11/15/2016-11/21/2016

Mapping

[1] Jochen Topf extends his Taginfo to display example renderings in the wiki’s taglists. Matthijs Melissen tested this for some pages. If you would like to help Matthijs, please contact him directly.

ImproveOSM is now based on the editor iD.

Community

User PlaneMad explains the great advantage of wikidata IDs in OpenStreetMap and links to Mapbox’ workflow to add such IDs. Others following these kind of edits got to discuss such edits upfront as they have to be considered automated edits.

User Joost Schouppe highlights the importance of community action which can shift the focus of the dev team to issues that would otherwise be lower on their priorities list. Community builders worldwide were asked and tried to answer questions about: main dilemmas when organizing communities, the tools needed to build them, and what is actually working. One of these tools is the Belgian Welcoming Tool, which the Spanish community is now implementing. (we reported last week)

FOSS4G and State of the Map Argentina 2017 will be held jointly in October at the National Geographic Institute with the support of OSGEO.

Chris Hill explains how he used the OpenStreetMap tool chain to build a great map for the Clockenflap festival in Hong Kong without using OpenStreetMap’s best, its data.

The OpenStreetMap blog reports about the release of version 2 of the iD editor and it going live on the main page. In the Mapbox blog, Bryan Housal gives more details including some of the new features.

Sebastian ponders about the meaning of all those place=locality tags that he discovered in rural Spain.

tags that he discovered in rural Spain. Nelson asks for help from the wider community about tagging “dangerous roads”. The Brazilian community can’t find a broad agreement on how to tag roads in (for example) favelas so that routing software won’t route through such “dangerous” areas.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

In an Interview with OpenCage Data, OSMF board member Martijn van Exel talks about running the donation drive and why it is important. He says that the funding is essential to remain independent and not entirely rely on corporate donors. It also gives the grassroots community an opportunity to help balance the OSMF revenue streams.

Events

A ‘girls only’ get together took place on 24th November, ahead of the State of the Map Latam, for the women in the community to talk, discuss and get to know other women who participate in the project.

The call for papers for the FOSSGIS 2017, which will be held at Passau from 22 to 25 March, is open here. Talks concerning ideas or project experiences are welcome both at the beginner and advanced levels. Talks about geo-data and its processing are also welcome.

The first edition of the “SysInfoLibre Abidjan 2016 (automatic translation): Yunohost, SI Libre for librist collectives, open data and OpenStreetMap of West Africa” with the collective LesLibresGéographes, the EOF project and the Direction Francophonie Économique et Numérique of the International Organization of Francophonie (DFEN-OIF) took place from 11 until 20 November in Abidjan.

Humanitarian OSM

HOT announces that they won a grant from the Gates Foundation to fight malaria in Africa, by analyzing OpenStreeMap data.

Séverin Ménard talks on the EOF Project blog about his voluntary mission (automatic translation) to assess the accessibility of roads in the areas affected by Hurricane Matthew in Haiti.

Programming

On the occasion of the second anniversary of the routing engine Valhalla, Mapzen summarizes the highlights, introduces the developer team behind it and announces the version 2.0 of Valhalla.

Releases

Provided by the OSM Software Watchlist.

(*) unfree software. See: freesoftware.

OSM in the media

Routefifty reported about Santa Catalina, southwest of Los Angeles County, which remained void on Google Maps. The article discusses the problems and challenges of missing on commercial maps and the fortunes of OpenStreetMap and Mapillary.

Other “geo” things

Richard Harris interviewed Anthony Calamito, the main developer of the OpenSource GIS platform Boundless.

Smithsonian has published an article with an interactive map illustrating volcanic activity and earthquakes over time and links to the occurrences.

The University of Maynooth, Ireland, is proposing a new protocol for the vectorization of geospatial data which has been created by crowdsourcing.

Katherine Anderson talks about the 13th GEO Plenary Meeting in Russia, which has taken place, among other things, for the launch of the new GEOSS portal.

The procedure for the creation of the map of AuthaGraph (we reported last week) has not been published. Marcin Ciura describes, in his blog, the mathematical methods for the development of pseudo-authagraphs. The source code is published on Bitbucket. For the sake of completeness we refer to Dymaxion Projection by the brasilian architect Sérgio A. J. Volkmer.

South Korea has rejected Google’s request to use local mapping data in the company’s global maps service due to concerns about national security if the mapping data got exported to Google. South Korea bars exporting local mapping data to foreign companies which do not have domestic data servers.

A Combinatorial Optimization course at Bonn University was set up to find the shortest route to visit about 24,727 pubs in the UK as an illustration of the travelling salesman problem. Google Maps was used and the pubs data was provided by the Pubs Galore. An interactive map shows the optimal short path to visit all pubs.

Upcoming Events

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This weeklyOSM was produced by Hakuch, Lamine Ndiaye, Peda, Rogehm, SeleneYang, Spec80, SrrReal, YoViajo, derFred, jinalfoflia, wambacher, widedangel.