25/12/2018-31/12/2018

Happy New Year from OpenStreetMap!

Mapping

OpenStreetMap Ireland suggested a mapping task for the holiday period: adding all the buildings for a single townland. A few mappers (including Ciaran, Earl and Tshedy), had a go, but this may be another multi-year project for Irish mappers as there are over 60,000 townlands.

Simon Poole (CH), Christian Quest (FR) and sebastic (NL) performed their customary New Year’s Day edits to update boundaries of communes following mergers.In Belgium it was a group effort, for which preparations had already started back in June, as it involved many street name and building address changes.

Daniele Santini suggests adding a top_up=* attribute to a feature if it sells top-ups, for example for mobile phone credit recharge vouchers, over-the-air credit top-up, public transport credit recharge vouchers or credit recharge for prepaid credit cards.

attribute to a feature if it sells top-ups, for example for mobile phone credit recharge vouchers, over-the-air credit top-up, public transport credit recharge vouchers or credit recharge for prepaid credit cards. Markus proposed a new value for the place key, place=peninsula , for mapping named peninsulas. During the discussion it became obvious that the tagging list is more in favour of natural=peninsula , a proposal declined back in 2008. The discussion also provides some useful information for people interested in philosophical questions, e.g. what is the upper size limit for a peninsula, or what is the difference between a cape and a peninsula?

, for mapping named peninsulas. During the discussion it became obvious that the tagging list is more in favour of , a proposal declined back in 2008. The discussion also provides some useful information for people interested in philosophical questions, e.g. what is the upper size limit for a peninsula, or what is the difference between a cape and a peninsula? Hufkratzer challenged the wiki description for building=pavilion as being a building providing facilities for users of sports grounds. However, he learnt that the description is fine according to British English, the language we are using in OSM. The question as to whether the term was wisely chosen if it means different things in other countries was not asked.

as being a building providing facilities for users of sports grounds. However, he learnt that the description is fine according to British English, the language we are using in OSM. The question as to whether the term was wisely chosen if it means different things in other countries was not asked. eteb3 was looking for a tag for the planter bike rack that appeared in the UK recently and is double checking if there are any unwritten rules or things to consider before using own values. After the discussion our wiki has one more documented tag: man_made=planter .

. Axelos suggested implementing some kind of hierarchy for route relations. Others have pointed him to the similar, already used concept of super-routes / super-relations, something that has been very controversially discussed.

Community

In Kozikhode, India a team of volunteers is working hard to create a comprehensive digital map of the wards of Koorachundu Grama panchayat using OpenStreetMap.

Reddit user tseepra created a nice visualisation of the 70k nodes, 60k ways, and 160k polygons that were added over 2018 in Ireland. In the Reddit thread there is a discussion of how this was made using the QGIS Atlas feature.

Peter Elderson is currently working on sectioning very long route relations into relation parts with less than 300 ways. The basic idea is to make such relations more workable by splitting them into sections of one day’s walking. However, he is looking for someone who can help him to create sortable wikitables on a wiki page which are fed from a live query.

Wille Marcel, a GIS application developer from Brazil, has been elected as mapper of the month by OSM Belgium. He discovered OSM back in 2010 at an open source software conference and names the development of OSMCha as his biggest achievement.

Simon Poole has updated the contributor statistics for 2018.

CouwelierTim published a weekly chat summary of the discussions in the Belgian community from December 17th 2018 through December 23rd 2018. We hope you make yourself familiar with CouwelierTim’s weekly offering as we will not publish a regular reminder as part of our weekly digest.

Imports

omgitsgela requests comments for the planned statewide import of addresses in Massachusetts. The import of data from MassGIS, the public GIS database of the state, is comprehensively documented in the wiki.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Kate Chapman, chair of OSMF, after acting as a facilitor for Wikimedia’s Technical Committee, has joined them now in a permanent role as Senior Product Manager.

Events

The website for Open Belgium 2019, a conference for Open Knowledge and Open Data, is now online. The conference will take place on March 4th, 2019 in Brussels.

Humanitarian OSM

HOT published a series of videos about the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team webinars in 2018 and gave an outlook on the already scheduled webinars in 2019.

HOT is asking for proposals to improve the Tasking Manager. The update will enable the Tasking Manager to incorporate results from machine learning, including a validation and deconflicting process before the model output is pushed to OSM.

Maps

Larissa Vernier, an epidemiologist from Doctors without Borders, explains the motivation behind her choice of R for Epis (R4Epis) for her work. One reason is the spatial analysis functions, which help her to look for patterns, understand how fast a disease is spreading and decide on a plan of action. It would save a lot of valuable time if all epidemiologists could standardise on a single free software solution.

Mapbox is, no doubt, seeing a lot of maps over the course of a year. On their website you can find 18 maps with some background information of the maps that inspired them during 2018.

On his user diary alexkemp reports that he ran out of the OSM Promotional Leaflets he had received from Andy Allan. Hence, he tried to get the GitHub-hosted leaflet printed at his local print shop but they did not have the necessary fonts. In his post he describes his journey to get the required fonts.

The maposmatic instance on osm-baustelle.de is now offering an overlay style that renders allotments=plot .

Open Data

A member of the open source community Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics asks for help as they are planning to store geographic data in their Common Data Model for medical data.

Software

Florian Schäfer announced a new command line tool that can convert between the i18n file formats and the custom format used by JOSM. The new tool langconv is part of the gradle-josm-plugin.

The OsmAnd team reports on several nice features and improvements they added over the past year and what we can look forward to in 2019.

Releases

A new stable version of JOSM has been released. Version 18.12 fixes memory leaks and outdated imagery entries, provides an animated “Getting Started” page with shining stars 15 days around Christmas and contains a lot of other fixes and improvements.

Other “geo” things

UnoSat created a map of the inundated areas caused by the tsunamis in Lampung province, Indonesia.

Upcoming Events

Where What When Country Lyon Rencontre mensuelle pour tous 2019-01-08 Munich Münchner Stammtisch 2019-01-08 Dresden Stammtisch Dresden 2019-01-10 Berlin 127. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch 2019-01-10 Nantes Réunion mensuelle 2019-01-10 Rennes Réunion mensuelle 2019-01-14 Toulouse Rencontre mensuelle 2019-01-16 Karlsruhe Stammtisch 2019-01-16 Salzburg Maptime – Stammtisch 2019-01-16 Freiberg Stammtisch Freiberg 2019-01-17 Leoben Stammtisch Obersteiermark 2019-01-17 Reutti Stammtisch Ulmer Alb 2019-01-22 Lübeck Lübecker Mappertreffen 2019-01-24 Greater Vancouver area Metrotown mappy Hour 2019-01-25 Bremen Bremer Mappertreffen 2019-01-28 Arlon Réunion au Pays d’Arlon 2019-02-04 Dresden FOSSGIS 2019 2019-03-13-2019-03-16 Montpellier State of the Map France 2019 2019-06-14-2019-06-16 Heidelberg HOT Summit 2019 2019-09-19-2019-09-20 Heidelberg State of the Map 2019 (international conference) 2019-09-21-2019-09-23 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 Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, derFred.