(English) weeklyOSM 517

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09/06/2020-15/06/2020

Breaking news

• Mapillary announced that they have been acquired by Facebook. We await the implications of this deal and, no doubt, will report in more detail over the coming weeks.

About us

• Since issue #512, we have resumed publishing in Italian. Last week the Russian language version was revived. We are very happy and hope that by reaching new readers we can communicate enthusiasm for OpenStreetMap.

Mapping

• Probably everyone has noticed changesets with huge bounding boxes that make locating the actual changes very hard. Frederik Ramm started a discussion about whether editors should prevent changesets with such large bounding boxes and received many responses.
• patata noted that the current tagging of charging stations with socket:type1 and socket:type2 does not mention whether a charging cable is present, or if the user needs to bring their own.
• Jack Armstrong asked if we map pedestrian crossings twice; that is, pedestrian crossing tags on ways in addition to the street connecting nodes. He was told, anecdotally, that there is a Slack group that made this tagging decision.
• Erkin Alp Güney updated his proposal to introduce a new scheme which aims to unify the tagging of educational institutions, from kindergartens to universities.
• Garry Keenor asks for comments on his proposal to tag railway tracks with electrification systems using third or fourth rails.
• Mike Thompson started a discussion about the difference between path and track. A lot of people responded and there was an interesting discussion.
• In his blog, SK53 looks at the way that terraced housing in the Welsh village of Llanfair PG was built, named and how the names have changed over the years — and, also how to map terrace names in OSM. The village is perhaps better known as ’Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch’, a contrived 19th century name.
• Nick Johnston found a nine-year-old error in OSM, which is also on Apple Maps, HERE and TomTom. He encountered this during mapping efforts to improve OSM’s address coverage and documented his journey to find the reason for the wrong data in his OSM user diary.

Community

• The city of Rostock is testing Mapillary on a small scale and asks for help (automatic translation) to create enough training data for object recognition. Street drains and gullies, benches, waste baskets and rubbish bins are the objects needing verification, but not various small manhole covers (e.g. fire hydrants).
• Valeriy Trubin continues his series of interviews with OSM participants. This time he spoke with Victor Sherb (automatic translation), the developer of the well-known mobile navigator OsmAnd, and Sergei Astakhov (automatic translation), an experienced programmer who took more than 150 orthophotomaps of the districts of St. Petersburg.
• Ilya Zverev wrote a post (automatic translation) about why calculating the width of pavements (sidewalks) is useless.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The minutes of the OSMF board meeting on 21 and 22 March 2020, when hiring paid staff was discussed, have been released.
• The Local Chapters and Communities Working Group released minutes of their 18 May 2020 meeting.
• The OpenStreetMap Foundation has published minutes of a meeting on 25 May between members of the OSMF board and representatives from gold OSMF corporate members for advice on hiring people by the OSMF. The minutes, among other things, contain information on what positions the OSMF might want to hire people for.

Events

• Christine Karch provided an update on how the format of sessions at State of the Map 2020 will change now it is an online only event. She also asks for help from anyone with a Jitsi, Mumble or Big Blue Button server who can make it available for the conference.
• Manfred Stock informed the Swiss community on how lightning talks and self-organised sessions can be held during the virtual State of the Map 2020.
• An international conference ’All (im)mobile, all cartographers?’ (automatic translation) on cartographic approaches to mapping mobility, circulation, flows and displacement (methods, tools, representations, practices and uses) will take place from 2 to 4 November in Toulouse, France. Contributions can be submitted until 30 June. Although the conference is in French, contributions written in English and Spanish are also welcome.
• During the online 2020 INSPIRE Conference, Alessandro Sarretta and Marco Minghini gave a workshop on exploring the synergies between OpenStreetMap and INSPIRE, which is the framework to build spatial data infrastructure in the European Union. The workshop explored the similarities and differences between the two initiatives and showed an example of data integration between them using QGIS. The presentation and supporting material (datasets, code, etc.) are available here.

