The team behing the Osmose quality assurance tool announced that an in-line help panel with a description of potential errors is now available. The additions also feature a guide on how to fix them, and other useful information.
Marc summarised the current tagging situation of camping sites following the approval of tourism=camp_pitch. However, rather than improving the data, he felt that the situation had worsened.
OpenStreetMap passed the milestone of its 80 millionth changeset on 23 January.
Don’t know what to map? You could help to make the map of Estonia better. A simple tool from user SviMik will help you to do this.
Hauke Stieler started the voting on his proposal of duty_free=*, a tag that should indicate whether a shop offers duty-free shopping.
Community
In a tweet the Osmose team pointed to GitHub, where the source code and now the documentation is maintained. The developer also welcomes help with translation.
The Russian OSM community has checked that all Russian border crossings are in order. MapRoulette was used as a tool for tasks.
Rory McCann, newly elected member of the OSMF board, listed his contributions made in January 2020 to the various areas of OSM, such as mapping, coding and the OSMF board, in a blog post.
Valeriy Trubin continues his series of interviews with OSMers. He spoke with Yevgeniy Usvitskiy (automatic translation) about humanitarian mapping and HOT and with Vladimir Marshinin (mavl) (automatic translation) about the data working group (DWG) and data licences.
User Vascom has started (automatic translation) to assemble weekly maps for Maps.Me. So far, he has covered all regions of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
Imports
In early January 2020 the Russian OSM-community completed (automatic translation) the import of data on Russian theatres, which started in 2017. Now OSM is richer by 693 theatres.
OpenStreetMap Foundation
Christoph Hormann explained his concerns about how the OSMF Board risks codifying the English language and Anglo-American cultural mores as predominant within the OSM community. A long discussion, mainly with members of the board, follows.
OpenStreetMap Česká republika z.s.(an organisation supporting OSM in Czechia), has applied to become a Local Chapter of the OpenStreetMap Foundation. Joost Schouppe, member of the OSMF board, is asking the community for their opinions on the application.
Events
Ilya Zverev gave a talk at the recent FOSDEM about reverse geocoding. He outlined the basics, presented a few unexpected challenges that a geocoder developer might face when working with OpenStreetMap data, and invited people to help improve the reverse geocoder he created.
Peter Rushforth, from the Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation, announced plans to hold a workshop about maps together with the World Wide Web Consortium and the Open Geospatial Consortium and invited interested parties from OSM to participate.
Humanitarian OSM
Missing Maps describes their activities during an anti-malaria campaign in Burundi in an article on their homepage. The country’s health authorities asked Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders for help. Missing Maps traced nearly 90 000 buildings in the region of Ruyigi, as large parts had not been mapped before. The article explains how the mapping activities helped and also the role OsmAnd and KoboToolbox played during the indoor residual spraying campaign.
ManonVi elaborated on a proposal for the tag place=refugee_site. He describes why this tag is necessary. The request for comments started on 1 February 2020.
Maps
Mapillary started the CompleteTheMap challenge for the northern hemisphere to improve its imagery. The top 3 contributors in terms of number of unique kilometres between 14 February and 15 March 2020 will be awarded with prizes.
Alexander Chertov created a map of speed limit cameras installed on Russian roads. He took data about cameras from the highway police website and used OSM as a basemap.
Anton Rapesco created a map of all the lights of Moscow. To do this he used open data from the Moscow open data portal.
switch2OSM
Golden Cheetah, a tool for analysing data from power meters (mostly for bicycle computers), switched to OSM from Google. The new 3.5 release uses OSM data.
Licences
User unen wrote in his OSM user diary entry that the Turkish parliament voted in favour of the proposed amendment to the National Geographic Information Systems Law. It requires official approval for a lot of mapping activities in Turkey and seems to forbid OSM.
Programming
OsmApiClient is a C# package to handle the communication between your .Net project and the OSM API. See the GitHub project, or nuget package.
User Artem Svetlov wrote (automatic translation) a script that could be used to generate beautiful maps of urban electric transport routes in any city. That’s why he called on everyone to help tidy up this data in OSM. The script is available on GitHub.
