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12/12/2024-18/12/2024
“Notes?!? Firefishy has a CLIPBOARD!” – This historic clipboard details the OSM’s recent ISP migration to Equinix Internet, as an effort to mitigate the 57-hour OSM outage caused by a router failure in Amsterdam (IPv6 was added later in the day). [1] | © Firefishy
Mapping
- The proposal to add
oneway:foot=*, for marking one-way restrictions on pedestrian paths and improving data for routing in areas with controlled pedestrian movement, is open for voting until Tuesday 31 December.
Community
- Inspired by meeting someone at a conference in Ireland who teaches in Indianola, Anne-Karoline Distel decided to map the city of Indianola, Iowa, United States, on OpenStreetMap. She ended up mapping over 5000 buildings and 775 trees.
- Le_Sharkoïste has compiled a collection of OSM objects named after world-renowned music artists.
- Curious about the OSM element with the highest tag count in Belgium, M!dgard downloaded Belgium’s OSM .pbf file from Geofabrik and created a Python script to find an answer. The results were: Belgium, Brussels, the Council of the European Union, the River Meuse, the Irish Embassy, and a certain maritime beacon in the River Scheldt.
- Raquel Dezidério has posted, in her OSM user diary, a retrospective of the YouthMappers UFRJ’s activities in 2024 and thanked their partners and collaborators.
OpenStreetMap Foundation
- [1] On Sunday 15 December OpenStreetMap and related services went offline at approximately 04:00 UTC due to a router hardware failure affecting Internet Service Provider (ISP) servers in Amsterdam. The OSM Operations Team (one permanent and volunteers) reported on the OSM Community forum about the progress to get back online.
- The ISP had confirmed the issue and was waiting for a replacement router shipped from California to the Amsterdam site.
- OSM’s infrastructure includes a primary database in Amsterdam and follower databases in Dublin, synchronised through asynchronous replication. The uplink failure in Amsterdam led to a minor amount of map data being unsynced with Dublin. To avoid data loss, the Dublin database was not promoted to the primary role. Manual synchronisation over a 4G VPN was also deemed too risky, so as a precaution, OSM was placed in read-only mode to maintain data integrity.
- In the meantime, the OSM operations were successful in moving to a new ISP for deployment in Amsterdam and Dublin, while awaiting the expedited delivery and installation of the replacement router.
- On Tuesday 17 December, around 13:24:48 UTC, all services were back up and running again. OSM is now operating with a new IPv4 internet provider: Equinix Internet, IPv6 is also operational. The first historical changeset after this 57-hour outage was the mapping of a staircase in Lüneburg, Germany, made by KTim, using StreetComplete.
- Meta has donated 178,710 EUR to the OpenStreetMap Foundation to enhance its infrastructure and operations, support events like States of the Map, and promote collaborative mapping initiatives.
Events
- Frederik Ramm has announced that the next Karlsruhe Hack Weekend is scheduled for 15 and 16 February. As usual, developers will bring their own projects and discuss ideas with others.
- FOSSGIS has published
the programme schedule ► for their 2025 conference. - A lot of people have written about their experiences at SotM Asia 2024:
- Bastian Greshake Tzovaras gave a talk about citizen science and how it relates to OSM and Panoramax at the National University in Río Cuarto, Argentina on 11 December. The slides have been published under an open licence.
the programme 
about citizen science and how it relates to OSM and Panoramax at the National University in Río Cuarto, Argentina on 11 December. The slides have been OSM research
- Researchers have utilised OpenStreetMap data, specifically building footprints with height tags, to validate a global urban building height model. OSM data played a key role in regions such as Brazil and China, showcasing its value in scientific research and enhancing its credibility for advanced geospatial applications.
- Do you have good examples of where community mapping and OpenStreetMap have contributed to urban climate adaptation or development planning and implementation? A coalition of open mapping advocates is looking for case studies to use as evidence in journal articles arguing for the increased use of open community mapping as an effective route in gathering accurate geospatial data and community knowledge.
Humanitarian OSM
- Gendy54 announced , on the OSM France forum, that there is a humanitarian mapping project in response to Cyclone Chido, which recently impacted Mayotte, a French overseas territory off the southeastern coast of Africa.
, on the OSM France forum, that there is a humanitarian mapping project in response to Cyclone Chido, which recently impacted Mayotte, a French overseas territory off the southeastern coast of Africa.Maps
- ButterflyOfFire wrote about a geoportal for the tourism sector in Algeria. You can watch this video, in French, to learn more about the project.
- Wolfmond has developed Fedikarte, a shared interactive map where Fediverse users can self-identify their location data.