Humanitarian OSM

• Ismaila Seye, a founding member of OSM Senegal, wrote (automatic translation) to the French-language HOT mailing list, about a new collaborative platform being used to gather data about flooding in Dakar.
• HOT and iLAB Liberia have jointly investigated the feasibility of using data generated from both aerial and street-level images by machine learning to augment on-the-ground mapping by people. The study areas were in Monrovia: 5cm aerial imagery (OpenAerialMap) was captured by drones and covers 20 square kilometres; around 160 kilometres of street level imagery (Mapillary) was also obtained using a dashcam.
• Valeriy Trubin recorded a video review of the MapSwipe mobile app.

Education

• Zkir (Kirill Bondarenko) created a video tutorial on how to download three-dimensional buildings from OSM into Blender, the 3D modelling programme.

Maps

• [1] Christian Nüssli created a map of all the defibrillators recorded in Switzerland in OSM. He then received a lot of feedback with submissions regarding missing defibrillators, which he later mapped in OSM.
• The Russian branch of Greenpeace has created (automatic translation) a detailed map of spring landscape fires in Russia and calculated their total area. The 'Greenpeace Forest Forum’ gives (automatic translation) details about how the map was created. In addition, an article (automatic translation) about this was published in Kommersant (a well-known newspaper in Russia).

switch2OSM

• Yenthe Van Ginneken tweeted about a project of the week from business systems supplier Odoo to integrate monitoring data from solar power installations provided by SolarEdge. Integration is based on a custom Python package. Odoo now visualises the data over an OpenStreetMap basemap.
• Interruptions to communal hot water supplies in the Moscow region are shown on a map (automatic translation) which uses OSM as a basemap.
• The public transport portal (automatic translation) of Perm (Russia) uses OSM as a basemap.

Software

• Now there is an extension to Locus, the mobile navigator, which allows you to add and edit POI in OSM via this app.
• Stéphane Péneau announced the release of version 2.0 of RTKBase, 'an easy to use and easy to install web frontend with some bash scripts and services for a simple headless GNSS base station’. For the adepts of RTKLIB and centimetric geolocation.
• MapTiler announced a new QGIS plugin that allows you to load map styles and custom maps and use externally hosted geodata in QGIS. The plugin has been published under an open licence at GitHub.

Did you know …

• … that you can view (automatic translation) GPX tracks on terrain using Blender 3D and the blender-osm plugin? The plugin can be downloaded for free here. A small hint: you need to import terrain first, then satellite images, and only then GPX tracks.
• … the lightningmaps.org? This 'thunderstorm map’ shows the current worldwide lightning situation on an OpenStreetMap basemap.

OSM in the media

• Several US and China military planes flew through the Taiwan Strait recently, making the area a hot zone. Many military observers and the media have shown screenshots of the flight tracks of these airplanes through the Taiwan Strait. The basemaps, which show the flight tracks, often use OpenStreetMap.

Other “geo” things

• The voice assistant Alice (Yandex’s analog of Siri) has learned (automatic translation) how to draw pictures in response to user requests. OSM user Hind (the developer of MapCraft) asked Alice to draw OpenStreetMap. The result was rather amusing. Many users note that there is a resemblance.
• Due to the pandemic, the Life and Style section of The Observer, a British Sunday newspaper, has had some space for OpenStreetMap. The article mentions OpenStreetMap and describes how OpenStreetMap is amenable to mapping the newly walked paths that people are creating while socially distancing.
• Sberbank (a major pro-government bank in Russia) recently (automatic translation) bought the independent Russian map service 2GIS. Some observers regret this fact. 2GIS partially uses OSM data and correctly attributes this.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Leoben	Stammtisch Obersteiermark (cancelled)	2020-06-18
Sheffield	Sheffield pub meetup	2020-06-23
Guarda	EuYoutH OSM Meeting (cancelled)	2020-06-24-2020-06-28
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch	2020-06-26
Rennes	Atelier découverte	2020-06-28
Prague	Pražský mapathon	2020-06-30
Montrouge	Réunion des contributeurs locaux	2020-07-01
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch (online)	2020-07-01
Cape Town	HOT Summit	2020-07-01-2020-07-02
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #18	2020-07-06
London	Missing Maps London	2020-07-07
Kandy	2020 State of the Map Asia	2020-10-31-2020-11-01

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 AnisKoutsi, Nakaner, PierZen, Rogehm, SK53, Silka123, SomeoneElse, SunCobalt, Supaplex, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, jcr83, renecha, richter_fn.