weeklyOSM 744

17/10/2024-23/10/2024

Ca’ Giustinian [¹] | © La Biennale di Venezia | Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

Mapping

Andy Mabbett has raised a concern about a remote mapper repeatedly closing an unresolved OpenStreetMap note regarding a cemetery. The mapping was done using aerial imagery, which does not capture the full extent of the cemetery, and Andy questioned how to properly escalate this issue. He highlighted that some parts of the cemetery are only visible in non-free imagery and that the mapped area is incomplete. The OSM-talk mailing list seems to have been orphaned since the forum was set up, however Andy got a few replies. This shows that the list is still being read. 😉

Community

Anne-Karoline Distel came across an article with a map without attribution in her local newspaper and showed how she proved that its data came from OSM.
lhirlimann participated ► in the monthly meeting of the OpenStreetMap Toulouse, France, community on Saturday 19 October. During the session, roptat presented the Public Transport Network Analysis tool, which helps map and verify public transport routes in OSM. The group also discussed their upcoming involvement in DevFest Toulouse ► and Capitole du Libre.
Negreheb blogged about his project to capture 360° images of the city of Salzburg, Austria, for Mapillary and possibly for Panoramax.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

The OpenStreetMap Foundation Annual General Meeting was held on Saturday 19 October. The board has released several reports including:
Guillaume Rischard has published his OpenStreetMap Foundation 2024 chairperson’s report. Regrid, QGIS, and Calimoto were welcomed as silver corporate members in 2024. Efforts have been pursued for more diversity in the Foundation’s membership. The Board has worked on internal policies and guidelines. On the finance technical side, the budgeting system has been improved, with expenses rapidly getting reconciled with the budget, with regular finance reports being useful both for the Board and for fundraising. Work about map attribution and the vector tile project was also presented.
Steve Coast, who had previously lobbied against the OSMF offering tile services, has again criticised the OSMF’s direction, stating that the GBP 373,000 (USD 483,000) raised in the last fundraising campaign should not be used for the OSM tile server to provide a free tile service, and that the OSMF should focus on completing the map instead. This idea was not well received by the community and various people argued in favour of maintaining the status quo. The 2024 budgeted cost for the standard tile layer was GBP 8,700 (USD 11,000). The 2025 cost is likely to be about GBP 4,200 (USD 5,400).

Events

Shizuoka Prefecture (Japan) held ► the Open Data Chubu Region Workshop on Wednesday 25 September, to promote and raise awareness about open data. The event included an OpenStreetMap mapping party where participants walked around the area near Fujieda Station, gathered information, mapped it in OpenStreetMap, and presented their results.
The upload of the recordings from State of the Map 2024, held in Nairobi, Kenya, has started. You can find the growing playlist here.

OSM research

Niels van Berkel and Henning Pohl have investigated the tensions that the use of large-scale automated edits and bots bring to editors in OpenStreetMap. They analysed more than 15 years of discussions from OSM mailing lists about bots and automated edits. From this data, they identified and analysed several recurring themes related to the topic of automated edits.

Maps

Christoph Hormann has introduced several new symbol designs for various point barriers in the OSM-Carto Alternative Colours map style, a fork of the OSM Carto style that uses a different colour scheme and cartographic approach. His design approach builds on the original concepts used for rendering barriers in the early versions of OSM Carto.

OSM in action

[1] The Biennale Arte 2024, in Venice, Italy, is running until Sunday 24 November. So there’s still time for last-minute travellers to visit. The Biennale is using OSM to guide visitors to individual exhibition spaces.

Software

Eugene introduced the 3D GPX track feature on OsmAnd, which displays route elevation along with visualisations of speed, altitude, slope, and heart rate. This feature offers a comprehensive view, helping users analyse their performance and better understand route dynamics in a 3D visualisation.

Programming

Kamil Monicz shared some updates on the current development of OpenStreetMap-NG, which is his personal alternative to the OpenStreetMap code base, including the implementation of OAuth2 and personal access tokens, a tag diff mode for easier review of tagging changes, and high-resolution feature icons.
Andy Allan delivered a presentation to the London Ruby Users Group on his experience as a software maintainer for the OpenStreetMap website codebase.

Releases

Christian Quest, from OSM-France, presented several new features of Panoramax 2.7. The new features include a user leaderboard and an updated upload API, which handles sequence splitting and duplicate image removal. Christian also announced that ESRI has worked on integrating Panoramax into its ArcGIS software. Panoramax is an open-source platform that provides geolocated street imagery via a decentralised architecture, similar to Google Street View, but self-hosted and without restrictive use conditions. There are several Panoramax instances, including the French and global versions, where users can upload images and share them via APIs.
HeiGIT announced new features for the ohsome Quality API and Dashboard, expanding its data quality assessment tools. Previously, it had used three indicators: data currentness, mapping saturation, and a building and road comparison with reference data. The latest update introduced a fourth indicator, attribute completeness, which shows the percentage of features in an area with specific additional attributes.

Did you know …

… that there’s a mail template, which you can use if you find a project using OpenStreetMap data but lacking proper attribution?
… that SuperTuxKart, a free and open-source 3D racing game, can use OpenStreetMap data for levels?

Other “geo” things

France’s National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information (IGN) is aiming to create a digital twin of France, in order to better understand ecological evolution. You can better understand it by reading the interview ► with Sébastien Soriano, IGN’s general director.
ORF Burgenland reported ► on the opening of a GNSS checkpoint in St. Margarethen, Austria. These checkpoints allow smartphone users to verify the accuracy of their device’s location services by comparing with precise, pre-measured coordinates.
In their latest edition of the #geoweirdness trivia thread, OpenCage showcased the world of linguistic maps and atlases, which chart variations in vocabulary and sentence structure across different geographical regions.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2024-10-25
Bologna	OpenStreetMap al Linux Day di Bologna		2024-10-26
中正區	台北城內商家mapping party暨慶賀MozTW 3.0喬遷之喜		2024-10-26
Rio de Janeiro	(Online) Mapeamento Colaborativo com OpenStreetMap e uMap (Minicurso)		2024-10-26
Mumbai	Mumbai Mapping Party		2024-10-26
City of South Perth	Social Mapping Sunday: Perth Zoo FREE TICKETS		2024-10-27
Strasbourg	Strasbourg 2ème Atelier de cartographie sur OpenStreetMap		2024-10-28
Saint-Étienne	Rencontre Saint-Étienne et sud Loire		2024-10-28
	Bremer Mappertreffen		2024-10-28
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2024-10-30
	OSMF Affiliation Models brainstorming		2024-10-30
Amsterdam	Maptime Amsterdam: Autumn mapping party		2024-10-30
Wien	73. Wiener OSM-Stammtisch		2024-10-30
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)		2024-10-30
	OSM-Deutschland Vernetzungstreffen 30.10.2024		2024-10-30
Moers	Community-Hackday am 1. – 3. November 2024 im JuNo, Moers Repelen		2024-11-01 – 2024-11-03
Berlin	OSM Hackweekend Berlin 11/2024		2024-11-02 – 2024-11-03
Hobart	FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2024		2024-11-05 – 2024-11-08
	Missing Maps London: (Online) Mapathon [eng]		2024-11-05
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen		2024-11-06
Potsdam	Radnetz Brandenburg Mapping Abend #10	✓	2024-11-06
Salzburg	Maker Faire Salzburg 2024		2024-11-09
Zürich	169. OSM-Stammtisch Zürich		2024-11-11
中正區	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #70		2024-11-11