more than 100 million edits are made every month 1 | Simon Poole - Map data OpenStreetMap contributors
Mapping
- Steve Coast has proposed the creation of a special interest group to deal with addressing issues in OSM. He also shared a prototype of the simplest address validator. But the community reminded him that the OSM ecosystem already has enough of these tools.
- Recently, small electric self-propelled vehicles have become more and more popular: bicycles, scooters, etc. In this regard, Jan Michel proposes to adopt several new tags that could indicate various infrastructure, as well as access rights associated with these vehicles. He has developed an appropriate tagging scheme and is awaiting our comments.
- When discussing how to mark incredibly large hydraulic structures for flood prevention, John Willis cited Japan 's impressive experience as an example.
- User Neena2309 wrote a MapRoulette task statement on her blog with which she wants to update data on medical facilities in India.
- Kreuzschnabel, fortunately, noticed
massive road displacement in London, and quickly rolled back these edits. The forum in the section " Questions and Answers " has enough opinions about what it was. Among other assumptions, Richard Fairhurst suggested that this could be caused by an open OSM file that has exactly the same OSM identifier as the points in Oslo.
Community
- ID developers temporarily disabled the ability to post comments on error messages and suggestions for code inclusion. In this way, iD developers responded to complaints from users who complained that the online editor began to transfer Facebook user data without any warning. But it seems like now again anyone can comment on the development of iD on GitHub.
- User Frederick Ramm believes that the iD development team is behaving inappropriately towards the OSM community, and therefore these abusive relationships should be terminated. In his opinion, the iD team has repeatedly shown that it does only what it wants, and not the community. Therefore, he offers to remove the iD online editor from the osm.org main page, instead use the iD version from Frederico Rodrigo , in which there are no controversial functions. The post of Ramm caused a lively discussion.
- Simon Pool noted one important point in OSM: edits began to be made steadily - more than 100 million edits are made every month. These statistics are regularly updated and posted on the page in WikiOSM.
- TZorn told about his JOSM experience on a Microsoft Surface Pro laptop in tablet mode.
- Not so long ago, a new service was launched - OpenStreetMap Calendar , which greatly simplified the publication of OSM-related events. It allows users to upload an event to their personal calendar and indicate their presence without having to use WikiOSM. In addition, you can add the countries of interest to your RSS feed and then you will receive notifications.
- Valery Trubin continues a series of interviews with Russian mappers. Sergey Sinitsyn told how OSM is connected with interesting life stories, and Artyom Svetlov about shooting Mapillary panoramas and using OSM data.
Imports
- Guillaume Richard said that in the near future the import of administrative borders and addresses in Kosovo will be completed. Data was provided by local authorities.
OpenStreetMap Foundation
- Frederick Ramm, OSM Foundation Treasurer, said the Foundation Council will consider various options for cooperation with Dorothea on a paid basis, as it provides significant assistance in solving administrative problems, as well as in organizing the State of the Map conference. Dorothea is the only employee of the OpenStreetMap Foundation who receives a salary.
- On November 20, 2019 at 19:00 London time , a meeting of the OSMF Council was held. There were some interesting questions on the agenda of the meeting.
- Soon, elections to the OSM Foundation Board will take place . Frederick Ramm believes that it is necessary to support those candidates who were not previously members of this council.
- The OSM Foundation's working group, which organizes the State of the Map international conference, is looking for volunteers. From the link you can find an incredibly long list of areas in which help is needed.
Events
- Ilya Zverev invites everyone to the FOSDEM 2020 conference, which will be held in Brussels (Belgium) from February 1 to 2, 2020. This is one of the main events in the world of free and open source software.
- December 7, 2019 in Belgrade will host the first OSM meeting in Serbia. Its organizer Pedja hopes that there will be a sufficient number of participants.
Humanitarian OSM
- The Imperial College of London announced that its students took part in the cardboard, which was held by the Friends of the Border Society of Friends. Attention was paid to the city of Bangas in the Central African Republic, which on Google is a blank spot.
Education
- Currently, articles are being collected for a special issue of the international journal of geographic information ISPRS. First of all, interesting articles on which there were speeches at the academic section at the SotM-2019 conference. But at the same time, other original materials are accepted. Applications are accepted until March 31, 2020.
