17/07/2018-23/07/2018

Mapping

Ilya Zverev is proposing a lighter tagging scheme for public transport. In an email to the tagging mailing list, he notes a growing discomfort with the current scheme. The concepts behind these suggestions will be covered in his talk What’s up with the public transport at SotM in Milan.

Portuguese researchers have published a paper in the journal Hydrology on how data from OSM can be used to improve digital elevation models. They compared a DEM built from Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM 30) data combined with waterways from OSM, with a DEM from the British Ordnance Survey. They concluded that an improvement in the horizontal accuracy and a decrease in systematic errors is possible.

As SotM-US is being held in Detroit this year Mikel Maron is helping to make OpenStreetMap in the area better, starting with bike share docking stations. He wrote a diary post describing how he was confirming and improving the locations of bike share stations, that were already added in OSM, using open data along with aerial, Bing Streetside, Mapillary and OpenStreetCam imagery. In his comprehensive blog post he explains his workflow and what he has learned during this exercise.

Following feedback from a user of Microsoft’s Soundscape, an app aimed at providing spatial information to people with low vision, Microsoft asked for volunteers in the OSM forum to help improve the mapping of Montclair Plaza (Wikipedia, OSM.org), near Los Angeles.

The granularity of the values for the building attribute tag is causing misunderstandings. On the tagging mailing list the question of the difference between building=house and building=detached was raised. Apparently, there are different understandings depending on the region.

Community

CartONG supports aid agencies with GIS and field missions. This NGO used its July newsletter to take a look back to 2017 and provide an update on current projects.

The idea of visualising road orientation is still drawing attention. Baran Kahyaoglu showed his colour-coded road orientation maps on Twitter.

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OpenStreetMap Foundation

The funding for a new uMap instance was secured by the approval (automatic translation) of the FOSSGIS e.V., a local organisation supporting free and open GIS software and acting as local chapter for the OSM and OSGeo Foundations in Germany. The uMap instance is intended for international usage.

(automatic translation) of the FOSSGIS e.V., a local organisation supporting free and open GIS software and acting as local chapter for the OSM and OSGeo Foundations in Germany. The uMap instance is intended for international usage. The OSM Foundation has announced the “welcome mat”, an introduction to OSM for people unfamiliar with it. This project is a work in progress and is available on OSMF’s public repositories.

Events

Alessandro, Marta and Francesca, of the local Italian organisation team, have released an Android app for the SotM 2018. The app was created by Laura Barroso, from the Spanish weeklyOSM team. The .apk file can be downloaded here. Besides the program for the three days there are also links to the SotM-tweets and an OSM map with routing.

The website of the State of the Map US 2018 has been updated with some important information. The conference will take place from October 5 to 7 in Detroit, Michigan.

The Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference State of the Map Oceania in Melbourne this November has announced its keynote speakers.

The State of the Map Asia will take place on November 17 and 18, 2018 at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore.

Humanitarian OSM

A second travel expense support programme has been launched for the FOSS4G 2018 in Dar es Salaam and the parallel HOT summit.

Education

OSM Switzerland, under the lead of Stefan Keller from the Hochschule Rapperswil, has started building a website for schools to promote the use of free and open data in the classroom. On OpenSchoolMaps.ch there are worksheets with solutions for use in the classroom.

Maps

Paul Norman, member of the OSMF board, wrote an article for the Wikimedia mailing list about his experience and lessons learnt with creating a new style and vector tile schema for the WikiMedia foundation. Beside styling improvements, the style changes were to enhance the representation of disputed borders.

Penegal has opened several pull requests for the OSM Carto stylesheet to improve the readability of the base OSM map. He wants to increase text and shield distances for waterways, railways and roads.

switch2OSM

The French department Maine-et-Loire has switched (automatic translation) to OpenStreetMap. Like other professional clients, they had to adjust rapidly following the announcement in May of an enormous increase in the cost of Google Maps (free for them until now). The OSM ecosystem and the drastic increase of the quality of OpenStreetMap over the last few years facilitated the decision.

(automatic translation) to OpenStreetMap. Like other professional clients, they had to adjust rapidly following the announcement in May of an enormous increase in the cost of Google Maps (free for them until now). The OSM ecosystem and the drastic increase of the quality of OpenStreetMap over the last few years facilitated the decision. On der Apotheke a Polish company recently wrote about how and why they chose to change map providers for their website, following the recent pricing changes of Google Maps.

Software

The Critical Numbers webapp by GIScience Research Group, Heidelberg visualise in the form of a bar chart the percentage of OSM Tasks mapped and validated (data from the HOTOSM-Tasking-Manager API instance). Data can also be downloaded as GeoJSON for further processing in QGIS or other applications. The authors have created an extensive introduction with examples. Such quantitative analysis could take into account other variables such as the contributor’s OSM experience or topological data errors.

Notes in iD have arrived is the title of a blog post by Thomas Hervey. Notes in iD have long been desired by users and can now be tested in a preview version.

