16/01/2018-22/01/2018

Mapping

Open Data Institute Cardiff have announced a beta-test version Welsh-language map of Wales based on OpenStreetMap. It joins two other Celtic languages Breton and Irish which already have dedicated OSM-based maps. Carl Morris describes his approach to rendering. There are many Welsh names still missing from OSM.

Now that OsmAnd has started rendering deserts, Warin has started a thread on the talk-au mailing list about how to properly map them. The discussion mentions the climatic definition of desert and the difficulty in mapping fuzzy boundaries of such areas.

Daniel wrote about how to place motorway junction nodes — typically, those that connect a motorway to a motorway_link way — for improved routing. Discussions follow in the comments.

Reddit user Toxx8 asked for help on /r/openstreetmap about the import of an official dataset from Queensland, Australia, and the related licensing hurdles. The discussion is continuing on the talk-au mailing list.

Mappa Mercia writes a blog post about an import that led to erroneous petrol station data within OpenStreetMap, they have captured some of this and added it a “fixme” tag to it. This will help anyone to identify and fix these errors.

François Lacombe points out that the voting process on the hydropower proposal has begun.

Brian Prangle of Mappa Mercia writes an article about the future of phoneboxes in the UK. The plans include the removal of half of the phoneboxes and the repurposal of the others: Brian mentions the subsequent tagging challenges and the unfortunate unwillingness of British Telecom to share their data with OSM.

Community

[1] Christian Quest has been combining hobbies: baking cakes imprinted with the OSM logo.

Jan Kinne and Bernd Rensch from the Centre for European Economic Research have analysed location samples of software companies on a microgeographic level using OpenStreetMap data in Germany (Paper as PDF). The main limiting factor in accuracy is the absence of fine grained geospatial data on socio-economic demographics..

OpenStreetMap Foundation

The OSMF Board meeting that took place on January 18th was continued, and concluded, on January 25th.

OSMF published the minutes from the recent board meeting, Christoph Hormann (aka imagico) shares his views on the same as a diary post and that elicited lots of reactions from the board members.

The minutes of the meetings of the Communications Working Group of 19 December 2017 and 16 January 2018 as well as the data working group of the OSMF of 11 January 2018 are online.

OSM-US is seeking candidates for the upcoming board election. The post also sets out the goals for 2018: hiring an executive director, becoming an official local chapter and redesigning the web site.

Events

There is still time to apply for scholarships to attend the State of the Map 2018 conference in Milan. The deadline is February 14th. Some useful tips are provided for applicants to enhance their chances of receiving financial support from the programme.

Humanitarian OSM

The eruption of the Mayon volcano in the Philippines is featured on the HOT mailing list. Links to Tasking Manager’s tasks can be found in the resulting discussions.

Also in 2018 there are two promotion programs from HOT for OSM communities.

With the money from the non-governmental organisation Nethope, HOT has purchased computers and mobile phones in various countries and financed mapping training courses. Details can be found on the HOT website.

Maps

The GIScience Research Group of the University of Heidelberg announces a new version of OSMlanduse.org. Gaps in OSM data, for Germany only, have now been filled using machine learning methods on satellite imagery.

TravelTime Maps provide two interesting maps based on various sources, including OSM data: RadiusMap, which compares a simple ‘miles radius’ around a point with the travel times (isochrones), and the travel-time-only map, that includes walking, cycling, driving and public transport options.

Licences

A well-known city in Bosnia-Hercegovina asserts that it has full rights over its name.

Software

Fred Moine announces the availability of a French QGIS tutorial.

MapCat.com has revised the sidebar and displays additional information (opening hours, Wikidata) now.

Sarah Hoffmann explains the modified handling of post code areas and tags in Nominatim.

5.25 million routes are calculated by the Matrix API of the OpenRouteService of the University of Heidelberg each day.

Zhuangfang from Development Seed writes a blog post on how one can create a building classifier to detect buildings in Vietnam. In this example, Label Maker will pull data from Mapbox Satellite and OpenStreetMap and prepare training data that is ready-to-use with MXNet in Amazon SageMaker, a service from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that enables users to develop, train, deploy and scale machine learning approaches in a fairly straightforward way.

Programming

WeRobotics has launched a competition for machine learning, which aims to identify roads, coconut palms, banana trees, papaya and mango trees on aerial photographs; but the prize is nothing but fame and glory. (Details)

The Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology at the University of Heidelberg searches for a backend developer (Java or C++). The contract is limited to two years.

Jan Marsch has published an SQL function for calculating rendering of shadows on Github.

Paul Norman guides his readers through the creation of a shell script for downloading planet files and extracts with robust error handling.

Robin Boldt, who runs Kurviger.de, reports in a guest article in the Graphhopper blog about their migration from Mapzen to the competitors and about which problems vector tile customers have to cope with.

HeiGIT developed a new open source “Realtime OSM Extracts” Service. It allows to automate the generation of the most recent OSM data extracts for arbitrary user defined regions in pbf format. For example these are needed during disasters for most frequent updates of maps and services such as the Disaster-OpenRouteService.

Releases

iD editor has been released in version 2.6.0 (Changelog). The main new feature is the possibility to adjust brightness, contrast and sharpness for satellite images. iD now also prevents the user from drawing overlapping lines.

Mapbox Navigation SDK for iOS v0.12.0 comes with modified Carthage installation instructions, end-of-route feedback UI, improved roundabout guidance, improved road name pronunciation, faster/slower route simulation, Bulgarian localization (translations welcome), and much more.

MapboxDirections.swift v0.16.0 comes with improved Objective-C compatibility.

Did you know …

… the POI search WhatIsWhere?

Other “geo” things

North Road has summarized the new features of QGIS 3.0 in a blog post.

The location intelligence platform CARTO announces its switch to Mapbox, in order to provide fast rendering of big geodatasets, better geocoding and routing.

Spiegel Online interviewed Heinz Vielkind, who draws ski slope plans and has to weight up between reality and usability.

Upcoming Events

Where What When Country Mumble Creek OpenStreetMap Foundation public board meeting (2nd part of January meeting) 2018-01-25 Urspring Stammtisch Ulmer Alb 2018-01-25 Lübeck Lübecker Mappertreffen 2018-01-25 Essen Mappertreffen 2018-01-28 Dusseldorf Stammtisch 2018-01-31 Dresden Stammtisch Dresden 2018-02-01 Montreal Les Mercredis cartographie 2018-02-07 Stuttgart Stuttgarter Stammtisch 2018-02-07 Rome FOSS4G-IT 2018 2018-02-19-2018-02-22 Cologne Bonn Airport FOSSGIS 2018 2018-03-21-2018-03-24 Turin MERGE-it 2018-03-23-2018-03-24 Poznań State of the Map Poland 2018 2018-04-13-2018-04-14 Disneyland Paris Marne/Chessy Railway Station FOSS4G-fr 2018 2018-05-15-2018-05-17 Bordeaux State of the Map France 2018 2018-06-01-2018-06-03 Milan State of the Map 2018 (international conference) 2018-07-28-2018-07-30 Dar es Salaam FOSS4G 2018 2018-08-29-2018-08-31 Bengaluru State of the Map Asia 2018 (effective date to confirm) 2018-10-01-2018-10-31

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 Anne Ghisla, Nakaner, Polyglot, SK53, SeleneYang, Spanholz, Tordanik, YoViajo, derFred, jinalfoflia.