02/01/2018-08/01/2018

Mapping

Fernando Trebien writes to the tagging mailing list seeking information about adding members in all types of routes.

Mateusz Konieczny wonders about the unit of seamark:light:range for light towers and beacons. The values were always entered in nautical miles. This was not yet among the default units though. The wiki was adapted in the course of the mailing list discussion.

User Spanholz published short videos explaining the iD editor on Reddit. The videos are under CC0.

Community

Engineers at Azavea used GeoPySpark to build multi-centre isochrone map of the Isle of Man for walkers based on OpenStreetMap data.

Dzertanoj wonders whether the fragmentation of communications channels both within and between OSM communities make it more, rather than less, difficult for people to interact with each other.

Antoine Riche wrote a detailed tutorial on Carto’Cité’s wiki about using Overpass queries with uMap. The use-case he picked is the rendering of a heatmap of bike parking density in Nantes, France.

Imports

Two mappers say that the Facebook “AI” import in Thailand has made OSM unusable in some rural areas and wonder if it should be reverted.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

The German-speaking association FOSSGIS e.V. is now an official OSM local chapter! FOSSGIS e.V. was founded in 2001 and was initially focused on free and open source mapping software. They have provided support to the German OpenStreetMap community since 2008.

OSM US have commenced the search for a full-time Executive Director, Michal Migurski has already announced his interest in joining the hiring committee.

Events

Frederik Ramm invites the OSM community to a hack weekend in Karlsruhe, Germany.

The call for proposals for the State of the Map 2018 in Milan is open! The deadline to submit the session proposals is Sunday, 18th February 2018.

Maps

Hans Hack has published a map that allows to discover the points in Germany that are furthest away from a road.

Over the last weeks the recently introduced Climate Protection Map, which is based on the user-contributed data from OpenStreetMap, has been extended to cover the whole world. It now also features some additional layers.

switch2OSM

Journocode, a German site dedicated to ‘closing the gap between journalism and data science’, publishes a guide to extracting data from OSM using osmfilter (and osmconvert).

Software

The NZZ newspaper has released a demo version of its web-based storytelling tool Q, which can also be used to create maps based on Mapbox.

Programming

With not-for-profit software, iOS and MacOS have lagged behind Android because the higher costs associated with Apple deterred developers. Now, however, there is the possibility for non-commercial organizations (including educational institutions and U.S. government agencies) to ask not to pay Apple Developer Program fees. The waiver only applies for developers of suites of free apps. It will resolve part of the problem (though not all of it; you still have to be able to afford a Mac and/or iPhone).

A number of OSM Foundation services are being migrated to HTTPS and therefore will not be reachable via HTTP. Software that cannot cope with this (for example, by following redirection requests from http to https) will stop working when this happens. Work is underway to minimise such disruption.

Releases

The new stable release of JOSM is here, find out what’s new!

Did you know …

… MAPCAT.com? It renders vector tiles, so you can choose in which languages to show the labels. It’s based on OpenStreetMap data.

… the Android app BumpRecorder? The app recognizes potholes and can show them on an OSM map. The data should help the road construction authority to recognize potholes before they get bigger.

Other “geo” things

There is a free source from where historical aerial photos, thematic maps and expedition results from the Antarctic can be downloaded.

German magazine Spiegel Online reports (automatic translation) that fake geospatial information has always been common, and not just for military reasons.

A post on the “MapPorn” subreddit features a fascinating map that shows present-day country borders and their date of origin. The discussion starts with details of the complex research behind this map and continues with more, often surprising, border facts.

According to golem.de the map data provider HERE is coming under (automatic translation) increasing pressure and has added Bosch and Continental as shareholders.

The Guardian reports on why developers of autonomous vehicles think that the chaotic traffic conditions make Moscow a great test-bed.

Ellie Craven shows why unique identifiers are rarely truly unique.

Upcoming Events

Where What When Country Cologne Bonn Airport Bonner Stammtisch 2018-01-16 Lüneburg Lüneburger Mappertreffen 2018-01-16 Cologne Köln Stammtisch 2018-01-17 Toulouse Réunion mensuelle 2018-01-17 Leoben Stammtisch Obersteiermark 2018-01-18 Turin Torino Hacknight 2018-01-18 Nottingham Pub Meetup 2018-01-23 Viersen OSM Stammtisch Viersen 2018-01-23 Urspring Stammtisch Ulmer Alb 2018-01-25 Lübeck Lübecker Mappertreffen 2018-01-25 Essen Mappertreffen 2018-01-28 Rome FOSS4G-IT 2018 2018-02-19-2018-02-22 Cologne Bonn Airport FOSSGIS 2018 2018-03-21-2018-03-24 Turin MERGE-it 2018-03-23-2018-03-24 Poznań State of the Map Poland 2018 2018-04-13-2018-04-14 Bordeaux State of the Map France 2018 2018-06-01-2018-06-03 Milan State of the Map 2018 (international conference) 2018-07-28-2018-07-30

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 Anne Ghisla, Peda, Polyglot, SK53, SomeoneElse, Spanholz, Tordanik, jcoupey, jinalfoflia.