(English) weeklyOSM 470

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16/07/2019-22/07/2019

picture

ImproveOSM editor by telenav – proposals should be checked on the ground! 1 | © Telenav, JOSM – Map data © OpenStreetmap contributors

Mapping

  • Marc Zoutendijk thinks landuse=village_green is being misused as a tag for all grass covered areas in villages. His post to the mailing list provides the detailed background to his view.
  • The mapping, by Amazon Logistics relying on their own GPS data, of service roads to buildings provoked much discussion in the Germany forum (some comments in German) and a user blog entry.
  • StephaneP provided interesting background on the geodetic datum used by OSM: WGS84. He explained why it is not an accurate description of a position due to tectonic movement and use of differing, largely national, datums for imagery.
  • A mapper complained (de) (automatic translation) in the German forum that another mapper has mistakenly added a oneway tag to a road based on the suggestion of Telenav’s site improveosm.org. However, the issue was apparently one that all QA tools have in common: Hints are perceived as instructions and resulting changes are made without local knowledge.

Community

  • Christoph Hanser from the Trufi Association, an NGO for informal transport in emerging countries, asked (de) (translation) on the German mailing list for volunteers who could help with adding route relations to OSM. However, he received questions about the maintainability and verifiability of the route relations as well as the concern, that an area with too many relations in comparison to the other data could scare off new mappers. He was pointed to the possibility of dealing with the routes outside of OSM using Pfaedle and GTFS-Flex.
  • The OSM forum has been given a responsive (i.e. smartphone-capable) style, Air3, which replaces Victory.

Imports

OpenStreetMap Foundation

  • Joost Schouppe, a member of the OSMF board, asks Foundation members whether the existing rules for becoming a local chapter should be changed.

Events

Humanitarian OSM

  • Alex Glynn advertised the latest HOT newsletter and points to a new two minute tutorial on adding buildings to OpenStreetMap.
  • The website undark.org published an article about how female cartographers and crowd-sourced Maps improve the lives of women in Latin America.

Maps

  • Frank Schmirler shows on his Beacon Map all sorts of beacons and navigational aids in different modes. You may see real fire sectors or the picture from a mariner’s view marking your own position. A new feature allows an OSM background layer instead of Google Maps or a satellite image.

Licences

Software

  • On the Overpass-Turbo website you can now choose a Russian server (in settings): http://overpass.openstreetmap.ru/cgi/. Many users note that this server is significantly faster than others.
  • Russian OSM user AlexPS created a “dark” theme for the online editor iD.

Programming

  • azaadshatru has drafted instructions on how to set up a tile server with the OSM Bright map style, which represents the boundaries of India as required by Indian law.
  • mmd’s GitHub issue to remove the Expanding Bounding Box API function, which was once required to upload a changeset, triggers an idea to block certain areas from being edited at all to prevent vandalism.
  • If you ever wanted to turn your hobby into a career (and you are a US citizen) you might be interested in Development Seed’s job offer as Map Data Engineer.

Releases

  • A new release of Cygnus+, a map comparison tool, is out: Cygnus+.

Did you know …

  • … the tool Antipodes from Datadaptive? The tool shows you the point located on the opposite side of the world from any other position.
  • Surveillance under Surveillance?
  • …that the Russian company Urbica created an interactive GULag History Map? (GULag – Main Directorate of Camps and Places of Incarceration)
  • …that the Russian company NextGIS together with the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts created a geoinformation system “Drawings of the Russian state of XVI-XVII centuries”?

OSM in the media

  • “All the stations” YouTube channel are traveling around the Isle of Man vlogging and visiting all of the railway stations; having previously visited all the stations in England, Scotland and Wales, and more recently all those on the island of Ireland.
    In the latest vlog they mention that there is no good mapping resource for the electric railway on the Isle of Man, save for OpenStreetMap. The presenters made a point, in the video, of thanking all the OSM contributors for their hard work in making the map so detailed.

Other “geo” things

  • The Esri User Conference, which took place 8 to 12 July 2019 in San Diego, California, shows the winner of the 2019 Map Gallery.
  • DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, has added new features to its map services. The features have been added using Apple’s MapKit JS framework.
  • Did you know what the maps of the future will be? Sergei Golubev thinks (ru) (translation) that they will be made as an app with augmented reality technology. Ilya Zverev suggests (ru) (translation) that they won’t exist anymore.
  • Mapbox’ blog reports that the company has added two million boundaries, from different sources such as the US Census and European NUTS, to its Mapxbox Boundaries product.
  • Minecraft Earth, an augmented reality game developed by Microsoft based on OSM data, could become a strong competitor to Pokemon Go. In the summer of 2019 you can register here for a beta test.

Upcoming Events

WhereWhatWhenCountry
DüsseldorfStammtisch2019-07-31germany
DumaguetePista ng Mapa 20192019-08-01-2019-08-03philippines
BochumMappertreffen2019-08-01germany
DresdenStammtisch Dresden2019-08-01germany
KyotoOpenStreetMap誕生日 前祝い会!2019-08-04japan
LondonMissing Maps Mapathon2019-08-06united kingdom
StuttgartStuttgarter Stammtisch2019-08-07germany
San JoséCode for San José Summer Mixer [1]2019-08-08united states
Cottbus134. Brandenburg-Berlin Stammtisch2019-08-09germany
TaipeiOSM x Wikidata #72019-08-12taiwan
BordeauxRéunion mensuelle2019-08-12france
Salt Lake CitySLC Mappy Hour2019-08-13united states
ZurichOSM Stammtisch Zurich2019-08-13switzerland
HamburgHamburger Mappertreffen2019-08-13germany
MunichMünchner Stammtisch2019-08-14germany
MinneapolisState of the Map U.S. 2019 [3]2019-09-06-2019-09-08united states
EdinburghFOSS4GUK 20192019-09-18-2019-09-21united kingdom
HeidelbergErasmus+ EuYoutH OSM Meeting2019-09-18-2019-09-23germany
HeidelbergHOT Summit 20192019-09-19-2019-09-20germany
HeidelbergState of the Map 2019 [4]2019-09-21-2019-09-23germany
DhakaState of the Map Asia 20192019-11-01-2019-11-02bangladesh
WellingtonFOSS4G SotM Oceania 20192019-11-12-2019-11-15new zealand
Grand-BassamState of the Map Africa 20192019-11-22-2019-11-24ivory coast

Note: If you like to see your event here, please put it into the calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM. Please check your event in our public calendar preview and correct it, where appropriate.

This weeklyOSM was produced by Mateusz Konieczny, Nakaner, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, Silka123, Softgrow, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, geologist, jinalfoflia.

2 Replies to “(English) weeklyOSM 470”

  1. Saying “all QA tools have in common: Hints are perceived as instructions and resulting changes are made without local knowledge” puts it too strongly. There are MANY sorts of “QA tools” which do not make any suggestions at all, for example, those that facilitate automated functional testing or which stress certain aspects of the software. It simply isn’t true that “all QA tools have in common” as not all QA tools offer hints.

    While it is generally true that tools which offer hints (often based on machine learning, a more-primitive form of artificial intelligence) that are designed to be reviewed by humans are OFTEN part of the QA efforts to provide high quality to the end user / data consumer, there is much more to QA than such hint-offering tools.

    SteveA