07/01/2020-13/01/2020

Mapping

Andrew Wiseman, from Apple, announced a new MapRoulette challenge for issues with roads and routing in Haiti, which have been identified by the Atlas data analysis tool.

Tesla’s plan to build Gigafactory 4 in Germany (Grünheide, Brandenburg), has generated strong interest in the OSM community. In mapping the changes during construction users are cautioned not to use outdated or copyrighted plans. Some edits of this kind already needed to be reverted. User Polarbear started a Wiki page (automatic translation) to collect information usable in OSM.

(automatic translation) to collect information usable in OSM. In memory of Qasem Soleimani, the popular Iranian General, many roads and places are being named after him in Iran starting last week. This will be reflected on OSM shortly. OSM user iriman posted (automatic translation) a diary entry on how he added name:etymology=* and name:etymology:wikidata=* tag to these places.

and tag to these places. OSM user ‘the_node_less_traveled’ reported about the MapWithAI plugin for JOSM, which allows JOSM users to work with the features detected by Facebook’s recently introduced MapWithAI tool. The tool is intended for users with an unstable internet connection or who don’t want to use the iD editor derivative RapiD.

Community

Mikko Tamura informed about a mapathon for LGBT spaces and HIV facilities, which will take place in Cebu City, Philippines on 14 March 2020 and specifies the sources and the tagging schema in a follow-up mail on OSM’s diversity mailing list. The project got a write-up by Gmanetwork.

Jorge Sanz reported (automatic translation), in his blog, about the progress made in 2019 by the project #1calle1nombre (automatic translation). of the OSM Spain community. This project seeks to fill in the name tag for every street in the country.

Imports

karitotp reports in her OSM diary that in recent months the DevSeed-Data team and other community members in Peru added around 6,200 new health centres to OpenStreetMap thanks to data found on Peru’s National Open Data Portal, and now has a more detailed map of health centres in Peru.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Dorothea announced that draft minutes from the OSMF board meeting on 23 December 2019 are now available.

Events

The 2020 FOSSGIS conference in Freiburg-im-Breisgau has now published the programme and opened ticket sales.

and opened ticket sales. The programme for the FOSDEM Geospatial dev room is also available. The conference takes place in Brussels on 1 and 2 February 2020, with geo sessions on the Sunday.

The first Maptime Salzburg this year, to be held on 23 January, will focus on digitising the outlines of buildings using satellite images for use by organisations such as Doctors without Borders.

Humanitarian OSM

Joost Schouppe announced the second draft of the procedure for the planned OSMF microgrants and asks for community feedback.

Azavea, a company offering geospatial technology services, carried out a global calculation of the UN Rural Access Indicator. The indicator (detailed description) is a proxy for a population’s access to the road network. It was introduced by the World Bank in 2006 and later adopted by UN. The company calculates the indicator based on data from OSM for the road network, WorldPop for population data, and the Global Urban-Rural Mapping Project for urban/rural classification.

VentureBeat reported about the efforts of Intel, the Red Cross and other parties to use AI in the identification of unmapped bridges and roads from satellite imagery. It also reports on the existing, technology based mapping efforts of Facebook and Microsoft. It is not clear from the article (or the associated Intel press release) whether data so generated can be used in OpenStreetMap.

The website Mail & Guardian reported about the efforts to map Makoko, a floating slum in the Nigerian city Lagos, to give it a cartographic identity and thereby forcing the local authority to include the suburb into their development planning rather than to deny its existence.

Maps

Jason Le Vaillant hopes to have produced the most detailed and useful topographic map of New Zealand.

Mapillary is hiring for a range of positions including designers and marketers.

Software

Robert Whittaker announced an additional mapping QA tool for the UK: construction sites which have not been edited in over a year. In many cases work will have been completed, or at least merit an additional survey.

Releases

Heidelberg University’s GIScience Research Group announced the release of version 0.6 of openrouteservice. Although there are some new features such as alternative routes and round trip routing, the majority of the changes were in the backend code.

