the Russian OSM podcast interviewed Steve Coast. The interview is available in English.
- Wheelmap celebrates half a million entries.
- User fuddl suggests that we add Wikipedia’s “thank you” feature to OSM as well, but not everyone is convinced.
Imports
- Bryce Nesbitt wants to import a list of “Dero” bicycle repair stations into OSM. The issue is discussed on the imports mailing list .
OpenStreetMap Foundation
- The new Membership Working Group is working on the migration of the OSMF membership management to CiviCRM.
Events
- Bonn and Dublin have completed the first round of the application process for the FOSS4G 2016 successfully and may now submit their applications.
Humanitarian OSM
- A user told the HOT mailing list about the possibility of mapping buildings that were destroyed by Boko Haram in northern Nigeria Unfortunately, the satellite images are not enabled for OSM.
- In the first official field mapping events, Jorieke Vyncke and Pete Master along with volunteers in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, asked the community to help with the editing of tasks 831, 833 and 838.
- UAViators has published a short talk about OpenAerialMap with HOT Executive Director Kate Chapman on YouTube.
- Humanitarian OpenStreetMap is now also on LinkedIn.
- Pierre Chrzanowski complained in a blog post at the Open Data Institute that the areas affected by Ebola in West Africa still lack data. He calls for international organizations not just to write reports, but also to make their data available. By way of example, he sees the activities of the OpenStreetMap community , 2600 of whose mappers had uploaded more than 12 million items by March 2014, as part of the HOT team’s activities . “Maps of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea have never been so accurate.”
- In Moonshadow’s blog, 3D visualizations are shown by population and election results.
#switch2OSM
- The end of the Google Maps Engine API is apparently to be set for January 29, 2016. Gary thinks about what should happen next.
Open-Data
- The city of Zurich, Switzerland, has published building addresses. It is CC-0, so the data can therefore be used in OSM without any restrictions.
- Open Addresses, a collection of shared address data, now also has a British namesake.
- Shizuoka (Japan) start publishing bus route & timetable data as GTFS format, with real time location API. They are licensed under CC-BY 4.0.
Software
- OsmAnd gathers money at BidforFix to implement new features.
- Osmaxx, new software to convert OSM data into other common GIS file formats, is now in development.
- Tim Sutton shows in Kartoza‘s blog how to build QGIS with Python and a GIS applications (which does not look like QGIS). 😉
- Is Merkaartor still alive? The development of the formerly very popular offline editor (“orphaned” since March 2013) might actually be restarted. Ladislav Laska is looking for help on the mailing list.
- User Polyglot is planning a Mapillary plugin for JOSM, and asks on the JOSM-Dev mailing list if anyone is working on such a plugin.
- Pawe? Paprota has completed a version of the OWL Activity tab for osm.org. It depicts changes in an area better than the present History tab and uses the API of the OpenStreetMap Watch List.
Did you know …
- … to fix by MapBox. To-fix is similar to the good Maproulette, but only allows changes using the default editor of a user, usually iD.
- … Lacking Proper Attribution (lack sufficient attribution) on the wiki, where is the admonition of license violations documented and organised ?
Miscellaneous
- For Asia, the 30 m SRTM data have now been released by NASA. MapBox also uses this immediately.
- The cartographers at National Geographic have been depicting the earth, sky and sea on maps for 100 years.
- Stefan Hahmann blogs about GPS data from OSM with WebGL.
- Libra, a browser for the images of Landsat 8 mission. (via Blog)