News 2023 - Week 48

Breaking news

• The voting period for the OSMF Board elections has been extended by one week. The reason was an error in the management software used by the OSMF, which resulted in around 60 members entitled to vote not receiving an email to cast their vote. The extension of the election period was agreed at the Annual General Meeting held on 9 December and the poll will now close on Saturday 16 December at 4 pm.

Mapping

• Charlie Plett has created a tutorial video on how to map buildings using JOSM and ID Editor.
• Requests for comments have been reopened on this proposal:
  • GTFS Tagging Standard for tagging data from a General Transit Feed Specification feed.
• Voting is open on:
  • crossing:continuous=yes/no to map continuous crossing, where a sidewalk continues uninterrupted across a side road, until Thursday 14 December.
  • amenity=bicycle_wash to map bicycle wash stations, until Monday 18 December.
• The vote on historic=millstone has closed, with the proposal being approved with 14 votes for and 1 vote against.

Community

• Robert Grübler explained his colleague’s experience dealing with the authorities while doing OpenStreetMap mapping in the field.
• dkbenjamin reviewed the history of OSM Analytics’ development. This tool will be ending service soon. He also asked for community input on suggestions for improvements to the data analysis features of the OpenStreetMap ecosystem.
• DW (Deutsche Welle), a German version of the BBC ;-), is creating software, called Spot, to do AI-driven natural language geospatial searches on OpenStreetMap. The software will translate user input via an AI. DW is asking for feedback and help from the OSM community. ‘We would especially appreciate the help of people with in-depth knowledge of the OSM tagging system’. DW asked for contributions to be made via GitHub, where the current code can also be found. A public beta release of a usable demo is planned for February 2024.
• rtnf has compiled some excerpts from the manifesto pages of the OpenStreetMap Foundation board candidates.

Local chapter news

• The November 2023 edition of the OpenStreetMap US Newsletter has been published.

Events

• [1] SeverinGeo reported on the State of the Map Africa 2023 activities live via its Mastodon account.
• Discover the world of OpenStreetMap at the Meetup in Barcelona! On Monday 11 December Marc Bosch and Wladimir Szczerban will showcase the diversity of OpenStreetMap at Adevinta, Spain. Learn how OSM can be integrated into free software projects and used for data analysis.
• Antidius Kawamala explained his experience of participation in the GIS Day Tanzania 2023 activities.

Maps

• The month of November has come to an end and with it the 30DayMapChallenge. Once again, we have seen many wonderful maps and perhaps weeklyOSM has been able to demonstrate with its collections what can be done with the data from OpenStreetMap.
  • Day 27: Dot
    • Who says maps have to be of the Earth?
    • Inset map of area between Melton Mowbray & Waltham-on-the-Wolds in Leics (centre of English fox hunting in C19)
    • Population Density Map of Germany 2020
    • Squirrels of Central Park … Check out the full map here
  • Day 28: Is this a chart or a map?
    • Distribution of the population by five-year age groups and census tract, INDEC Census 2010
    • Some overlapping countries….maps or a layered proportional area chart? … check out the code on GitHub
    • Results of demining of the territory of Ukraine by the SESU units for the entire period of war
    • The 120 radially most distant communes of France’s Hexagon from Paris
  • Day 29: Population
    • Urban areas in the Northern and Southern hemispheres
    • Shropshire population by parish 2021. Geographically correct and a cartogram
    • I’m not sure why I’ve spent so many years learning how to use #GIS software when #Excel exists 😓
    • Where Welsh is spoken in Wales
  • Day 30: My favorite
    • not OSM, but amazing – Mondrian map 🟥🟨⬛️🟦
    • Names of settlements derived from the name Fedir
    • 2023 Saudi Pro League Summer Signings
• Anita Graser encouraged QGIS users to share the maps they have created on the ‘QGIS Map Showcase‘ on Flickr.
• Grant Slater is seeking help to purchase old topographic maps of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) in order to make them available online.
• Some participants have summarised their participation in this year’s 30DayMapChallenge:
  • Fedir Gontsa
  • Fedrica Gazzelloni
  • terence
  • Frédéric Cantat
  • Jacob L. Macdonald
  • SIG UCA
  • Hans van der Kwast
  • Izzy Youngs
  • Mapidea
  • Bejamin Nowak
  • Joel Mariteau
  • Kurt Menke
  • MapTheClouds
  • digigeolab@mastodon.online

OSM in action

• Amid the restrictions to access in Gaza and recent high resolution optical satellite images of the territory, a group of decentralised scientists led by the Decentralised Damage Mapping Group has been publishing a map of the damage to buildings in the territory. The map is revised every 5 to 6 days and has been shared by some 120 media organistions so far. For the estimation of building destruction in Gaza, the researchers are relying on Copernicus’ new Sentinel-1 satellite constellation of radar sensors (10-metre resolution). The estimates are also based on OpenStreetMap and Microsoft building footprint. Nearly 105,000 buildings may have suffered damage as of 4 December. See Scientific American,
  Democracy Now! or BBC for more information.
• The Israel Defense Forces have published a Leaflet / OpenStreetMap map of Gaza superimposing a grid divided into numbered blocks, that they say is to coordinate civilian evacuation and reduce casualties. There were critics on usability of such maps and UN agencies officials operating in Gaza reacted by saying that no place is safe across the Gaza Strip including the south, and no civilian infrastructure or facility has been spared, including hospitals, medical facilities, schools, and UN shelters.

Software

• A recent change to Organic Maps, which added a commercial hotel review platform as a partner link in the hope of opening up a new revenue stream, had led to heated debate about whether this was advertising or not (we reported earlier). Some users had expressed the fear that the developers were turning Organic Maps into Maps.me 2.0, from which this app originally split off from for precisely these reasons. In addition, the main developers’ handling of the community’s objections was criticised, with some then apologising for this.
• Jean-Claude Repetto described, in his OSM diary, how Strava’s heat maps are useful for improving OSM. He has written a Python programme to detect missing paths in OSM from the Strava heat maps and create MapRoulette challenges for adding them to OSM.
• ToastHawaii wrote a blog on how he tries to make OSM apps more visible for everyday users by improving the wiki and supporting the comparison of the apps’ features in his ‘OSM Apps Catalog‘.
• NextGIS has released a new version of their OSMInfo plugin for QGIS. OSMInfo uses the Overpass API to add the ability to click and get OSM data anywhere in the world. Map features can be added to new or existing layers or copy-pasted anywhere else.
• The NLnet Foundation has announced its new funding projects for their next funding round. Among them are two from the OpenStreetMap ecosystem: Umap (collaborative custom mapping with OpenStreetMap data) and Protomaps (self-hostable maps based on OpenStreetMap data). The NLnet Foundation has previously funded several OpenStreetMap-based projects, including StreetComplete, MapComplete, and Nominatim.
• Sam Woodcock explained how to use the Field Mapping Tasking Manager (FMTM) to coordinate field mapping efforts.

Did you know …

• … that OpenStreetMap has implemented a policy on limiting the number of edits new accounts can do? This triggered a discussion on the OSM Community forum about how this impacts new mappers’ contributions to mapathons and possible revisions to the policy.
• … the CalcMaps website allows you to measure, search, and overlay mark-up elements on maps?
• … the ‘Project Full Text Search‘ QGIS plugin? This plugin adds a global search functionality to QGIS.
• … that the longest current OpenStreetMap username is 250 characters long?

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by PierZen, Strubbl, TheSwavu, YoViajo, barefootstache, derFred, jcr83, mcliquid, rtnf.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.