After several weeks “offline”, the OSM Software Watchlist, from wambacher, is available again with all the current releases.

Did you know …

[1] … Ethermap from Chris Lamby, who tried OSM once 😉 ? Like Etherpad or Ethercalc, Ethermap is a tool for distributed working, here to create a simple collaborative map. The source code is available on GitLab.

… the current tasks on maproulette.org? There you will surely find something in your area.

… Bushfire.io, a map which consolidates information on Australian bushfires from multiple sources.

… the site latlong.net, which lets you find the geographic coordinates of a position easily?

… Habr now has Russian translations of weeklyOSM.

of weeklyOSM. … that OSM-US now produces a monthly newsletter? The January issue is out now.

Other “geo” things

Quoctrung Bui and Emily Badger write, in their New York Times column “The Upshot”, about the expansion of urban areas in the US over the last 10 years. For the article they asked Descartes Labs to identify these changes using machine learning.

Marc Prioleau tweets about an article in Ars Technica about some of the extraordinary technology used to provide driving aids before the advent of GPS.

There’s now a GTFS feed for the San Francisco Bay Area. An observant reader on Hacker News noticed that the ACE train (which runs here) is missing. The route is missing because they don’t currently have geometries for the route alignment, so a suggestion was made to “Send an intern with a logging GPS”. It’ll never work …Joking apart, Interline, a mobility data and service company that provides the GTFS feed, has a number of OSM extracts available (they’ve continued where Mapzen left off), and in the Bay Area the Valley Transportation Authority has worked closely with OSM in a number of areas, including sidewalk mapping.

It appears that relatively few American voters can locate Iran on a map.

The German National Geographic site, part of Fox News, published (automatic translation) a selection of vintage maps from the 130 years of the society and its magazine.

(automatic translation) a selection of vintage maps from the 130 years of the society and its magazine. Geospatial World blogged about the mapping industry, which, according to the author of the blog article, Sarah Hisham, is maturing from mapping and navigation to analytics and intelligence. The development is driven by the increasing importance of location data for businesses. Companies like SAP and IBM are integrating location data and analytics into their business intelligence solutions.

NASA reported about a study, which says that near-real-time satellite data could cut costs and save time for emergency responders in a disaster. The overall concept also includes the use of the openrouteservice based on OSM data.

Upcoming Events

Where What When Country Dortmund Mappertreffen 2020-01-17 Cologne Bonn Airport 125. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch 2020-01-21 Lüneburg Lüneburger Mappertreffen 2020-01-21 Nottingham Nottingham pub meetup 2020-01-22 Bratislava Missing Maps Mapathon Bratislava #8 2020-01-23 Lübeck Lübecker Mappertreffen 2020-01-23 Salzburg Maptime Salzburg – Mapathon 2020-01-23 Ivrea Incontro mensile 2020-01-25 Rome Incontro mensile Roma 2020-01-27 Zurich Missing Maps Mapathon Zürich 2020-01-29 Budapest Budapest gathering 2020-02-03 London Missing Maps London 2020-02-04 Stuttgart Stuttgarter Stammtisch 2020-02-05 Dortmund Mappertreffen 2020-02-07 Turin FOSS4G-it/OSMit 2020 2020-02-18-2020-02-22 Riga State of the Map Baltics 2020-03-06 Freiburg FOSSGIS-Konferenz 2020-03-11-2020-03-14 Chemnitz Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2020-03-14-2020-03-15 Valcea EuYoutH OSM Meeting 2020-04-27-2020-05-01 A Guarda EuYoutH OSM Meeting 2020-06-24-2020-06-28 Cape Town State of the Map 2020 2020-07-03-2020-07-05

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This weeklyOSM was produced by Elizabete, NunoMASAzevedo, Polyglot, Robot8A, Rogehm, SK53, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred.