10/04/2016-10/10/2016

About us

This year’s OSM donation drive is still running. weeklyOSM says thank you to: Peter Karich (Graphhopper) for 1000 Euro, Florian Schenk (500 Euro), Viktar Shcherb (OsmAnd team) for 300 Euro, Andreas Geyer-Schulz, Markus Hallermann, Henri Geist and Julian Hollingbery each for 200 Euro and all the other donors to OSMF.

Mapping

Last week Mexico launched (automatic translation) their first cableway for public transportation: the ‘Mexicable’. The importance of the Mexicable is that it will be able to transport people from the poor neighborhoods of the suburbs of the capital. @federicomena asked (automatic translation) OSMers in Mexico to help map the stations. A week later the stations were mapped on OSM.

Ziltoidium asks in the German Forum, whether one can exert influence on bicycle routing by means of special tagging. (automatic translation)

in the German Forum, whether one can exert influence on bicycle routing by means of special tagging. (automatic translation) Claudio Cossio reported about photomapping in Cuba on the occasion of the International Free Software Conference .

The weekly roundup by Krishna Nammala (Mapbox) about suspicious changes that were commented or reverted.

Community

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Skrill.com, a payment service you have to use if you use Flattr, owes the OSMF £ 500 and refuses to pay its debts.

Events

Harry Wood published a recap of this year’s SotM in the OSM blog.

Daniel and Victor reminds about this year’s SotM LatAm (Latin America) that takes place in São Paulo from 25 to 27 November .

. In Tuscany (in the area of Alta Versilia) a hiking mapping party took place from September 30 until October 02.

Humanitarian OSM

Dale Kunce reported in the HOT blog about the great mapping achievements accomplished by more than 1,000 volunteers in recent days. However, further aid is needed for the areas affected by Hurricane Matthew in Haiti.

Fredy Rivera called on October 10 for help to map two threatened villages around the volcano Cerro Machín (automatic translation) in Colombia. The mapping is already finished: Task1, Task2. It would be nice if experienced JOSM mappers could validate the data.

Maps

Anton of Transit wrote a very detailed and quite interesting explanation of how they autogenerate their transit maps for their supported cities worldwide.

Srikanth Lakshmanan reported that he has installed a language selection for 12 languages for India openstreetmap.in.

Open Data

DigitalGlobe delivered the latest satellite imagery after Hurricane Matthew’s catastrophe in Haiti under a CC BY license for humanitarian organizations such as HOT and the American Red Cross. Many of the images are also now available in OpenAerialMap, both for download and as map services.

Programming

Klokan Technologies (known for their OSM2VectorTiles) started OSMNames, a new project that features basic place search functionality.

Mapzen published a new API called Libpostal to expand address data into component parts (like house number, street, city etc.).

Kepta, a GSoC intern, summarizes his contribution over the summer. He worked on building a lane editor for iD.

Releases

Provided by the OSM Software Watchlist.

Did you know …

… that you can use BBBike to extract an area from Planet.osm and convert it into one of many supported formats?

… WhirlyGlobes Maply, a toolkit for Android and iOS that provides visualizations in OpenGL ES for maps with many features?

…. about the smallest street in Nottingham which Alex covers in details in his report?

OSM in the media

Spanish newspaper, Las Provincias reported in the group “Geovoluntariado” of Polytechnic University of Valencia who organized a mapathon to update the areas affected by hurricane Matthew.

The University of Gijon held an experimental workshop (automatic translation) within the framework of the INCUNA VIII Conference in which free use technologies are used to collect data of all kinds, visible and invisible, on buildings. The underlying intention (apart from practicing with OSM) is to extract useful information about the potential and use of public space.

Other “geo” things

One year after the historic agreement in the border conflicts between India and Bangladesh the Indian-Bangladeshi enclaves are still in Google Maps.

Wendy Lee from the San Francisco Chronicle reported from the Google Summit in California, where Jen Filzpatrick (Head of Google Maps) talks about the challenge of creating maps for self-driving cars. The competition like Mapillary is mentioned. The OSM-based Trulia website is also mentioned in relation to the limits of Google Maps’ timeliness.

Google has published Cartographer, a library running on ROS for building SLAM applications.

TanDEM-X, from the German Aerospace Agency, makes available a “seamless 3-dimensional world map of unprecedented accuracy“.

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 weekly was produced by Laura Barroso, Nakaner, Peda, Polyglot, Rogehm, SomeoneElse, YoViajo, derFred, giovand, jinalfoflia, seumas.