On the tagging mailing list there was a discussion on whether amenity=shelter implies a building=yes tag. Judging from the answers, the topic is more complex than expected.
The OSM US Camera lending program is so popular that the goal needed to keep the camera had to be increased to 1 million OSC contributions, in order to ensure sustainability of the program. This will only affect new applicants.
[1] After Harry Wood featured the FIFA World Cup stadiums on wiki.osm.org as "photo of the week", ШТОСМ studied the maps and imagery for each of them and explains the reasons behind sub-par representation of these stadiums on OSM. Turns out there was no project to map any of these and there is still no recent imagery for the cities. The author points out that OSM still "won" by being used in MAPS.ME, which is the official partner of Rostourism.
Mapbox discontinues its support of their navigation data map.
Norgeibilder is the best available imagery for Norway, and the OSM community obtained permission to use it for mapping. With the latest release of iD the new orthophoto layer is now the default in iD, via the Editor Layer Index. Laser imagery (both DSM and DTM) is also available for the whole country, also through the ELI.
Mapbox has released 184,000 possible turn restrictions for more than 35,000 intersections in 23 cities in the USA. The restrictions can be viewed on a map (takes time to load). The restrictions should be double checked before entering them into OSM.
Community
OSM Belgium has named Matšeliso Thobei (OSM tshedy) from Maseru in Lesotho as Mapper of the month. Matšeliso is currently studying spatial planning in Ireland and has mapped extensively during her 3 years at OSM. In the interview she tells how she came to OSM, explains her motivation and her background.
The first of the Top Ten Tasks, a reporting function and complaint management system for openstreetmap.org, has been in use since June 16. Users, map notes (both by mail to the DWG) and spam diary entries (message in IRC channel #osm-dev) can now be reported in the browser with a few mouse clicks.
nyampire published a blog post about Shinsyu University of International’s switch to OSM. SUI is a fake university and famous for pranks in Japan. As SUI wrote in the html source "In order to avoid harm to OSM" they added their "university" only to a local instance of OSM data.
Events
The SotM Latin America 2018 will take place on September 24th in Buenos Aires. Proposals can be submitted until August 25.
Mappy published its report of SotM-FR 2018. The conference covered many topics, including pedestrian, cyclist and automotive navigation, public transport, humanitarian mapping, tools for mapping and a lot of new ideas.
Education
Víctor Olaya presented his book "Introduction to GIS", available under CC-BY license. You can find it on GitHub.
Maps
Richard Fairhurst shows on Twitter the differences due to the new clustering of bicycle parking spaces on cycle.travel.
Last week’s defibrillator map is – as some readers have noted – not updated. Therefore we would like to draw your attention to two alternatives today: emergency-map by wambacher and defibrillators in Austria.
Christoph Hormann continues his series of suggested improvements to the rendering of water related objects. After his blogpost about waterbodies and fords "Water under the bridge" he follows up with a new post "The way of the water" with suggestions on how to improve the rendering of water barriers i.e. dams, lock gates and weirs as well as water sources, namely fountains and springs. Here is an example implementation that he published on GitHub.
Licences
The EU Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee has endorsed the new EU Copyright Directive, which introduces an ancillary copyright for headlines and text excerpts as well as upload filters. The plenary will vote on it in the first week of July. Wikimedia Germany presents their view. On change.org you can sign a petition against the upload filters and ancillary copyright.
Software
The BBBike extract service now offers OpenStreetMap data extracts in GeoJSON format. The step follows the shutdown of all of Mapzen’s services, including the Metro extracts, where the GeoJSON download was an often used feature. GeoJSON is an open alternative to the proprietary ESRI-Shapefiles.
Mapbox announced the release of RobotSat. While the OSM blog post highlights the feature extraction from aerial and satellite images with "polygon recommendation" at the end, the announcement at mapbox.com also mentions tracking of deforestation, fires and landuse as well as measuring the impact of natural disasters and humanitarian crisis.
With the Robosat recognising multiple features based on the aerial and satellite images, this is a step towards using AI or machine learning for mapping, Christoph Hormann (imagico) points to his own blogpost and we also previously reported about the research paper that talks about issues related to the same.
Programming
The company Sentiance announced Loc2Vec, an AI product to predict human behaviour. The neural network consumes location data like tiles generated by customized OSM-Carto stylesheets and outputs semantic similarity between different locations. Very simple put, the system gets some intuition and can say which venue a person is more likely to visit based on a given inaccurate location.