- geoObserver reported ► on Amanda McCann’s WaterwayMap. This successful global watershed interactive map uses OpenStreetMap data as a basis and provides visualisations of the structures and courses of rivers worldwide.
Open Data
- Trufi Association mentions that their public transport data (GTFS) generated from OSM has passed the rigorous Mobility Database tests.
Software
- Transform Transport has released its ’15 min City Score Toolkit’ and the results can be accessed through an interactive map, which shows the advantages of the tool in the optimisation of proximity services analysis, or with the web map displayed on PTV.
- Bastian Greshake Tzovaras has been working on creating a Docker-based version of Amanda McCann’s Mapping party before–after tool. The goal is to allow people to create before/after comparison maps, without having to install all dependencies by hand.
- Thibault Molleman learnt that the OpenStreetMap Router Project has a debug layer and it can be viewed by mode, for example a car.
Programming
- Jeremy Keith discussed progressively enhancing the maps on ‘The Session’ (a community website dedicated to Irish traditional music) by leveraging the Cache API and service workers to switch between lightweight bitmap map tiles and more detailed vector tiles from OpenFreeMap, while maintaining performance and flexibility by caching JavaScript off-thread.
- Jin Igarashi has added a new measure control to maplibre-gl-terradraw. You can add it to MapLibre with only one line of code and there is a demo on the MapLibre GL Terra Draw website. It is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International.
- Romika Thapa is working on a project that focuses on creating an interactive OpenStreetMap-based web application that integrates dynamic mapping, visualisation, and data interactivity. This interactive web app, built with Leaflet, offers the ability to visualise geographical layers, including districts, municipalities, and states, perform student location searches by name, integrate real-time weather data into map pop-ups, and display nearby schools using custom map markers.
- Miles Alan has built Mobroute, an open-source public transportation trip planner that can directly ingest GTFS data from the Mobility Database.
- Ellen Poe has developed Farebox, a Rust-based implementation of the RAPTOR algorithm tailored for multi-criteria journey planning on public transit networks. Designed to operate efficiently on memory-constrained devices, Farebox is built on top of Valhalla, an open-source routing engine that leverages OpenStreetMap data.
Releases
- A new version of MapLibre Android with Vulkan Support was released on 12 December. You can get the package android-sdk-vulkan 11.7.0 from the maven central repository.
- HeiGIT has celebrated the release of openrouteservice version 9.0.0. This update featured several integral changes for users that run their own openrouteservice instance.
OSM in the media
- This feature from Die Sendung mit der Maus explored how traffic light systems are controlled, highlighting Cologne’s use of OpenStreetMap for monitoring and decision-making in coordination with traffic management centres.
- Newsweek (as usual) has utilised an OpenStreetMap-based interactive map to illustrate the range of the Russian tactical nuclear weapons recently deployed in Belarus.
Other “geo” things
- Ryan Abernathey has published the book Earth and Environmental Data Science. The content is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 International.
- Framasoft, which maintains ► the Framacarte and many other interesting projects, is celebrating 20 years (just like OpenStreetMap). We wish you a long life.
- nordmagazin reported > on an incident where the Altenpleen Fire Department in Germany was unable to reach the site of an emergency due to inaccurate data on Google Maps. Despite repeated requests from local authorities over the past five years, Google has yet to update its maps to reflect these changes.
- Caitlin Dempsey blogged on the subject of ‘Mapping Methane: the Launch of MethaneSAT and the Limitations of Satellite Data’, discussing the advantages and limitations of using hyper-spectral images to acquire data about methane emissions.
- Overture Maps has released a new update featuring 500 GB of monthly refreshed global geospatial datasets. Mark Litwintschik took a look at what it takes to join the various datasets together.
Upcoming Events
| Where | What | Online | When | Country |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jevíčko | 2. jevíčský mapathon  | 2024-12-20 |  | |
| OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting | 2024-12-20 | |||
| gmina Krośniewice | Świąteczne mapowanie | 2024-12-20 |  | |
| Bengaluru | OSM Bengaluru Mapping Party | 2024-12-21 |  | |
| Hamburg | OSM@38C3 | 2024-12-27 – 2024-12-30 |  | |
| Düsseldorf | Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online) | 2024-12-27 | | |
| OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting | 2025-01-03 | |||
| Moers | Community-Hackday vom 3. – 5. Januar 2024 im JuNo, Moers Repelen | 2025-01-03 – 2025-01-05 | |
Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.
This weeklyOSM was produced by Grass-snake, MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, TheSwavu, barefootstache, derFred, kabarmaz, mcliquid.
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