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09/29/2015–10/05/2015
About us
- thefive wrote a dedicated content management system especially designed for the needs of Wochennotiz and weeklyOSM. This system ensures that the English version of weeklyOSM appears immediately after the German Wochennotiz.
Mapping
- [1] UK Mappers have started their last quarterly project in 2015, on Nature Reserves. The call for the project is supported by this map, made by user SK53. The National Nature Reserves are shown in red, Local ones in blue.
- GPS will be jammed in Scotland during the NATO war games. Please be careful with tracks during this period, and do not upload them to osm.org without close examination!
- User naoliv has used the Mapbox Distance API for quality assurance. With this approach, he found that Parintins (Brazil) was isolated from the rest of the world.
- jorgemendozatorres asks the Mexican community to start mapping «monumental flags«.
- Martijn van Exel presents a JOSM plugin to find «missingRoads» based on aggregated, processed GPS data points. Some first comments on the approach can be found on the talk-us mailing list.
- The French QA tool Osmose now has Mapillary integration.
- User toc-rox reports on a perl script, which can download all OSM-Notes for a bounding box and save the result as a CSV file.
Community
- Dietmar Seifert’s House Number Evaluation tool is now also available for Florence, Italy.
- Open Cage Data published an interview with Jan Marsch, who has conceived and developed OSM Buildings.
- Ten years ago, on September 30, 2005, Immanuel Scholz informed the talk mailing list that he is working on a «standalone Java editor». A few days later, on October 4, 2005, he published the first beta version of the editor called JOSM. We congratulate the developers of the only OSM editing software maintained for ten years.
- Jo Walsh talks about ‘Putting Out Data Fires; life with the OpenStreetMap DWG’ as part of Programmable City’s Data and the City workshop in Maynooth.
- A first brief report on a meeting of the Dutch OSM community with government providers of open data sets. The conclusion from the meeting is that the BGT (basisregistratie topografie — base registration topography) could be used as actual and detailed reference source for mappers, while the OSM community could help with feedback to the BGT.
- OSM veteran Mikel Maron (since 2005 at OSM) now works at Mapbox.
- The Australian OSM community discussed the representation of an airfield as node and way. Different opinions are available 😉
- Stefan Keller from the Hochschule Raperswil has started the project «Zebrastreifen-Safari» (pedestrian crossing safari), which has several objectives. On one hand computer science interns from the Geometa Lab are developing a web application (still in progress!). This application includes among others, internally captured security aspects, as well as publicly available statistics on the state of data in OSM. On the other hand, this project tries to encourage the community to collect data which is useful for routing.
OpenStreetMap Foundation
- OpenStreetMap US board elections are coming up, October 12th — 18th. The current board hosted a question and answer session for aspiring board members; you can watch a recording of the session on Youtube.
- Kate Chapman published a presentation called «The OSM Foundation and You». She calls for joining the Foundation, talks about fundraising and explains why you should «run for the board» 😉
Events
- From September 30 to October 4, the State of the Map Scotland was held in Edinburgh. Unedited videos are already partly online on YouTube. Read the tweets at #sotms15.
- On October 17 and 18, there will be an OSM hackweekend at Geofabrik in Karlsruhe, Germany. More information about the hackweekend and about registration can be found on the OSM wiki.
Humanitarian OSM
- Free aerial imagery collected with satellites, aircraft and drones is crucial for humanitarian organizations. Therefore, HOT created OpenAerialMap to facilitate mapping after a disaster. For more information, see the video.
- The American Red Cross published a «Case Study: Lessons learned from community mapping in urban and rural areas in East Africa and Bangladesh.» (via Andrew Braye)
Maps
- The Belgian artist Hans Hack makes art based on building outlines found in OpenStreetMap.
- On OpenStreetMap.org, tomhughes has integrated the Mapzen routing engine. (via github)
- Real estate portal Trulia made maps of the noisiest neighborhoods in Seattle, San Francisco, New York City using Stamen tiles, OSM data and CartoDB. (via Geekwire)
#switch2OSM
- The German city of Kolbermoor uses an OSM map for a route map of city buses.