In the OSM forum a user asks for data sources for city models. He is working on the project OpenGlobus.org that aims to become a JavaScript library that can display interactive 3D maps with map tiles, imagery, vector data, markers and 3D objects.
Biswesh Mohapatra wrote a blog post on his background, how he came to the Google Summer of Code 2018 and his experience about working on the JOSM PT_Assistant plugin.
Princi Vershwal wrote a blog post on her work on Vector Tiles for the iD Editor during the Google Summer of Code project. She prepared the implementation of data in .pbf (Protocolbuffer Binary Format) and .mvt (Mapbox Vector Tiles) format.
Releases
The current release state of the software around OSM can be found on wambacher’s software-wachtlist.
Version 0.9 of the OSM-C-Tools (Osmconvert, Osmupdate, Osmfilter) has been released.
Version 2.9.0 of the iD editor was released. Support for Bing Streetside 360-degree panoramic image layer was added among other features. A Microsoft employee explains on the GitHub pull request which usage of the imagery is permitted and which not.
OSM in the media
The Italian newspaper La Stampa publishes an article about the upcoming State of the Map in Milan.
Grab (the Uber of the East) has been sponsoring a number of mapathons in Myanmar, Indonesia, Philippines, and Singapore. Their latest effort in Malaysia, with 50 university students, has generated a number of articles in the press including this one on Behind the Wheel.
Other “geo” things
Nastya Parygina published an article about FOAM. It is intended to replace more traditional geospatial databases with blockchain technology. It claims to be decentralized, up-to-date due to economic incentives and technology agnostic and has trusted historical data due to blockchain technology with a higher accuracy compared to GPS. A white paper goes a little bit more into the details. With regards to OSM, the article wrote that FOAM will solve the issues of unverified edits and the vandalism in general.
An article on The Conversation discusses why we cannot always trust what we can see in satellite imagery.
Topi Tjukanov wrote an article about the database PostgreSQL with its PostGIS extension, targeting consumers of spatial data. However, the article is worth reading for anyone who wants an easy written explanation of what PostgreSQL and PostGIS are and why it is worth using them.
Xiaomi has launched the world’s first dual-frequency GNSS smartphone, bringing decimetre levels of accuracy to consumer grade equipment. The new GNSS chip BCM47755 used by Xiaomi is able to receive all currently available satellite positioning systems i.e. the European Galileo, the well known US based GPS, the Russian GLONASS, the Chinese Beidou and the Japanese system called QZSS.
Upcoming Events
Where
What
When
Country
Mumble Creek
OpenStreetMap Foundation public board meeting
2018-06-21
Leoben
Stammtisch Obersteiermark
2018-06-21
Essen
Mappertreffen
2018-06-22
Kyoto
幕末京都マッピングパーティ#05:会津藩と京都守護職
2018-06-23
Essen
4. OSM-Sommercamp und 10. FOSSGIS-Hackingevent im Linuxhotel
2018-06-22-2018-06-24
Amagasaki
あまらぶBosai literacy+:地域防災マップ作成講座
2018-06-24
Rome
Incontro mensile
2018-06-25
Bremen
Bremer Mappertreffen
2018-06-25
Lübeck
Lübecker Mappertreffen
2018-06-28
Dusseldorf
Stammtisch
2018-06-29
Stuttgart
Stuttgarter Stammtisch
2018-07-04
Bochum
Mappertreffen
2018-07-05
Urspring
Stammtisch Ulmer Alb
2018-07-05
Ise
世古をマッピング!:伊勢マッピングパーティ
2018-07-07
Munich
Münchner Stammtisch
2018-07-10
Cologne
Köln Stammtisch
2018-07-11
Berlin
121. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch
2018-07-12
Milan
State of the Map 2018 (international conference)
2018-07-28-2018-07-30
Dar es Salaam
FOSS4G & HOT Summit 2018
2018-08-29-2018-08-31
Buenos Aires
State of the Map Latam 2018
2018-09-24-2018-09-25
Detroit
State of the Map US 2018
2018-10-05-2018-10-07
Bengaluru
State of the Map Asia 2018 (effective date to confirm)
2018-11-17-2018-11-18
Melbourne
FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2018
2018-11-20-2018-11-23
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.