11/08/2016-11/14/2016
About us
- The OSM Foundation needs € 70.000 to cover its core operational expenses. Last Friday, Mapbox announced that they would „match the next €10,000 in contributions“ to achieve the target. With €18,028 left to achieve the target, consider donating to keep OSM running.
Mapping
- Adrien Pavie introduces Pic4Carto, a website that combines recent pictures from Mapillary, Flickr and Commons, so mappers can easily refer to pictures from these three sites. He has also made the source code available.
- CartInnov (automatic translation), the collaborative and open map of the innovation actors in the French-speaking world.
- [1] OSRM’s debug map (we reported earlier) now also shows penalties given for turns.
- Markus Schalke calls for discussion of the bird tower proposal in the tagging mailing list.
- Daniel wants a tag for „not-a-roundabout” so that routing software can give better instructions. He explains here in more detail why is this needed.
- On the tagging mailing list, Warin proposed a more detailed mapping of football (soccer) fields.
- Joost Schouppe submitted a tag for dog toilets. There are various suggestions for the exact name of the tag.
- James opened a task in the Canadian task manager to incorporate wikidata into OSM. User LogicalViolinist explains in his blogpost why this is important (but there is significant controversy). Also please read about what James writes about the
is_in:
tag. - User Tbsprs tweeted about OpenLevelUp! – a great tool for the representation of indoor mapping. For example, here is the multi-level Birmingham New Street Station.
Community
- The Dutch Computerworld magazine reports (automatic translation) about four projects that are „almost broke”. OSM, being one of them, has not yet reached its donation goal of €70,000. Time to donate!
- There is a discussion over at OpenStreetMap Carto’s GitHub repository (where the 'standard’ style that appears on the openstreetmap.org website is developed), asking why there are relatively few contributors, and why some features (such as wayside shrines) take so long to appear.
- Gonzalo Pérez, from OSM Argentina, facilitated a workshop on mapping and collaborative practices. It was organized by Santalab (in Argentina, not at the North Pole) and the Centre for Media Studies, in the city of Rosario, Santa Fe.
- Santiago Crespo reports that the Spanish community is now also using „osm-welcome-Belgium„, the tool created by the Belgian community (actually M1dgard). Pascal Neis has already noticed the new users on his twitter feed.
- „kaxtillo” wrote a diary entry summing up (translation) the involvement of OSM in Colombia with the 3rd „citizen innovation lab”, (translation) whose aims were to promote citizen innovation in Latin America in order to foster social transformation, democratic governance, and social, cultural and economic development.
- “Bike parking is not a problem, but part of the solution: Amsterdam’s 265K car places could allocate 2.1M bikes!” So says the „bike professor” from the Urban Cycling Institute. He explains (automatic translation) how to solve this, illustrated with an OpenStreetMap map.
- Pascal Neis has updated his analysis of the activity of OpenStreetMap members for this year.
Events
- OSM Geography Awareness Week (OSMGeoweek on Github) aims to celebrate geography and OSM with over 120 events worldwide. This complements National Geographic Society’s initiative with many local and humanitarian mapping projects.
Humanitarian OSM
- The „Red Cross climate center” in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, reported about another workshop with several partners. This involved plans for a second phase with the support of OSM in the creation of development plans, flood protection and infrastructure development.
- HOT is asking the community feedback on choosing the platform that would be the best to host activities such as live training. Please fill the three-question questionnaire!
- A mapathon hosted in Ivry-sur-Seine (Paris, France) with the help of cartONG brought together mappers and members of the local Malian community. Together, they mapped the area of Dianguirdé, Mali, adding some 337 km of roads.
switch2OSM
- The French Ministry for the Environment, Energy and the Sea is organizing a hackathon under the name #HackRisques. The aim of the mapathon is to prevent natural hazards. In addition to Meteo France, the OSM community is also invited to participate – as Sebastian Dinot reported on OSM-talk-fr.
Software
- Thomas Konrad published the austriaaddresshelper, a Java OpenStreetMap Editor (JOSM) plugin which automatically assigns addresses to an object. It uses the BEV Address Data Reverse Geocoder which uses the address data sets released by the Bundesamt für Eich- und Vermessungswesen (BEV) in Austria.