Open Data
- The Northern Ireland Ordnance Survey (OSNI) published the «OSNI Large Scale Boundaries — Town Country dataset», exactly 15 days after the mapper StephenCoAntrim mapped with Syunshin the last town in Northern Ireland.
- Pieter Colpaert of Open Knowledge Belgium informs the Belgian OSM mailing list that the GRB will become open data in January 2016. He asks how it can be used in OpenStreetMap, but is also interested to learn about the difficulties to integrate this data into OpenStreetMap. The data contains all information about buildings, parcels, roads and road infrastructure, as well as railroads and waterways. (discussion partly in English and Dutch )
- Mapbox announces new aerial imagery for New Zealand.
Licences
- The Free Software Foundation and the Software Freedom Conservancy have published their Principals of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement. Their aim is to make people comply with the terms of the GPL, and not to gain as much money as possible.
Software
- On September 30th 2015, GeoServer version 2.8 was released.
- The Directions API of GraphHopper now supports motorcycles, mountain bikes and road bikes. The well-known web application Graph Hopper Maps benefits as well. Performance optimizations with Graph Hopper 0.5 reduced the hardware requirements so that more profiles can be offered with the same server hardware of GraphHopper Directions API.
- On October 1st, 2015 MapFactor Navigator Free version 2 was released.
- Apparently, most OsmAnd maps are updated only once a month instead of as hitherto approximately three times per month. Torsten Bronger wrote about it in OsmAnd-Google Group. We recommend to produce your maps on your own with OsmAndMapCreator.
- A new navigation app for Android systems Pocket Maps based on Mapsforge (offline vector maps) and GraphHopper (routing) is available. Attention: in PlayStore there are two apps with the same name.
- The source code of MAPS.ME has been published under Apache License at Github. The Russian OSM blog reports about it. MAPS.ME is an offline map application based on Qt5 framwork for Android, iOS, Windows, Mac and Linux. Teams of Wochennotiz and weeklyOSM are looking for someone who wants to blog at our blog about a hands-on of MAPS.ME and comparison with other OSM-bases offline map applications. Some users at the OsmAnd Google Group think that the rendering engine of MAPS.ME is superior to the OsmAnd rendering engine.
- Cartodb published the data visualization tool Torque.js under an open source license.
- The framework Action Street Map can create a 3D world with Unity3d and OSM data. (via ARTEKLAB)
Did you know …
- … the JOSM map styles and object templates for Finnish traffic signs? The Dutch community has created its own version.
Other “geo” things
- Claus Rinner describes how to print 3D maps. (via Twitter)
- Eric Gundersen, CEO and Tom MacWright are answering for MapBox in an #AMA (Ask Me Anything) questions from the community. Tom discusses the future of the old MapBox Studio (Classic). They will ensure that it will run on new versions of OS X, but not be adding new features.
- Remember kids, Google Maps is better than OpenStreetMap because any prankster can edit OpenStreetMap. 😉
- Beijing is already surrounded by six ring roads, but the seventh will be 940 kilometers long. How many are 940 km for example along a circle, as the Circular Highway of Milan? This blog shows how blogger can create web maps to enhance their articles.
- Mapillary is blogging about a big update to their iOS App.
- Are you looking where Google Maps has a map error? Why don’t you search for «Fehlerbereich» (German for «area with an error»)? You will get to the city center of Dresden, Germany. Do you want to go to Brecon Beacons National Park, Wales? Don’t trust Google! According to BBC, you’ll get to London.
- Can you identify these world cities from their street plans alone?
- Air pollution across the globe in real time.
- Mapillary is now being used to map model railways.
- «NOSOLOSIG» is a free monthly magazine (PDF format) which reports from the field of geographic information technology. The main focus is reports about free software, events, and tutorials in the geographic area.
- Kristian blogs about the relevance problem of walking trails.
- Mapillary also made some improvements to their web based map-browser.
