OpenStreetMap website and related services will be unavailable for short periods between 00:00 CEST (GMT/UTC+2) and 06:00 CEST on Wednesday 26 April.
Mapping
The proposed feature kerb:approach_aid=* is in RFC.
The Louisiana highway classification was approved with 2 yes and 1 comment votes.
CactiStaccingCrane has developed a four-step technique that can help map buildings in very densely populated urban areas, which he calls the ‘Tower of Hanoi‘.
Cartofy described difficulties with the OSM classification guidelines for India. He asked the community for help so that ‘we all have better classified roads’.
SK53 noted that work needs to be done everywhere to improve the mapping of max speeds on highway=primary.
Community
The Software Freedom Association of Taiwan interviewed ► OpenStreetMap Taiwan community member Supaplex. He talked about the local Taiwanese Community and his observations on the Overture Foundation.
KAWAMALAnoted the necessary prerequisites for a successful Mapathon, in a blog post.
OpenStreetMap Foundation
Simon Poole tooted about interesting discoveries he made about the structure of companies associated with the Linux Foundation.
Local chapter news
The OSM community in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has given up► its Twitter account. A move to Mastodon was discussed►, but finally rejected.
Events
HeiGIT will host a mapathon on mapping permafrost as part of the UndercoverEisAgents project on Monday 8 May at 18:00 CEST in the Mathematikon, INF 205 (IWR), Heidelberg.
Maps
Andy Townsend has created a new version of all the code behind map.atownsend.org.uk. It contains the releases for the four repositories – the Lua code, the map style that determines how the map looks, the map legend, and the website for the map itself.
Overture Maps Foundation has pre-released their collaboratively built map dataset as a shared asset for location-based apps.
Programming
Jiri Vlasak wrote about the improvements he has implemented to the ‘Divide and map. Now.’ web client. There is a new client for beginner mappers and a new Quality Assurance page.
Did you know …
… there is a 3D representation of the Swiss canton Jura?
… that topographic maps use isolines to represent points of equal value? Isolines, also called contour lines, are commonly used to show elevation. They can also represent other variables, such as population distribution or magnetism. Here’s a list of common and obscure types of isolines used on maps. The prefix ‘iso’ means ‘equal’.
‘It is indeed true. The benches that the city of Mainz has placed on the banks of the Rhine in the Laubenheim district have their backs to the river and face the car park’, via Klaus Euteneuer►.
The Economisttraced the history of national mapping in Britiain by the Ordnance Survey in an interactive feature.
Picterra have integrated Facebook’s Segment Anything Model into their map application, which allows users to select features on an aerial image with a ‘magic wand’.
HeiGIT, together with the GEORISKS group at the German Aerospace Centre, are currently offering a master’s degree by thesis in the field of machine learning for characterising building inventories for use in natural hazard risk models. The aim of the research is to describe building inventories based on the combination of ubiquitous multispectral satellite imagery and vector data (OSM building footprints).