News 2023 - Week 46

Mapping

• Thelone1986 has released several videos about OpenStreetMap mapping in the city of Seraing, Belgium.
• The amenity=bicycle_wash (bicycle washing service) tag proposal is currently under discussion.

Community

• Andy Allan gave an update on the development of the OpenStreetMap website: the addition of a map edit rate limit feature and a presentation at SOTM Europe 2023 entitled ‘Maintaining OpenStreetMap.org‘.
• In a rare in-person summit, the Trufi volunteers in Cochabamba, Bolivia, mappers, developers, and community leaders met to celebrate their achievements.
• lhirlimann shared his experiences working at the OpenStreetMap community booth during the Capitole du Libre 2023 event. The booth was well visited by participants and they asked various questions about OpenStreetMap.
• Martijn van Exel reported on the monthly OpenStreetMap Salt Lake City meeting that he organised.
• Ponciano da Costa de Jesus reported on the launch of Timor-Leste’s OpenStreetMap community on 18 November 2023.
• Simon Poole expressed his opinion on the potential disruption the Linux Foundation could have on the geo-business ecosystem that has been relying on OpenStreetMap data.
• unsungNovelty shared some of his most memorable OpenStreetMap edits.
• Ilya Zverev wrote about his thoughts on Overture Maps after he attended the State of the Map Europe 2023 event.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The next public OSMF Board meeting will be held on Thursday 30 November at 20:00 UTC.
• The OpenStreetMap Foundation board member election committee has released the candidates’ manifestos and Q&A session results.

Local chapter news

• Jochen Topf has been appointed as an OpenStreetMap staff consultant at the FOSSGIS Coordination Centre.

Events

• [1] FOSSGIS recounted their participation in the State of the Map Europe 2023 event.
• Bart Louwers shared his impressions of the State of the Map Europe 2023 event.
• Courtney Cook bloged her story of SotM Europe 2023 and why a good story is important for OpenStreetMap.
• The IVIDES Institute organised GIS DAY 2023 , which included mapathons in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil).

Humanitarian OSM

• Rabi Shrestha reported on the humanitarian mapping activities carried out by the OpenStreetMap Nepal Community following the earthquake in Jajarkot district, Nepal, 3 November 2023.

Maps

• The 30DayMapChallenge 2023 on Mastodon, LinkedIn, X, and BlueSky continued.It is not possible to adequately acknowledge the multitude of outstanding works. The selection we make is purely random and not an evaluation. Please take a look at the works yourself. The hashtag #30DayMapChallenge will help you.
  • Day 13: Choropleth
    • Political rights in Africa for the year 2020
    • High School Graduation Rates in Appalachia (2021)
    • Estimated Population in Sri Lanka 2020
  • Day 14: Europe
    • Shipping Routes through the Fjords of #Norway
    • dolomiti di brenta, italy – btw: the code for all of his 30DMC23 maps is available on GitHub – including the code for this map
    • Forest area per country 🌳🌲
    • The biome community of Europe
  • Day 15: OpenStreetMap – Given today’s topic a few more links than usual 😉
    • In order to do justice to our core topic and not to make this section too long, derFred has tried to collect all the examples that appeared on Mastodon and LinkedIn for Day 15 – OpenStreetMap in a blog post
    • From Cabo 🇵🇹 to Rabó 🇧🇪 – means from ‘head to toe’
    • A rendering of Ljubljana using government lidar data and an OSM standard background
    • Henningsvær in the Lofoten islands in Norway
    • The richness of OSM data and the capabilities of rayshader – Breathtaking GIF of five overlays on shaded relief – roads (line), buildings (polygon), woods (polygon), rivers (line), and historic sites (point)
  • Day 16: Oceania
    • National Parks in New Zealand
    • Where are the Numbats?
    • Pacific atolls: guide for cleaning data up in Oceania
  • Day 17: Flow
    • City bus routes in Pergamino, A, B, C, D, and E branches. Round trip
    • The Camino de Santiago pilgrimage routes from Flickr data
    • Ukraine refugee situation
    • Annual glacier surface flow velocity
  • Day 18: Atmosphere
    • Air quality of Europe from 2017 to 2021
    • Variations of the word ‘atmosphere’ in various European languages
    • The emissions of fire and smoke that would be expelled by the brick factory chimneys in Limousin, France, if they were still operational
  • Day 19: 5 minute map
    • The roads in the city centre of Vienna, Austria
    • Hourly isochrones of Ukrainian cities. Where you can go in 60 minutes by car
    • Mapping ‘minute’ using #GeoNames
    • Cassini map #oldMap using #Opendata @IGNFrance vector tile #geocomuns #Macarte
• Zkir analysed several statistical maps showing the age of OSM objects. Using these maps, we can see which areas were first mapped a long time ago and which areas have been inactive recently.

Software

• Sarah Hoffmann announced the release of Nominatim versions 4.3.2 and 4.2.4. These versions contain fixes for SQL injection security holes in the Nominatim CLI.
• Sarah Hoffmann reported on an experiment to improve the performance of the Nominatim Python frontend by tuning SQLAlchemy. This optimisation successfully improved the performance of the Python frontend, although it is still not as good as the previous PHP implementation.
• In response to the inaccessibility of Bing satellite imagery in some OSM editors, Microsoft’s Milos Brzakovic explained the new rules for using the Bing Maps imagery API for OSM editors. This is due to the new policy of separating the free version of the API for OSM editors from the paid version of the Bing Maps imagery API.

Did you know …

• … the map with all hackerspaces, fablabs, and makerspaces?
• … that the Mastodon MapComplete bot account reports MapComplete user statistics regularly?
• … that you can see the historical Java Great Post Road on OpenStreetMap?

Other “geo” things

• Nate Berg, from FastCompany, has reviewed Felt, an online service for creating custom maps.
• OpenStreetMap isn’t the only place where people are prepared to fight over seemingly minor issues. In Hampshire, England, locals have been campaigning for the correct use of apostrophes on street signs. OpenStreetMap has always had the apostrophe.
• Robert Thorson explained how stone walls became a signature landform of New England.

Note:
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This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, Strubbl, TheSwavu, barefootstache, conradoos, derFred, renecha, rtnf.
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