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.
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.
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.
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.
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” 😉
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.
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 )
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.MEhas 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.
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.
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?
“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.