The geospatial company Boundless announced that it will be hosting a webinar on August 2nd focused on Boundless Offline Tile Server™ (BOTS), a lightweight, portable, offline, high-performance map tile server.

Programming

Maning Sambale writes about his experiments with RoboSat for feature detection from aerial imagery. He confirms that data cleaning and utilization of proper training sets are crucial for accurate results, and suggests using this procedure to facilitate remote mapping.

A large influx of spam in OSM notes with personal insults was reported (automatic translation) in the German forum. After discussions with the DWG and a block did not help to calm the situation, Frederik Ramm submitted a pull request that will stop anonymous comments in notes on OSM’s website if implemented.

(automatic translation) in the German forum. After discussions with the DWG and a block did not help to calm the situation, Frederik Ramm submitted a pull request that will stop anonymous comments in notes on OSM’s website if implemented. Following her introduction after Anusha Singh was selected to join the Google Summer of Code working on the OSM Public Transport Editor, she has now provided an update on progress she has made so far.

Jennifer Cats wrote a diary post on how she identifies spam or other difficult labels (i.e. name=) using language processing techniques.

Releases

The version 4.13.0 of OSM’s carto stylesheet has been released. Changes include increased shield distance on roads and new icons for five shop types and three amenity types. The documentation has also received improvements. The full list of commits can be seen on GitHub.

According to a tweet from wambacher, there are new versions for the following OSM-related software available: Komoot Android, Leaflet 1.3.3, Magic Earth iOS 4.1.0 and several Mapbox GL products.

You can find these updates along with an almost endless list of OSM-related software and current versions in Wambacher’s software list.

Did you know …

[1] … photon? An elasticsearch based Geocoder, multilingual, typo tolerant and that supports auto-completion. Source code is available on GitHub and an example implementation is running at komoot who initiated his development. Download is available and the installation is very easy.

Other “geo” things

Stéphane Péneau tweets his disappointment that Mapillary is still compressing images. He added examples of how the compression lowered the quality of the images.

SpringerOpen, part of the global academic publishing company Springer, made a Call for Papers for a planned publication with the title Special Issue: Open Source Geospatial Software as reported on the OSM-Science mailing list. Papers on Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), Crowdsourcing and OpenStreetMap (OSM) are all invited as outlined on SpringerOpen’s website.

The Register reports on a paper from Microsoft, Virginia Tech and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. It describes how vehicles can be “hijacked” with a Raspberry Pi and a Software Defined Radio of the type HackRF One (175 US dollars). Technically, this is GPS spoofing, which is often used in military manoeuvres. To keep the vehicle on the road, routes were calculated using OSM data.

A Vietnamese online newspaper has published an article complaining about the appearance of the Paracel Islands on Facebook’s maps. Like many other island groups in the area, these have multiple sovereignty claims over them. According to the article the Vietnamese government will try and rectify this “mistake”. Facebook apparently stated that “all its maps were provided by third-party companies like OpenStreetMap and HERE Maps”. The OSMF’s position is clear – “The OpenStreetMap community operates under the ‘on the ground’ principle” and “you are free to make maps from our data leaving out or putting in what you need for harmony with your general usage, culture and legal system”. What organisations with different national audiences tend to do in a situation like this is to provide different maps for each, with the appropriate “alternative facts” presented to each audience (a Vietnamese user would see the islands as part of Vietnam; a Chinese one as part of China).

Upcoming Events

Where What When Country Ciudad del Este Introducción al mapeo colaborativo con Openstreetmap 2018-07-27 Milan State of the Map 2018 (international conference) 2018-07-28-2018-07-30 Stuttgart Stuttgarter Stammtisch 2018-08-01 Bochum Mappertreffen 2018-08-02 Buenos Aires Mapatón-taller OSM 2018-08-04 Amagasaki みんなのサマーセミナー：地図、描いてますか？描きましょう！ 2018-08-05 London Missing Maps Mapathon 2018-08-07 Munich Münchner Stammtisch 2018-08-08 Urspring Stammtisch Ulmer Alb 2018-08-09 Berlin 122. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch 2018-08-10 Tokyo 東京！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第22回 富岡八幡宮 2018-08-12 Viersen OSM Stammtisch Viersen 2018-08-14 Karlsruhe Stammtisch 2018-08-15 Mumble Creek OpenStreetMap Foundation public board meeting 2018-08-16 Rapperswil 10. Micro Mapping Party Rapperswil 2018 (inc. OSM-Treffen) 2018-08-17 Dar es Salaam FOSS4G & HOT Summit 2018 2018-08-29-2018-08-31 Buenos Aires State of the Map Latam 2018 2018-09-24-2018-09-25 Detroit State of the Map US 2018 2018-10-05-2018-10-07 Bengaluru State of the Map Asia 2018 2018-11-17-2018-11-18 Melbourne FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2018 2018-11-20-2018-11-23

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This weeklyOSM was produced by Anne Ghisla, Nakaner, PierZen, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, Spanholz, SunCobalt, YoViajo, derFred, jinalfoflia.