Releases
MapTiler announced MapTiler.jp as a service in Japan, in cooperation with local map provider MIERUNE. It provides maps using data from OSM and the Japanese government.
The map style of OSM’s main map has been updated to v4.25.0. Joseph Eisenberg detailed the changes in the current OpenStreetMap Carto release in his user diary.
JOSM published stable release #15806; they note that 'with 58 enhancements and 26 bugfixes, this is one of the biggest monthly releases ever made’.
The new release of OpenMapTiles comes with rendering support for disputed borders, roads under construction and the Kurdish and Amharic languages.
Did you know …
[1] … the SolidaryCityMap by openDEM, which shows places where you can participate in city life without papers and money? In the forum openDEM explains which OSM tags and other data sources the SolidaryCityMap evaluates and asks for further ideas.
… about a site that collects sounds of various environments from all over the world? It also uses OSM as a basemap.
… about the Oontz website, whose owner recorded the sounds of Sergiev Posad (a city in Russia) and placed them on a map based on OSM.
… about the Russian app HandyPet (automatic translation), with which you can try to find a lost pet? The smartphone app uses OSM as a basemap. Unfortunately, the required attribution is not specified properly.
Other “geo” things
Simon Weckert shows you how to easily create a traffic jam on Google Maps. Also reported by Slashgear. 😉
GISGeography has a list of its 'Top 25 satellite maps’ and provides some information for each of them. The term 'satellite map’ is used very broadly and includes not only a range of classic satellite maps such as Google, Bing, Landsat and others, but also the JavaScript library Leaflet and images produced by the NASA weather satellites NOAA and GEOS.
Apple has given its maps of the United States more detail, including buildings. The buildings shown in the linked article do not appear in OSM.
Yandex has made (automatic translation) a map on which you can see a day in the life of the Moscow ground transport system over about a minute.
Upcoming Events
Where
What
When
Country
Dortmund
Mappertreffen
2020-02-07
Rennes
Réunion mensuelle
2020-02-10
Grenoble
Rencontre mensuelle
2020-02-10
Taipei
OSM x Wikidata #13
2020-02-10
Toronto
Toronto Mappy Hour
2020-02-10
Lyon
Rencontre mensuelle pour tous
2020-02-11
London
Move 2020 (featuring OSMUK)
2020-02-11-2020-02-12
Zurich
114. OSM Meetup Zurich
2020-02-11
Hamburg
Hamburger Mappertreffen
2020-02-11
Munich
Münchner Stammtisch
2020-02-12
Wuppertal
OSM-Treffen Wuppertaler Stammtisch im Hutmacher 18 Uhr
2020-02-12
Nantes
Rencontre mensuelle
2020-02-13
Berlin
140. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch
2020-02-14
Lüneburg
Lüneburger Mappertreffen
2020-02-18
Karlsruhe
Karlsruhe Hack Weekend February 2020
2020-02-15-2020-02-16
Mainz
Mainzer OSM-Stammtisch
2020-02-17
Viersen
OSM Stammtisch Viersen
2020-02-18
Turin
FOSS4G-it/OSMit 2020
2020-02-18-2020-02-22
Derby
Derby pub meetup
2020-02-18
Cologne Bonn Airport
126. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch
2020-02-18
Ulmer Alb
Stammtisch Ulmer Alb
2020-02-20
Rennes
Atelier découverte
2020-02-23
Takasago
Takasago Open Datathon
2020-02-24
Singen
Stammtisch Bodensee
2020-02-26
Düsseldorf
Düsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch
2020-02-26
Lübeck
Lübecker Mappertreffen
2020-02-27
Riga
State of the Map Baltics
2020-03-06
Freiburg
FOSSGIS-Konferenz
2020-03-11-2020-03-14
Chemnitz
Chemnitzer Linux-Tage
2020-03-14-2020-03-15
Valcea
EuYoutH OSM Meeting
2020-04-27-2020-05-01
Guarda
EuYoutH OSM Meeting
2020-06-24-2020-06-28
Cape Town
State of the Map 2020
2020-07-03-2020-07-05
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.