02/07/2019-08/07/2019

About us

ERRATUM: In weeklyOSM #467 we wrote “The Japan Times reported that Benin is now proud to have a modern digital map to replace the last map from 1957”. Actually the link to OSM was wrong, as it directed to a city in Nigeria and not to Benin the country. Besides this, the geodata produced through this project led by IGN France International, as in many former French colonies, is unfortunately not open at all, despite it have been part funded by public EU funds.

Mapping

Joseph Eisenberg has rewritten the Good Practice wiki page and started a discussion about his changes at the general Talk mailing list. While the edits were broadly accepted with some minor exceptions, he was criticised for editing before discussing the changes.

Joseph Eisenberg announced the start of voting for his proposal for the tag waterway=tidal_channel .

. User higa4 analyzed the state of Japanese mapping as of the first half of 2019.

the state of Japanese mapping as of the first half of 2019. Maning Sambale wrote about his visit with other Philippine colleagues in Lupang Arenda, Taytay, Rizal and shared insights about the field mapping activity organised with the local village government to collect aerial and street-level imagery for use by the community in their governance, development, and disaster preparedness programmes. He mentions the free workshops in next month’s Pista Ng Mapa local conference in the Philippines, which will be facilitated by the same team of volunteer drone operators.

SilentSpike’s suggestion to implement a warning in iD when landuse is connected to highways was discussed and, as usual, there are diverse opinions..

Community

[1] This year OpenStreetMap will celebrate its 15th birthday on 9 August 2019. Details on the celebration events are being collected at the wiki.

SeverinGeo published a Twitter moment about two weeks of OSM and free Geomatics training in Nouakchott (Mauritanie) targeted to the local OSM community and stakeholders from the research, development and local authorities. The courses were facilitated with the help of members of Nigerian and Senegalese communities with the support of the International Organisation of Francophonie (OIF).

In 2017, Zoe Gardner conducted a survey on the gender and some further demographic data of mappers and analysed their HDYC profiles. Her detailed findings have now been published in a peer-reviewed paper. Men were typically the more active mappers. There were no major differences between genders in the use of some of the important keys that HDYC represented at the time.

The OSM Forum now has a responsive (i.e. suitable for smartphones) style called Victory. You can enable it in your forum profile at the item “Display”.

The Grab team in the Philippines hosted a mapathon and describe the successful event in a blog post.

Harry Potter Wizards Unite is a new location-based augmented reality game from Niantic, the creators of Ingress and Pokémon Go. Gregory played the game on his Mapper Diaries channel and took a look at how it uses OpenStreetMap data.

A reminder that nominations for the annual OSM Awards can be submitted until 15 July.

An offline mapathon took place (translation) on 22 June in Kommunarka (Moscow, Russia), where a new metro station was opened recently. Five people took part in this activity. They walked through several areas of the village and collected a lot of information, which they now use for editing this area in OSM.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

OSMF board member Joost Schouppe announced that the board will carry out regular surveys ahead of every major OSM event. The survey is not meant as a popularity poll but to listen to people, who otherwise might not be heard.

Events

Humanitarian OSM

HOT is collecting building outlines to measure exposure risk in Tanzania. For the assessment, mappers digitised more than 10,955 buildings and 20 mappers collected data on the ground.The blog post outlines the background of the project, how the data was gathered and how it will be used, and gives an idea of the challenges faced.

Education

Jean-François Perrat has published a guide to the organisation of a mapathon or a participatory map session in class. Starting with the basics and what tools are available, a possible implementation in class is also described. (automatic translation)

Maps

Darafei “Komяpa” (Kotyara) Praliaskouski wrote about a map displaying a density comparison between population and the count of OpenStreetMap objects.

switch2OSM

The Civil Protection in the Azores used OpenStreetMap, at least during an exercise.

The Russian Cycling Federation used an OSM map in a leaflet for the Russian Cycling Championship and Competition which took place in Belgorod on 26 to 30 June.

Open Data

Nikolai Janakiev created an online presentation with a comparison of Wikidata and OSM.

The European Commission has published a map with an OSM background displaying company locations in the EU which are trading with Mercosur, the South American trade bloc.

Software

The developers of Maps.Me have significantly simplified the process of installing a map generator for their application. It’s now available as a docker-container which allows the creation of fresh maps for Maps.Me even for inexperienced users. It currently only works on Linux.

Mateusz Konieczny posted results of testing how new users interact with StreetComplete (UX testing).

Programming

iD users may become able to change the style of the map in the editor. The iD maintainer Quincy Morgan calls the feature, which is similar to “Map Styles” in JOSM, “Lenses”.

Andy Allan blogged about his work on the OSM website/API in June. Among other things, the processing of GPX uploads was improved and a new /api/versions call was introduced. This new call allows users to find out which versions the API supports and makes it possible to run multiple API versions in parallel.

Releases

The iD team has released version v2.15.3 of the popular editor. The changes in the new version, which is already in use at osm.org, are detailed at GitHub.

