02/23/2016-02/29/2016

About us

Dear reader, this edition is published after only one proofreading. If you find faults or if you think some sentences could be written better, please join the team as a proofreader.

Mapping

Martin Koppenhoefer wonders on the tagging mailing list, whether the voting rules should be changed: “Shall we really require three quarters approvement for a vote to pass? Even to change the constitution, in many countries you do not need more approval than two thirds.”

IanSan5653 asks for feedback on reddit after mapping the airport of Southwest Florida in high level of detail. Inspired by that posting, KaTiON reports about his micromapping efforts on a convention centre.

Jinal Foflia describes at a tutorial at Mapbox’s blog some keyboard shortcuts of JOSM to split and combine ways, creating circles, join nodes to a way and JOSM’s filter function.

Naveenpf says that he feels happy that they are almost done with mapping State Highways in Kerala.

Martijn van Exel is working on a new version of MapRoulette. He has asked feedback about some decisions like backward compatibility. “The focus will be on making MapRoulette more fun for newcomers, more effective for power users, and more powerful for challenge owners.”, Martijn says: “Your comments are welcome in a piratepad.”

Johnparis wrote a proposal for amenity=internet_cafe tag and started the RFC Request for Comments.

Community

Door2Door GmbH from Berlin which developed the mobility app Ally is looking for a GIS software developer who has OpenStreetMap knowledge.

Anran Yang, Hongchao Fan and Ning Jing published their paper on “Amateur or Professional: Assessing the expertise of Major Contributors to OpenStreetMap Based on Contributing Behaviors” where they write about whether the main mapper in Germany, France and Great Britain are more amateurs or “Professionals”.

The Comenius Project MychOSM (we reported) which ended in 2015, was judged to be a “star project”. A further outcome of the work is exactly this weeklyOSM.

User mmd notes that there’s not only the history view but also a rss feed for each user’s history!

OpenStreetMap is accepted for this year’s Google Summer of Code again and students may choose one of the great project ideas or even propose a new idea.

Since the end of December the Dutch community is trying to teach one mapper to map according to the conventions. They list the errors he makes and give him solutions to fix the problems (or they do it themselves). Each time he starts mapping a new topic without reading about it, he introduces tons of errors. Just recently the DWG was informed about it.

Imports

Ryan Cooper wants to import “city-sourced GIS data” of Lensington, Kentucky and this led a little discussion for his plans.

Rory McCann proposes a second attempt at a planned import of the Logaim place names database of Ireland. See also his posting at Imports mailing list and the wiki page of the import.

Events

Christine Karch of SotM Working Group informs at Talk mailing list about a discount SotM visitors can get at a specific hotel in Brussels. Rob Nickerson announces that ticket sale will start soon. Pricing will be similar to SotM 2013 in Birmingham.

There will be a workshop on open data (OSM in the field of disaster management) (“OSM in disaster management“) at University of Heidelberg on 15 of April. It is a follow-up of 10th “Modellierungstag” (modelling day) which took place on 3rd of December 2015 in Heidelberg. We do not know if the organisers either mean disaster prevention (as it is common in Germany) or HOT- like disaster prevention and management.

Humanitarian OSM

Does Missing Maps still need OSM? The new website of Missing Maps started without a link to openstreetmap.org. Tweets and other forms of complaint were necessary to make Missing Maps add the link.

GIScience Research Group Heidelberg becomes member of the Missing Maps Project. Disastermapper Heidelberg talks about it in their blog as well.

Medecins sans frontières, is heavily involved in the Mediterranean and points to a current interactive map whose areas of operation to supply the refugees in Europe.

Maps

The FabLab in Lannion, France creates maps with a laser cutting machine.

[1] Metrocosm (a collection of projects that analyze life through statistics and data) published an interactive OSM based map about “every disputed territory” in the world.

Touch Mapper provides a web service that creates tactile maps from OSM data. One can print out a map using 3D printers as well as download the STL model. They offer maps in several formats.

switch2OSM

The Game, ‘The Division’ will be released on 8th of March. This game is based on global data from the OpenStreetMap, NASA open source data and the IATA flight paths. The realistic Browsergame ‘Collapse – The End of the Society Simulator ” uses the same data base.

Open Data

The German railway “Deutsche Bahn” has published a rudimentary API for long-distance traffic timetable. Critical remarks raised on mailing lists and on twitter. Inter alia was criticized that an API key is required, the API use a new, hitherto unusual data format.

All 208 events for the International OPEN DATA Hackathon which is on 5th of March are on the map.

Software

User ivanatora has improved his browser based game Roadster.

Read about the 27 differences between ArcGIS and QGIS on gisgeography.com.

Programming

The daily updated and OSM based coastline data from openstreetmapdata.com has been improved for some use cases.

According to the mapzen.com’s blog, libpostal is a new fast statistical parser/normalizer for street addresses around the world.

Releases

provided by the OSM Software Watchlist

Did you know …

Other “geo” things

Astro Digital releases an online platform for anyone to analyze satellite imagery.

Google’s neuronal net beats a human player at GeoGuessr for the first time.

Deborah Farmer Kris explains to the Geography teachers and parents, the reason for children to still learn how to read and draw maps even though they are a part of the GPS era.

Facebook’s Connectivity Lab shares a post about connecting the world with better maps. It writes about their mission to connect the unconnected and underserved in the world.

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 don’t forget to mention the city and the country in the calendar.

This weekly was produced by Nakaner, Peda, Rogehm, derFred, escada, jinalfoflia, mgehling, stephan75, wambacher.