11/22/2016-11/28/2016

About us

We are in deep grief and we express great sorrow because of the loss of our beloved friend Thomas Bellmann also known as Malenki. Malenki was last week on a piligrimage in Spain, where he breathed his last breath, after an accidental fall off a cliff. Thomas was an avid contributor to weeklyOSM, an active OpenStreetMap mapper for over 9 years, a programmer, documentary writer and a photographer. We wish to express our sincere condolences to his mother, family and friends. We are saddened by this loss and he will always remain in our thoughts.

Mapping

BharataHS, a data analyst working at Mapbox, describes two procedures for detecting and repairing invalid multipolygons, and invites everyone to investigate and repair the invalid polygons in their respective area.

Michael Tsang presents his proposal for flight routes. It is similar to public transport tagging.

As a tribute to the deceased mapper Malenki, the Spanish community invites mappers to make the region where he met his death, the best mapped in Spain.

Edith Quispe aka ediyes shared a blog post about the events that the Mapbox team hosted as a part of Geography Awareness Week. The Ayacucho office organized a mapathon last Friday to build awareness around geography and continuous growth of the local OpenStreetMap community. Over 15 university students were a part of this and were eager to learn about OpenStreetMap and join the community.

There are three proposals with voting status: François Lacombe has provided a detailed description of power switching devices. Michael Tsang presents his proposal for public transport services which change routing between lines. Those who are interested in nature can vote on bird nesting aids mounted on a mast or tower.

Simon Poole summarizes his visit of Wherecamp 2016 in Berlin and reports about Simple Indoor Tagging that he did help to create.

Martijn van Exel proposes to use the “fixme” tag on seasonal issues to make sure they are again taken care of in time.

José Sánchez created a proposal for tagging 3D printer shops and asks for comments.

The tagging mailing list discussed the collection of helicopter landing sites for crises operations.

Community

[1] Christoph Hormann describes his advances in the rendering of large water bodies in the lower zoom levels and shows some impressive examples of his work.

Clifford Snow writes about his work to increase the number of mappers in his area.

The OpenStreetMap community of Ivory Coast (OSM_CI) is the winner of the 2nd Best Young Digital Initiative Award in Ivory Coast. They received the prize from the Ivorian Minister of the Digital Economy and the Post, Government Spokesman Bruno Nabagné Koné.

Martijn van Exel reports in the Improve OSM blog that, the Telenav-supported OpenStreetView project has been renamed to OpenStreetCam. 12 Million images have been collected so far.

Roland started a discussion about a major change of the second level landing pages in the OSM wiki.

Imports

Brian M Hamlin writes about the ongoing problems with the import of small-scale landuse parcels in Fresno county, California. After detailed analysis he suggests a deletion criteria to clean up the data.

There’s now also discussion on the import mailing list about Thomas Konrad’s JOSM plugin to add address data in Austria (we reported earlier).

mailing list about Thomas Konrad’s JOSM plugin to add address data in Austria (we reported earlier). Andrea Musuruane has plans to import data in in the Province of Biella (Italy).

Brandon Liu announces a planned import of building heights in San Francisco. The initiative seems to be motivated by Mapbox GL JS. A discussion ensues about how involved the local the mappers are, and the initiator of the project explains his motivation.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Frederik Ramm, the treasurer of the OSM Foundation, reported to weeklyOSM about the donation goal of the OSMF being achieved as soon as the transfer of donations received by FOSSGIS e.V. (German OSM department) for OSMF are completed. Thanks to all donors worldwide! You can still continue donating of course.

Christoph reminds everyone that this year’s OSMF AGM is on the 10th of December. The wiki features a list of candidates for the two available seats, along with their answers to a large number of questions.

Humanitarian OSM

A mapathon will be organized in Lyon by @Coworking Lyon, L’atelier des Médias on the 20th of December (see here) for more information, in French automatic translation).

HOT started its yearly donation drive and therefore created a little video for motivation.

Maps

A new global WebMap prototype OSMLanduse.org has been launched by GIScience Research Group, Heidelberg. In the blog post GISRG Heidelberg says: “Therefore our aim is to evaluate the overall possibility and suitability of OpenStreetMap (OSM) data for these specific purposes (landuse and landcover information), identify ways for improvement and to provide all this information globally to the interested communities in an automated way.”

Planemad says: “Excellent writeup highlighting the cultural data issues on temples and language tags on the map”, on a blog post by Supaplex describing his SOTM Asia talk about localized tagging.

Software

Skobbler founder Philipp Kandal (now VP of OSM at Telenav) explains in his blog post how and why Telenav works on the future of mapping for OSM, using OpenStreetCam, computer vision and deep learning.

Dennis Nienhüser announced Version 1.0 of Marble Maps for Android devices.

Paul Norman compares and rates the different alternatives to serve vector tiles.

Programming

Jochen Topf summarizes the most important changes in Osmium in a blog post.

Releases

Provided by the OSM Software Watchlist.

(*) unfree software. See: freesoftware.

Did you know …

… the BRouter-Web-Client to schedule your next ride?

… the service Meshu, who makes a necklace out of your favorite map region?

OSM in the media

The Ottawa Sun reports on Statistic Canada’s pilot project to collect data in partnership with OSM mappers. This has turned into a somewhat controversial import.

Other “geo” things

It seems that every news service are reporting that San Francisco’s Millennium Tower is sinking faster than expected, and tilting to one side. However the real news is that the ESA satellite analysis used is capable of monitoring changes elsewhere, include earthquake-prone areas.

Invisible Cities have trained a neuronal network to automatically generate satellite imagery out of map data. The only question that remains: Will there be a fixpoint if combined with e.g. Facebook’s extractor 😉

The Swiss newspaper “Der Tagesanzeiger“ reported that Terraloupe, a company in Munich, works on a software to recognize and map buildings, construction projects, tree populations or water bodies automatically out of aerial photography.

Betsy Mason from National Geograhic published an article called “The Best New Maps, According to Cartographers”

GeoSLab briefly outlines the differences between raster and vector tiles.

Upcoming Events

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 appropiate..

This weeklyOSM was produced by Hakuch, Peda, Polyglot, Rogehm, SomeoneElse, Spec80, YoViajo, derFred, jcoupey, jinalfoflia, kreuzschnabel, widedangel.