News 2023 - Week 37

Mapping

• Citrula wrote about how to use OSMCha’s RSS feed and filter features to review changesets for which a review has been requested.
• Anne-Karoline Distel is seeking comments on a proposal to add vandalised to lifecycle prefixes.

Community

• OpenStreetMap mapper Jasper wanted an OSM shirt and there wasn’t one. So he made one and is offering it on Etsy, in case you are interested.
• nabilersyad blogged about his aims to map every street in Kuala Lumpur CBD and to add satellite visible data in all of the Kuala Selangor District.
• There are 30 videos from the SotM US 2023 on YouTube.
• Antti blogged about how to use OsmAnd for driving the TET (Trans Euro Trail), an 80,000 km GPX route, from the edge of Africa to the Arctic Circle, created by the TET adventure motorcycle community.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The current status of the OSMF fundraising campaign can be viewed online. The comments made by donors are interesting.
• You are welcome to join the next monthly video-meeting of the OSMF Board that will take place on Thursday 28 September at 15:00 UTC. The video room opens 20 minutes before the meeting starts. The preliminary agenda is on the wiki and this is also where the draft minutes will be added.
• The OpenStreetMap Foundation reported the addition of a new render server in the US. It will be used for rendering and updating the default map style.

Humanitarian OSM

• [1] Pete Masters (pedrito1414), Head of the Community staff at HOT, provided an update on the disaster response activations for Morocco and Libya, providing statistics and other information about this response.
• ABDURAHMAN AL FURJANI from OSM Libya, supported by UN Mappers and HOT, has launched a disaster response activation, following the devastating floods in Darnah, Libya. There are mapping tasks ready for contribution on the HOT Tasking Manager and pre- and post-event imagery available on OpenAerialMap, provided by Maxar.

Maps

• Imzadi1979 announced that the community responsible for the English Wikipedia’s North American road articles has created a fork of Wikipedia that features vector maps based on OpenStreetMap Americana (example).
• The Berlin Refreshment Map shows cool, windy and shady areas in the city. The map was created in a collaboration between the Open Data Informationsstelle Berlin and CityLab Berlin.
• Geofabrik have released a boundary fix for their OpenStreetMap data snapshot of the Alps region.
• jonnymccullagh blogged about setting up a map server displaying [ga] place names in the Irish language (Gaeilge).

Open Data

• Qiusheng Wu’s interactive web app for visualising Maxar’s open data has been improved. By just clicking on the map, you may now select images interactively.

Software

• jarmokivekas released, on GitHub, an overview tool that he developed for tracking Tasking Manager activity by campaign, project, country, or organisation. This is a preliminary version. It is not yet clear how easy it will be working with this API (no dropdown list for selection) compared to working directly in the Tasking Manager explore function.
• Answerquest listed the steps to convert boundary shapefiles, using Mapshaper and QGIS, in order to use them in OpenStreetMap.
• Allan Mustard has figured out how to get mkgmap to produce fully customised, routable Garmin-compatible IMG files for his nüvi GPS navigator. He posted a tutorial so you can also produce custom IMG files to your own specifications.
• After more than 9 years of work, a group of students from the Salesian College of Duitama (Colombia) has launched a mobile application called ‘BusBoy App’, already available on the Google Play Store and soon on the Apple App Store. The creators are seeking to expand the use of the application, so that more users of urban transport will know the names of the routes, places of travel, points of interest, transport companies, and schedules.
• MapComplete has changed its internet domain from mapcomplete.osm.be to mapcomplete.org after a short survey on the Mastodon server en.osm.town.
• Geopaparazzi has released ‘Smart Mobile App for Surveyor Happiness’ (SMASH), a mobile application for taking notes on mapping survey activities. The app can be downloaded via F-droid and Google Play Store.
• Sam Woodcock gave a high level overview of the Field Mapping Tasking Manager (FMTM), which is software for coordinating field mapping efforts.
• vorpalblade reported that JOSM’s MapWithAI plug-in now supports PMTiles and Mapbox Vector Tiles as data sources and showed how to use it. PMTiles is a web-first tile storage format, which allows the provider to have a single file containing all the tiles they want to share.

Programming

• An Australian family refused to sell their farmland, even though the entire neighbourhood was being converted into a new housing estate. The location of the property was unclear. This challenge was taken up by Dean Marchiori to locate, as he describes, Sydney’s strangest property using osrm and the Overpass API. There is a nice ‘movie’ at the end of the article.
• Sam Woodcock gave an overview of the different vector tile file formats available and described their differences.

Did you know …

• … that you can explore places on OpenStreetMap using the OpenStreetBrowser app?
• … that you can participate in an OSMFight?

Other “geo” things

• Felix von Leitner , a German IT security expert, comments on current affairs in their blog . Our market ‘competitor’ is looking for ‘volunteers’ to record streets for them. Felix asked ironically, ‘Are you also considering volunteering for the fourth richest company in the world? I hope not. But if you are, it would be better to volunteer for OpenStreetMap’.

Note:
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This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, Strubbl, TheSwavu, barefootstache, derFred, rtnf.
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