weekly 273

10/06/2015 – 10/12/2015

Mapping

• This is a report about “A little update on OpenStreetMap editing in gnome-maps”
• [1] Mappa Mercia writes about their success in mapping the entire new mainline multilevel station in Birmingham.

Community

• On TNW, Ben Woods claims that OSM got a big boost by Maps.Me.
• Simon Poole has updated the Contributor Statistics Reports. It happens once per quarter. (via @ sp8962)
• The tool “How did you contribute” by Pascal Neis now supports the editor Level0 created by Ilya Zverev.
• higa4 describes what OsmHydrant is, how can it be used to add fire hydrants, and why you should be doing it.
• Historic Place Map (Screenhots from a Comenius school project) is offline due to a disk failure. The former link with data from 06/17/2015 still works. The recovery of data may take days or even weeks, said the maintainer, Lutz. Update: Historic.Place is back with current data. The tiles of the historic map layer is still under construction.
• According to Richard Phililips son’s sad posting on Talk-gb-westmidlands mailing list, Richard Philips recently passed away. He was an “addicted mapper” (HDYC) and active around Evesham area (England).

Imports

• PlaneMad from Mapbox Data Team discovered many problems with road data quality in Japan: problems such as unconnected, misalignment and many short segments in the road network. His description sounds as horrible as the descriptions of the TIGER import in the U.S. Most data seems to be coming from the Yahoo Japan Import shortly after the Great Earthquake on March 11, 2011, and was never maintained afterwards. A translation into Japanese was made by MAPconierge.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• All paid members of OSM US may take part in the elections for the OSM US board. Elections are end on October 18. You have a choice of nine candidates. Nakaner has had a deeper look into the manifestos. There was a virtual townhall on October, 12 where everyone could ask questions via Twitter, IRC and Google+.
• Paul Norman informally announces an OSMF general meeting on 5th of December 2015. During this meeting, four board members will be elected. The reason for this early announcement is to give you the possibility to renew your membership early enough, and also the possibility to stand for the election.
• Ilya Zverev is the first candidate to announce his candidature for the OSMF election on the OSMF mailing list.

Events

• Gregory Marler’s report on the SotM Scotland.
• After State of the Map in Scotland and Catalonia, SotM Japan will take place on October 31, 2015 in Hamamastu City.
• The first videos from SotMCAT 2015 in Barcelona appeared on the Youtube channel OSM en català.

Humanitarian OSM

• A new HOT export tool is now live. The tool can be used to select and export OSM data (either following OSM or HOT scheme) in different formats.

Maps

• Stefan Keller from Geometa Lab at HSR shows how to integrate up-to-date OSM data into uMap in their blogpost.
• Map Compare from BBBike now supports up to 140 maps. (via @BBBikeWorld)
• Tangram is a JavaScript library for rendering 2D & 3D maps live in a web browser with WebGL
• It looks like,  OSM Buildings have received a face lift. Inspiring for 3D mapping . 😉
• Blogging service googlemapsmania is writing about vector based maps, with horizon-less perspective, like in the Inception movie.

Open Data

• Two master thesis at the Chair of GeoInformatics at the University of Munich, created a 3d city model of the city of New York. The model in CityGML format is derived from data of the NYC Open Data Portal and can be viewed in a 3D Online Viewer. (via @textkoch)
• The 1-SRTM data (about 30 m ground resolution) are now available worldwide.
• User KDDA reports in his user diary that the official townlands data in Northern Ireland has been taken offline.

Licences

• The German company Omniscale presents a Sustainability-Open-Source-Software-Licence, in short SOSS-Licence. By the use of this kind of licence, a better development of Open Source projects is expected.
• User timetabling claims that OSM should also have a license enforcement guideline, like the Free Software Foundation has. We reported on it before. Otherwise, OSM should drop share-alike.

Software

• In a term paper “Gamified Extraction of Crossroads from Aerial Images” two computer science students at the University of Applied Sciences in Rapperswil, Switzerland, developed an application that automatically extracts pedestrian crossings from aerial images. Here, an image recognition algorithm travels along OSM streets of Switzerland, and maybe soon all over Europe. The coordinates found by the application are checked for duplicates and then consigned to MapRoulette so that they can be gathered in OSM. This work benefits from the project “Zebrastreifen Safari” (see weeklyOSM 272), where the result is reviewed with “ground data”. Stefan Keller says: “So far, we know mainly two approaches to detect street axes and building outlines. The point-like objects such as pedestrians crossings (Node-Tag highway=crossing) appear promising.”
• Richard Fairhurst reports on a Tilemaker version that supports shapefiles.
• The “Game of Nodes” is collecting money on Kickstarter for an Ingress-like game but using OpenStreetMap data. However, the funding target has not been reached yet. (via @OSMMV)

Programming

• Paul Ramsey reports in the cartodb.com blog, on how to compress geospatial data from a PostGIS database effectively without big loss of quality.
• Chros Whong has published a plugin for the javascript based Leaflet library, that places a 3D globe in the corner of your map, centered to the same location as the main map.
• Jerome Cukier reports that the source code of React-map-gl was published. This project provides a React friendly API wrapper around Mapbox GL JS – a webGL based vector tile mapping library.
• In Italy, there is no longer a big whole-Italy shapefile on the Geofabrik server. Instead there are individual shapefiles for five regions. The same applies for Poland where the 16 voivodeships have their own extracts.
• Releases:
  • September 10th, 2015 OpenLayers version 3.10.1
  • October 7th, 2015 PostGIS version 2.2
  • October 8th, 2015 PostgreSQL version 9.4.5
  • October 8th, 2015 Mapnik version 3.0.6

Did you know …

• … the Page/Map which shows jobs in GIS with geo-locations?
• … that Canada offers streets with very funny names? 😉
• … IMY or International Map Year, a project run by the International Geographic Association supported by the UN. Obviously, the importance of maps should be emphasized.

Other “geo” things

• Jan Erik Solem casts a glance at Two Years of Mapillary.
• A Map of Every Device in the World that is connected to the Internet.
• Christoph Hormann writes in the imagico.de blog about “Map design economics” and cites as an example the recently introduced Wikimedia maps.
• The German railway “Deutsche Bahn” starts, in cooperation with Open Data City “Netzradar“, a crowdsourcing app for detecting the mobile radio network coverage (and the dead spots) along the routes of DB long distance traffic. Refer to the press release DB and the press release of P3 group.
• With the help of modern image computer vision, it’s possible to extract building footprints out of aerial imagery. OpenStreetMap prefers to keep the manual traces 😉
• Cool, now the kids don’t have to go out to a maze. The Corn Maze near Edmonton is already available online. 😉
• GIS Doctor says: “I love OpenStreetMap. It’s the best …, it’s the most important thing to have happened to the geo community since Dr. Tomlinson started working with map overlays in the 1960s”, and GIS Doctor explains why!

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