Did you know …

The Vatican City is the source of many mysteries. The area of the small country seems to be one of these. Frank Gavaerts claims that Wikipedia and “every single source … says it’s 44 ha, including britannica.com” but the JOSM plugin measures 0.49 km².

You have probably seen the Image of the week on the OSM main wiki page but do you know how you can propose an image? It’s very simple and documented here.

… that you can have the whole world rendered in the console? You can access a demo server via Telnet, or you can run the map yourself.

… how to tag the fuels available at a petrol station? It’s recommended to use generic names for different types of fuel instead of local names or brands to keep the data consistent world-wide. The Wiki documents these values, but in total there are more than 500 different “fuel:*” tags in use – most of them undocumented and used only a few times each.

… the Beacon map which animates how they look and blink? The GitHub hosted project uses seamark:light:sequence and also uses the seamark:light:range and seamark:light:colour tags.

and also uses the and tags. …that the Russian company NextGIS created an information system of cultural and historical heritage of Rostov land (Yaroslavl region, Russia)? On the map you can find historical places, sacred places, estates and even places where healers lived. (automatic translation)

an information system of cultural and historical heritage of Rostov land (Yaroslavl region, Russia)? On the map you can find historical places, sacred places, estates and even places where healers lived. (automatic translation) … that the Russian mapper FreeExec has created a lot of validators for OSM? You can find on his personal website: a visualisation of the Russian Federation’s power supply grid, the validation of substations over 35 kV, railway stations of Russia and many other things. (automatic translation)

OSM in the media

Valeriy Trubin continues his series of interviews with the Russian OSM community. This time he talked to the municipal official from Tolyatti (Samara region, Russia) Elena Balashova (translation), who allowed the use of EMGIS data in OSM, and Anton Belichkov (translation) from Magnitogorsk (Chelyabinsk region, Russia), who has been an OSM mapper for 10 years.

Other “geo” things

Alex Parsons tweeted about a study in which the authors analysed the problems reported on the fixmystreet website to see whether there was a difference in reporting between the sexes. They found that men were more likely to report problems related to driving and women more likely to report problems related to walking.

In France, the conseil général de l’environnement et du développement durable published (translation) a report indicating that the prefectures have interpreted quite liberally the possibility of revising IGN hydrography maps, eliminating many small rivers. In a country where Open Data is considered important, many criticisms followed (1 translation , 2 translation, 3 translation, 4 translation) highlighting attempts to avoid the environmental obligations for these waterways.

highlighting attempts to avoid the environmental obligations for these waterways. K.M. Alexander extracted icons from old maps such as Isola di Malta, from 1686, or Terræ Sanctæ, from 1660, and made the icons available under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

The NZZ reports about the influence of Google Maps on the representation of territorial claims and border conflicts (“Google Maps war”) and what happens if an entire city disappears by mistake for a month… (automatic translation)

The Guardian features an article about the app Guthook Guides, which provides information on hikes, wilderness regions and trails worldwide, and the unintended consequences caused by the increasing reliance of users on their phones when navigating through the wilderness.

Mike reports (translation) on his homepage #geoObserver that, despite the disappearance of one method, the creation of building footprint maps from OSM data using an overpass turbo query, even within QGIS, is not a big problem.

A video about the new features of QGIS 3.8 (Zanzibar).

Upcoming Events

Where What When Country Dortmund Mappertreffen 2019-07-12 Cologne Bonn Airport Bonner Stammtisch 2019-07-16 Lüneburg Lüneburger Mappertreffen 2019-07-16 Viersen OSM Stammtisch Viersen 2019-07-16 Mannheim Mannheimer Mapathons e.V 2019-07-17 Maebashi 第1回 MissionDayまえばし マッピングパーティ 2019-07-20 Bremen Bremer Mappertreffen 2019-07-22 Nottingham Nottingham pub meetup 2019-07-23 Reading Missing Maps Reading Mapathon 2019-07-23 Salt Lake City SLC Map Night 2019-07-23 Maebashi 第1回 MissionDayまえばし もくもく会 2019-07-23 Lübeck Lübecker Mappertreffen 2019-07-25 Santa Fe State of the Map Argentina 2019 2019-07-27 Kamakura 鎌倉マッピングパーティ 2019-07-27 Düsseldorf Stammtisch 2019-07-31 Dumaguete Pista ng Mapa 2019 2019-08-01-2019-08-03 Minneapolis State of the Map U.S. 2019 [2] 2019-09-06-2019-09-08 Edinburgh FOSS4GUK 2019 2019-09-18-2019-09-21 Heidelberg Erasmus+ EuYoutH OSM Meeting 2019-09-18-2019-09-23 Heidelberg HOT Summit 2019 2019-09-19-2019-09-20 Heidelberg State of the Map 2019 [3] 2019-09-21-2019-09-23 Wellington FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2019 2019-11-12-2019-11-15 Grand-Bassam State of the Map Africa 2019 2019-11-22-2019-11-24

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.

This weeklyOSM was produced by Elizabete, Nakaner, PierZen, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, SeverinGeo, Silka123, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, geologist, jinalfoflia, k_zoar, muramototomoya.