26/09/2017-02/10/2017

Mapping

Community

Matthew Darwin proposes to the folks on Talk-ca mailing list to meet at State of the Map US (20th–22nd October) and discuss about founding a local chapter of OSMF.

Imports

Enock Seth Nyamador wants to import 216 District Borders into OSM and asks for advice.

The buildings import for Denver Metropolitan area is ready. Russell Deffner wrote an update at the import mailing list. At the wiki, you can read about the import in detail.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Tom Hughes confirms on OSM-dev that the OSRM routing service is not available anymore. The demo server on osm.org was provided by Mapbox and has been put down without any prior notice. There is an ongoing discussion in this pull request about commercial services and various possibilities around using them.

Joost Schouppe started on osmf-talk the discussion about sponsored OSM Foundation memberships with the expressed objective to help increase diversity among members.

Already participated in the survey of the DWG? (we reported last week).

Events

Rob Nickerson one of the organisers of the State of Map shared a budget for a generic large State of the Map events, this will be a useful reference for organising similar events in the future.

Humanitarian OSM

The DailyMail reports how the Nigerian youth “armed with smartphones and boots” mapped flooded areas in Niamey.

The developers of Ushahidi, a tech platform for social activism, attended the HOT summit 2017 and share their experience in a blog post.

Maps

[1] Pascal Neis updated his map of unmapped places around the world.

Ilya Zverev wrote a script to inventorying railway=subway stations in major cities around the world for use in MAPS.ME. which means it will be the first app that uses solely OSM data for routing passengers. Michael Reichert informs that Geofabrik also develops a Public Transport version 2 validator.

stations in major cities around the world for use in MAPS.ME. which means it will be the first app that uses solely OSM data for routing passengers. Michael Reichert informs that Geofabrik also develops a Public Transport version 2 validator. There was an issue raised in help.openstreetmap.org about a delay in updates between OpenStreetMap and Strava maps which uses Mapbox. Mapbox states that they can’t guarantee a timeframe for the edits to appear but they appreciate everyone’s contributions and are continuing to work hard to make sure their maps are up-to-date.

The University of Heidelberg has produced a map “osmlanduse.org” that analyses OSM landuse in an area (and also uses some remote sensing data). An introduction is here and the map is here.

Open Data

Heise writes (automatic translation) about a proposed EU directive compelling open source platforms to monitor their data for copyright infringements at high expenses.

Software

Kort Game, an app for Android and iOS to add missing information to existing objects in OpenStreetMap got published. The app follows a gamification approach that pays out so called Koins for each question answered, and only when a response has been verified by another user, and then is it added to the OSM database. The question remains how such a verification will allow to get edits in rural areas added to OpenStreetMap. The development of Kort happens on GitHub. The translation on Transifex. The Kort Game App is available for Android and iOS. It is already being used – and discussed.

Programming

In OSM help forum, karussell, account of the developers of Graphopper routing engine, seeks an answer for the default access values that should be assumed for a ferry, a ford and a barrier when it comes to a routing engine.

Chris Whong has written an express.js server that allows to quickly load Mapbox GL styles from any project into the Maputnik Style Editor.

Releases

Mapbox Navigation SDK for Android v0.6.0 adds a prebuilt user interface similar to the one in the iOS version

Did you know …

… Achituv Cohen’s thesis (PDF) on “Building a Weighted Graph based on OpenStreetMap Data for Routing Algorithms for Blind Pedestrians”?

… Marble, the online globe for Linux, Mac, Windows and Android with OSM maps?

update: …WHODIDIT to analyze OpenStreetMap changesets? Ilya recommends a faster fork. 😉

OSM in the media

The New York Times reports on “A Mapathon to Pinpoint Areas Hardest Hit in Puerto Rico”.

A reddit user shares an animated GIF that shows hurricane Jose predicted path.

TV network WCPO reports about a mapping event at Miami university helping to face the hurricane damage in Puerto Rico. OSM is only mentioned in one brief direct quote, though.

Other “geo” things

An article in The Guardian reports on the wheelchair accessibility issues of metro networks around the world. The results are discouraging.

HOT is searching for a Director of Finance & Administration (Part-Time) to join their senior management team.

According to The Guardian, “Google Maps must improve if it wants cyclists to use it”. However, commenting users (apart from some militant pro- and anti-cycling trolls) seem to be managing just fine without it. Cited competitors such as CycleStreets, Map.Me are not clearly identified as being part of the OSM Ecosystem.

NASA has released a tool that makes it easy to discover satellite images of recent natural phenomena such as hurricanes, forest fires, icebergs, algae blooms, volcanoes and more. Additional information was shared by a developer on Reddit.

Upcoming Events

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This weeklyOSM was produced by Laura Barroso, Nakaner, PierZen, Polyglot, SeleneYang, SomeoneElse, Spanholz, Spec80, YoViajo, derFred, jinalfoflia, k_zoar, kreuzschnabel.