Cards
- The developer of the map " Lights of the Sea (" mapa de balizas "in Spanish) has updated its service, now it is available in German, English or Spanish. Just look at this formidable map and immediately want to add even more beacons to illuminate each shores on the planet.
We pass to OSM
- A message from the Tesla owner that the Smart Summon built-in navigation application changes the route when he edits the parking area in OSM triggered a discussion on Hacker News.
Open data
- The High Court of Great Britain ruled on an important case, which may subsequently affect geo-information published under open licenses, including INSPIRE . Startup 77m used various open data to create its Matrix product. But he did not even have time to launch it on the market, as the British national cartographic agency of Great Britain “Ordnance Survey” sued him. 77m lost the case. However, both the Ordnance Survey and the cadastral agency were criticized by the judge. What this will lead to is not yet clear, but Jenny Tennyson (Director General of the Open Data Institute) tweeted a few thoughts about it, and Owen Bosvarva has a detailed blog post. Some more material on this topic can be found on Chris Hill and SK53 blogs .
Software
- Simon Poole, the developer of the Vespucci mobile editor, said that the editor may be malfunctioning because the format of the data provided by the Osmose API has changed. At the moment, this issue has been resolved on the Osmose side - they rolled back the change that caused this error.
Programming
- A Gravitystorm user spent a lot of time figuring out whether it’s possible to run openstreetmap.org on Heroku (the cloud computing service). This experience may be of interest to those who want to experiment with the installation, as it is practically free.
- The user akashihi wants the OSRM service when building bicycle routes not to take into account the roads that have (
embedded_rails=*
) built-in railway tracks. Discussion of this proposal goes on GitHub .
Releases
- We have overlooked the latest updates to the OpenLayers service. In its latest versions, several interesting functions have appeared: the ability to create layers with various types of visualization, the visualization of vector layers has been improved, the memory size has been reduced, and much more. We recommend using releases that were released before v6.1.1 . Remember to check the version history .
Did you know …
- ....... about the Digital Egypt team, which was founded in 2011 and specializes in geodata and cartographic products? The team plans to launch a project to improve the map of Egypt in OSM, as well as checking the available data, for example, in the city of Badr . The aim of the project is to improve the accuracy of maps, put down names for roads and mark geographical codes. At the same time, OSM standards will be strictly adhered to.
Other geo events
- A new landmark has appeared in New York. The fifth highest observation deck - “Edge” - is located at an altitude of 335 m. The glass floor is especially delighted. On the F4Map website you can see the view of New York from this platform. Mapping the “30 Hudson Yards” skyscraper in OSM is not yet complete.
- Morten Lind tweeted about Kristians , a village on Ertholmen Island in Denmark, whose buildings have received some of the most recent addresses. This happened due to the fact that Cristianso was a military town for a long time.
- Geospatial World talks about a new initiative by Google: the company will provide free licenses for Google Earth Engine in the amount of $ 3 million to organizations and initiatives that use Google’s geospatial data.
- The German Federal University of the Armed Forces has done what was previously possible only in advertising for mobile phone manufacturers. They were able to achieve accuracy of 1-2 cm when determining the geolocation using a regular Android smartphone, which was placed on a special device to improve signal reception and mitigate re-reflection, Inside GNSS reports . Details of the experiment can be found on the university’s website .
- The United States Transportation Security Council has again called on map providers in the United States to include information on level crossings. Mortality at level crossings is still high (270 people in 2018). One of the reasons is the driver’s ignorance of the fact that the railway is ahead. Many mapping applications do not warn drivers about this. The WeeklyOSM team looked at how many railway crossings were recorded in OSM: about 100 thousand, of which 5 thousand (5%) were not marked with the necessary tag
railway=level_crossing
. - The New York Times published material on one study that concluded that many cities on the planet (such as Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, parts of Shanghai, Mumbai, and Alexandria) could be flooded by 2050. Already, 110 million people live below sea level, and another 150 million people may be affected by 2050. The perceived threat requires large investments to build dams and other barriers.
Communication of Russian OpenStreetMap participants is in the Telegram chat room and on the forum . There are also groups on social networks VKontakte , Facebook , but they mainly publish news.
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