Since last few days, an increased activity has been detected by newcomers who are targeting Pokémon Go – unfortunately, the term of "vandalism" is applicable to many of those changes. Michael explains in his blog how to find Pokémon mappers and deal with them. Mic.com reported as well.
Eric Rodenbeck summarizes the past year for his company Stamen Design and presents all the accomplished projects.
Following the discussion about Bing Maps imagery updates, @katpatuka underlines the importance of filling in the gaps, for example, in Turkey.
Inspired by the "Belgium Welcome Tool" from user M1dgard, user sabas88 wrote a new "Italian Welcome Tool" from scratch. It is available on GitHub. Regarding different languages sabas88 told us: "Currently the language function is made only for the ‘snippets’. Each snippet is a reusable message template (or part of it) you can drag to make the message. Internationalization of the proper software is in my mind, but actually I still need to do it."
On January 25 and for the first time, more than 6000 mappers were active on OpenStreetMap in one day, as Pascal Neis reported on Twitter.
OpenStreetMap Foundation
Ilya Zverv published details and statistics on the last OSMF board election.
Humanitarian OSM
In early January, 60 students met in Bagamoyo, Tanzania, to learn how to map in OSM.
Rebecca Firth, HOT Community Partnerships Manager, participated at the UN World Data Forum in South Africa. The achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) takes place with the support of the HOT community. An example is the fight against malaria. The UN conference participants were very impressed by the work and the results achieved by the OSM map support.
Missing Maps thank their 20,000 volunteers for their efforts. We too take the opportunity to congratulate them.
The HOT Task Manager is currently very slow because another program regularly consumes a lot of resources on the same server.
Maps
A map about the Syrian war in 2017 uses tiles from the German style OSM tile server as a background, causing overload to the server. Maybe the German style, which is maintained by Sven Geggus, was preferred for its labeling countries and cities in both Latin and Arabic.
Mapzen reported in their blog about graphical changes that their maps (style) offer and also regarding API keys.
OpenRouteService introduces "E-bike and Level of Fitness" into its routing application.
Joshua Comeau has created a nice map that visualizes the activities of Unsplash. Unsplash is a photo community where you can get free high-resolution photos is under CC0. In an article Joshua explained the background to his map.
User aromatiker asks how to map whiskey distilleries. The Whiskymap is according to his opinion by far not yet complete.
switch2OSM
Florian Lainez points out that the DuckDuckGo search engine has OpenStreetMap as an option for directions.
The SNCF, the French National Railway Company, uses OSM in their TGV. (via 0x010C)
Mapzen now supplies map data for all smart devices with the operating system Tizen.
Pokémon Go named OSM in South Korea as a data source.
Software
The University of Heidelberg experimented with deep learning methods to automatically detect populated areas in rural regions .
Programming
Mapbox writes about Project Atlas that turns blueprints into maps – ingesting thousands of drawings and work orders per project, converting them from building information modeling (BIM) and computer-aided design (CAD) formats to Mapbox vector tiles, and making them interactive with Mapbox GL JS.
Panier Avide reports in his user blog on the Pic4Carto.js JavaScript library, which places georeferenced images from various sources (Flickr, OpenStreetCam, Mapillary) on a map.
Mapbox has released its MapboxNavigation.swift as open source, which provides an SDK for routing applications for iOS.
… Disaster Mapping and Management from the University of Heidelberg? Heidelberg supports humanitarian activities in disaster management through innovative technologies and services using OSM.
… OSMstats by Pascal Neis? The site contains a lot of interesting statistics about OpenStreetMap.
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This weeklyOSM was produced by Nakaner, Peda, Rogehm, Spec80, YoViajo, derFred, jinalfoflia, kreuzschnabel.