19/10/2021-25/10/2021
OpenData and OpenStreetMap [1] © Pascal Neis © OpenStreetMap contributors
Mapping
- Pascal Neis tweeted that his ‘Unmapped Places of OSM’ has been updated. A total of 331,000 places have been identified this year, compared with 339,000 by the same time last year.
- Christian Rogel, who recently bought an electrically assisted tricycle, suggested
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that he will be able to help provide advice on tags which would help tricyclists make use of existing cycle infrastructure.
- DENelson83 started converting individually named bodies of water on the Atlantic coast of Canada to relations. He set out his rationale, but has already received some negative feedback.
- Alec Schulze-Eckel reported the successful end of the 25th mapathon project that saw the the formation of a small but solid group of German Red Cross (GRC) volunteers over the course of the project.
- MKnight shared
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his experience of guardrail mapping.
- CzerwonyPazdzierz asked
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, in the forum, about the places that are best mapped on OSM. Besides the individual suggestions in the thread about it, there is also a map showing the ratio of OSM objects to population density.
- A request for comments has been made for
artwork_type=maypole
, an additional tag toman_made=maypole
for maypoles with artistic merit.
Community
- China’s OpenStreetMap local community, OSMChina, has released
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their website
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and offer a tile service based on OSM-Carto style, but at the moment the site only contains data for mainland China.
- Mateusz Konieczny asked about the status of HOT Tasking Manager (TM) projects, which triggered another discussion about mapping quality and the coordination of TM organised editing projects. Arnalie Vicario from HOT reacted by sharing information about the HOT Data Quality and Assurance working groups and invited contributors to participate in the next meeting on 4 November.
- OSMF Board member Amanda McCann provided her regular monthly activity update for September.
- BryDee reported that the HOT Open Mapping Hub – Asia Pacific (OMH-AP) have signed a letter of intent with the Asia Pacific Region branch (WSB/APR) of the secretariat about working together with the World Organization of the Scout Movement (WOSM). The initial agreement is for three years. BryDee sees a lot of interest from the Scouts and more importantly 30 million potential OSM mappers.
- GOwin reported that OSMaPaaralan tasks are complete and more than 39,129 schools have been mapped and verified in 2 years and 22 days.
- Someone on the #osm IRC channel noticed that if anyone mentions ‘OpenStreetMap’ in a YouTube video comment, the post is immediately blocked. Simon Poole tweeted about it here.
- Lejun is looking for an app to map building facades. He describes his desired criteria and evaluates possible tools in terms of their suitability for this purpose.
- martien-vdg wrote about his ideas on how to improve the mapping quality of new mappers.
- PlayzinhoAgro suggested a re-imagining of the OSM user profile page.
OpenStreetMap Foundation
- Dorothea Kazazi has announced that nominations for the OSMF Board election have closed. There are six candidates for four board seats :
- Guillaume Rischard, USA
- Michal Migurski, USA
- Amanda McCann, Germany
- Mikel Maron, USA
- Roland Olbricht, Germany
- Bryan Housel, USA.
Members can continue adding their questions and information about the candidates is available on the Candidate 2021 wiki page.
Voting information and proposed resolutions are detailed on the Annual General Meeting 2021 wiki page.
Events
- Never been to Perth, Australia? Just join The FOSS4G SotM Oceania Perth Hub conference with an OSM workshop all day on Saturday 13 November.
- State of the Map Africa 2021 is happening online 19 to 21 November. Registration is open and Geoffrey Kateregga has invited applications for internet data scholarships to enable remote participation for those who need it. The application form is online.
- The LCCWG extended an invitation to leaders and members of OpenStreetMap local communities to attend the 2021 Local Chapters and Communities Congress, which will be held virtually on Saturday 6 November. Representatives of other OSM user groups are also welcome.
OSM research
- John Bryant, of the Overseas Development Institute, has released a working paper Digital mapping and inclusion in humanitarian response. He notes that maps can contribute to ‘distancing’ and remote management of responses. Some humanitarians interviewed also observed that a map frequently becomes the end product rather than the ‘beginning of a conversation’.
- Hao Li introduced a paper that proposes an automatic surface water mapping workflow by training a deep residual neural network (ResNet) based on OpenStreetMap data and Sentinel-2 multispectral data and using the Simple Non-Iterative Clustering (SNIC) superpixel algorithm for generating object-based training samples. As part of the paper, a case study was conducted that provides comprehensive insights into how to best explore the synergy of volunteered geographic information (VGI) and machine learning (ML) of Earth observation (EO) data in a large-scale surface water mapping task.
Maps
- The HeiGIT ohsome team is extracting full history OSM data of the volcanic eruption on La Palma (Spain) and its constantly growing lava field to help keep OSM up to date. Temporally explore the data, including every single map edit, here.
- Web developer and artist Hans Hack has created
a map that displays the ‘War Traces in Berlin Street Names’ on an OSM base map. The historical eras (Prussia, Empire …) are colour-coded and it can be filtered by a wide variety of viewpoints.
Open Data
- Pascal Neis showed how helpful ‘live’ information can be displayed with the help of free data and free software. For his implementation ‘utilization of parking garages and traffic situation in Mainz‘
, he also uses the OSM base map.
Software
- Bryan Housel announced the release of RapiD 1.1.8, which includes performance improvements and bugfixes.
- Flatmap is a tool that generates Mapbox Vector Tiles from geographic data sources like OpenStreetMap. Vector tiles contain raw point, line, and polygon geometries that clients such as MapLibre can use to render custom maps (demo).
Programming
- The Overpass API treats closed ways not only as ways but also as areas now.
Did you know …
- … the key
winter_service=*
is available? The key can be used to map paths or areas that do not have winter service, as well as those which are regularly cleared of snow and ice. - … the NUNAV Navigation app for cars? It combines OpenStreetMap with real-time traffic data in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (for now) and is available in the app stores in a number of European countries. Your route is continuously recalculated based on traffic during a trip. The app has no ads or trackers and the GPS location data
is only used for traffic aggregation. You can give the routing a try on the website of the traffic control centre Lower Saxony
.
- … there is a list of software for OSM users at home or on the road?
Other “geo” things
- Satellite imagery firm Planet Labs is ten years old, and expecting to go public shortly with a valuation of around $2.8 billion. Ari Lewis gave a potted history of the company in a Twitter thread.
- Carlo Ratti found that people (without navigation software) tend to follow their intuition rather than the most effective path when choosing routes, after analysing mobile phone data at MIT.
- Shaun McDonald examined the cycle-friendliness of roadworks during the installation of a new gas main.
- TomTom described how they have made progress in improving quality with their MapMetrics system by removing bad data, e.g. filtering out GPS tracks from people on trains. The map data used during the process is based on OpenStreetMap.
Upcoming Events
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 Nordpfeil, PierZen, RCarlow, SK53, Sammyhawkrad, Strubbl, TheSwavu, arnalielsewhere, derFred.