- Frederik Ramm is in a look out for developers/admins, who would be interested in building and maintaining an OSM Sandbox around the test OSM APIs.
- OSRM release candidate for version 5.5 features a bunch of interesting changes. It now supports
oneway=reversible
vs.oneway=alternating
tagging, directions for thedestination
tag and implements new heuristics for turn angles. - On the talk list, Martijn van Exel describes how OpenStreetView has been asked to change its name „by a well-known company with a similarly-named product„. As ever anonymaps is Quick to Draw its own conclusions about Google’s „evenhanded respect for trademarks”.
Programming
- Mapzen describes the background of the programming of the Tangram engine with new features to import, among other things, the new TRON 2.0 styles.
- Railnialtial presents the Python library OSMnx. It was written during his dissertation, and allows the visualisation and analysis of street data.
Releases
Software | Version | Release date | Comment |
---|---|---|---|
OSRM Backend | 5.4.3 | 2016-11-08 | Bugfix release. |
Mapillary iOS * | 4.5.5 | 2016-11-10 | Bugfix release. |
libosmium | 2.10.0 | 2016-11-11 | Too many changes, please read release info. |
Mapbox GL JS | v0.27.0 | 2016-11-11 | Many extensions and fixes, see release info. |
Komoot iOS * | 8.4.2 | 2016-11-13 | Gallery reworked. |
Komoot Android * | var | 2016-11-14 | Minor enhancements. |
Maps.me Android * | var | 2016-11-14 | Bug fixes and new map data. |
Provided by the OSM Software Watchlist.
(*) unfree software. See: freesoftware.
Did you know …
- … Liberland, a new „country” which nobody is allowed to enter? Hacker News has more details about this and Wikipedia explains the border conflict that lead to its „creation”.
- … Framacarte, using uMap as part of an initiative to de-Google-ify the Internet?
- … the sustainable Comenius project MychOSM? It shows a lot of possiblities on how to use OSM in schools.
OSM in the media
- The Genealogical Society of Ireland reported on its last edition (PDF – see page 2): „In early October the completion of the project to draw all the townlands on the Island of Ireland was celebrated in Berlin. It was on the occasion of the annual world-wide conference of the volunteer driven OpenStreetMap community”. „townlands.ie” is of course the main web site.
Other “geo” things
- Archdaily reports about David Rumsey’s Map Collection of high resolution maps (we reported earlier) which now features more than 71,000 maps to download.
- Apple has been granted a US patent for augmented reality maps.
- Hajime Narukawa, a Japanese architect has come up with a map projection, such that a printed map can be fold up into a perfect 3D globe. For his work he received the coveted Good Design Award. We presented last week the OSM Dymaxion Projection by the Brazilian architect Sérgio A. J. Volkmer.
- Real-Time GPS tracking of scavenging gulls pinpoints illegal waste dumping.
- Google will retire Map Maker on March 31st 2017, moving the POI editing functions to Google Maps, and users won’t be allowed to edit geometries anymore. We wonder if this would be another boost for our community.
- In an effort to enable and support machine learning using satellite imagery, DigitalGlobe, CosmiQ Works and NVidia are launching the SpaceNet Challenge. In the first round, the challenge is to automate the extraction of 2D building outlines from satellite images. Prizes worth $34,500 to be won.
- Surveillance under Surveillance is a project which visualizes crowd sourced data on surveillance. The project, currently available in German, English and Spanish, is looking (automatic translation) for translators to expand it to other languages.
- Google Street View vs Mapillary: Greg Oates, Skift Digital, describes – using examples – the objectives, opportunities and the know-how of the two counterparts.
Upcoming Events
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This weeklyOSM was produced by Hakuch, Lamine Ndiaye, Laura Barroso, Peda, Rogehm, SomeoneElse, Spec80, SrrReal, TheFive, YoViajo, derFred, escada, jcoupey, jinalfoflia, muramototomoya, sabas88, sbiribizio, wambacher, widedangel.