07/03/2017-13/03/2017

Mapping

Community

After Senegal, Burkina Faso and Benin, it is the turn of Togo to start its phase 01 of the project School of Free Geomatics.

For some time now, there have been rumours that Niantic is using OpenStreetMap data to influence Pokemon Go. There’s more discussion about it here, and a recent OSM diary entry has linked to an article amusingly titled ‘How To Create Your Own Nest In Pokemon GO With A Free Tool Called “Open Street Map”’ (and as you’d expect, every other post there, reads like Buzzfeed Bingo too). But this could mean that there are a few people trying to game OpenStreetMap to make things appear in Pokemon Go. Here are a few things that you can do about such vandalism.

Sven Geggus tweets that the German tile server operated by FOSSGIS e.V. is now HTTPS capable.

Events

The Swiss OpenStreetMap Association’s Annual General Meeting will take place in Fribourg, Switzerland on April 8th. A mapping party will follow.

Gregory calls again to submit lectures for the State of the Map in Japan, since not enough papers have been submitted so far. Rob also refers to the deadlines for proposals and the scholarship program.

Humanitarian OSM

Marek Kleciak reports in the German forum that new satellite images from Nepal are available. They allow to map previously untapped areas.

The HOT Team Indonesia organized a mapping event called WomenMap. They introduced women to ICT and digital mapping skills. It was pioneered by HOT as it moves towards promoting inclusion for vulnerable, disenfranchised groups (women, persons with disabilities, youth and marginalized communities) and thus help to narrow the digital divide. The initiative is supported by the Australian Government, Disaster Management Innovation and UN Women.

Maps

Walter aka wambacher presents the completely revised version of the Emergency Map.

Mapzen now offers a map style for cycling. European readers have to answer the question themselves if this map design can compete with the long-standing experience and work of all those cycling mappers/developers in Europe. 😉

switch2OSM

When you do a geo search on the meta search engine Startpage, you will directly see an OpenStreetMap map in the results.

Open Data

Mapbox published new satellite imagery for Vancouver and Toronto.

The summary of an interview with Antonio F. Rodríguez Pascual provides 10 good reasons why the public administration (in Spain) should release data under an open license. (automatic translation)

Software

Andrés summarizes all important sources for learning about and using the Overpass API.

The motorcycle route planner “Kurviger”, which prefers beautiful winding routes with elevation changes, is now available worldwide.

Harry Wood created a tool to convert OpenStreetMap notes into KML and to use them in MAPS.ME.

On talk-fr, Florian Lainez announces the launch of Bus Contributor, a new Android app to ease public transport related contributions in OSM. Provided by Jawg Maps, the app is based on OSM Contributor.

Programming

A “monster relation” of an undiscussed import in Brazil with more than 32,767 members was too big for osm2pgsql, which probably caused problems on many servers.

In the second part of his blog series, Roland explained how to deal with numbers in the Overpass API.

Releases

Provided by the OSM Software Watchlist.

(*) unfree software. See: freesoftware.

Did you know …

… Multimapas by Javier Jiménez Shaw to compare a variety of different map layers? Javier’s service also supports WMS layers and allows you to add your own layers.

Other “geo” things

Mongabay Wildtech reported on a new mapping platform for environmental protection.

The French magazine ‘Sciences et Avenir’ reports on PaleobioDB, a database inventorying fossils found by hundreds of paleontologists. The corresponding interactive map is based on OSM.

Upcoming Events

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This weeklyOSM was produced by Nakaner, Peda, Polyglot, Rogehm, SeleneYang, Spec80, SrrReal, TheFive, YoViajo, derFred, freeExec, jcoupey, jinalfoflia, keithonearth, taranarmo, wambacher.