11/09/2018-17/09/2018

Mapping

While David Earl was surveying a new development in Cambridge for OpenStreetMap, he met a surveyor doing the same for the national mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey, we know which map was updated first.

The use of type=watershed without an existing proposal or other guides led to a discussion on the tagging mailing list to get some common understanding on how to use the tag. Apparently, it is disputed whether watersheds or drainage basins should be added to OSM.

without an existing proposal or other guides led to a discussion on the tagging mailing list to get some common understanding on how to use the tag. Apparently, it is disputed whether watersheds or drainage basins should be added to OSM. dannykath from the Development Seed data team wrote a diary post about mapping commercial farms in Ethiopia. Using JOSM more than 190 large farms in lowland Ethiopia were mapped as part of a World Bank project. This required the use of a range of satellite imagery sources to ensure adequate coverage: ESRI World, Sentinel-2 Agriculture mosaic.

Community

Rory McCann suggests allowing users to delete comments from their user diary entries. Many people criticised the idea.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Mikel Maron gave an update on OSMF’s efforts to take a stance against the proposed EU copyright law (as we reported earlier) that could adversely affect OSM in its current form. It seems like the discussions have led to a new momentum.

Events

The Swiss conference WikiCon 2018 will be held (automatic translation) from October 5th till 7th in St. Gallen. There will be two talks on OSM-related subjects and the Swiss local chapter SOSM will be present with a booth.

The Swiss event DINAcon 2018, a conference for digital sustainability, will take place (automatic translation) during October. OSM’s local chapter SOSM will host a session during the event on October 19th.

(automatic translation) during October. OSM’s local chapter SOSM will host a session during the event on October 19th. The FOSSGIS conference 2019 has been scheduled for March 13th to 16th in Dresden. The conference announced the Call for Papers.

On October 3rd 2018 QGIS.NL will host a community day in Nieuwegein near Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Humanitarian OSM

HOT published an article about a recent GESAN-organised mapathon event. The event, which targeted geomatics engineering students, focused on mapping specific disaster-prone areas.

Maps

OpenTopoMap is running on a backup server, possibly until November, which means low-level zooms are not updated and higher-level zooms are not rendered. In that same forum post (automatic translation) there is an interesting discussion about the not exactly trivial rendering of names of lakes.

switch2OSM

The French website L’informaticien features a comprehensive article comparing (automatic translation) OpenStreetMap with Google Maps, but also with IGN (official data for France).

Wetter.com is a widely known weather forecast service in Germany. The website switched to OSM recently.

Licences

Gaël Musquet criticises (automatic translation) a report from the French government for describing free and share-alike licences using “contamination” as a derogatory medical term.

User Kaxttillo became very interested (automatic translation) in the use of OSM maps in movies and television series and invites others to chime in. He does wonder how the attribution works for those cases, though, as there is no mention of OSM in the credits.

Software

Yuri Astrakhan announced the enhancement of the OSM Wiki by a Wikibase extension. Wikibase stores data from our OSM Wiki in a structured, machine-readable data repository similar to Wikidata. A good starting point to dive deeper into the topic is the OSM Wikibase site.

Programming

Andrei Kaschcha (Anvaka) announced a very fast path finder library written in JavaScript. You can try it out yourself in a live demo featuring routing graphs for 6 metropolitan cities.

Together with Ralph Straumann, Riccardo Klinger has programmed an OSM data importer called OSMquery for the ArcMAP and ArcGIS geoinformation systems. The toolbox serves as a front end for the Overpass API.

Releases

[1] The GraphHopper project announced the release 0.11 of its routing engine. A major milestone is the open sourcing of the isochrone module. The isochrone API can calculate the reachable area based on limiting factors such as time, travel mode, and origin. Other improvements include the public transit module, the introduction of an open source navigation library and faster map matching.

Did you know …

A new more mobile friendly version of the ATM search on geldautomaten-suche.org is now available .

. … the German initiative to create a Climate Protection map? It has instructions on how to map your local surroundings on OpenStreetMap.

… the list of mapping accidents? It’s unlikely that no new ones have happened over the past five years.

OSM in the media

Xenius, a popular science TV show of the French-German ARTE channel, talked about maps creation. Frederik Ramm, Michael Reichert and Joachim Kast demonstrated how they surveyed and mapped a new housing development near Karlsruhe (download with English/Spanish subtitles).

Other “geo” things

A London-based graphic designer has a collection of photographs which would be familiar to any avid OpenStreetMapper. Examples of his images of street nameplates are showcased in The Guardian.

A Mapbox visualisation of Hurricane Florence has been used in a New York Times article.

The first result published by Swiss Data Cube, a tool for organising earth observations data, is a visualisation of snow cover change in Switzerland.

For the first time in history it is possible to view a high resolution terrain map of Antarctica.

Brilliant has produced a video called “The Fake Neighbourhoods on Google Maps”. They don’t talk about trap streets in the video, it’s more about Google’s power to assign wrong names to neighbourhoods and how this often sticks.

Potsdam is pioneering (automatic translation) self-driving trams. On the test rides there are no passengers and there is still a driver to take over when things go wrong.

Upcoming Events

Where What When Country Kyoto 幕末京都オープンデータソン#06：壬生の浪士と新撰組 2018-09-22 Tokyo 首都圏マッピングパーティー 戸山公園で山登り!? 2018-09-22 La Mandragore Réunion franco-allemande à Strasbourg 2018-09-22 Miyazaki 宮崎マッピングパーティ 2018-09-23 Graz Stammtisch Graz 2018-09-24 Bremen Bremer Mappertreffen 2018-09-24 Lüneburg Lüneburger Mappertreffen 2018-09-25 San Juan Maptime! Manila Meet-up 2018-09-27 Biella Incontro mapper di Biellese 2018-09-29 Rennes Réunion mensuelle 2018-10-08 Lyon Rencontre mensuelle pour tous 2018-10-09 Munich Münchner Stammtisch 2018-10-09 Berlin 124. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch 2018-10-12 Nantes Participation au « Village des sciences » lors de la Fête de la Science à l’Hôtel de région 2018-10-12-2018-10-14 France. 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 Lübeck Lübecker Mappertreffen 2018-09-27 Düsseldorf Stammtisch 2018-09-28 Stuttgart Stuttgarter Stammtisch 2018-10-03 Bochum Mappertreffen 2018-10-04

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This weeklyOSM was produced by Nakaner, PierZen, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, Sheeplieder, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, jinalfoflia, sev_osm.