On October 26, 2019, the voting for the tagging scheme for plates and identification marks of communal infrastructure ended 1 | Pyrog - Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
Mapping
- The MapRoulette service team said on Twitter that it had improved the documentation, and therefore was waiting for comments and volunteers who were ready to help them.
- Frederick Ramm asked the community to comment on a number of areas that were marked as a park (including a “micropark”). This question arose in connection with one conflict in the United States, which is now being considered in the DWG.
- Michael Brandtner suggested automatically adding the tag
cash_withdrawal= (the ability to withdraw cash directly to the store) to all stores in one supermarket chain in Germany. This initiative received mixed reviews, both on the German mailing list (automatic translation ) and on the forum (automatic translation ). - John F. Kennedy developed a plugin for JOSM that makes it easy to create new boundaries based on existing ones in OpenStreetMap. When combining existing borders, it automatically erases the common borders.
- Voting for the
amenity=toy_library , which the user ChameleonScales suggested marking toy libraries , ended on October 27, 2019. It is important to note that toy libraries provide only toys and various games, but not books. - On October 26, 2019, the vote ended for the tagging scheme , which was proposed to mark on the map the signs and identification marks of the communal infrastructure: gas and water pipes, service valves, power lines, hydrants and much more. The circuit was developed by user Fanfouer.
OpenStreetMap Foundation
- Michael Reichert asked the OSM Foundation Board: why the micro-grant initiative was adopted without discussion with the community. His question answered, Joost Schouppe.
- The draft minutes of the meeting of the working group on local offices of October 9, 2019 are available on the OSMF wiki page.
Events
- Ilya Zverev asked cartographers to answer a number of questions regarding the differences in cartography in a particular country. He presented his results at the local SotM conference , which was held on October 25-27, 2019 in the city of Prizren (Kosovo).
- User Imagico wrote a detailed report on the SoTM-2019 conference, which this year was held in the German city of Heidelberg. He shares not only emotions, but also details the venue, the scale of the conference, speeches, the audience, scholarships, and even reflects on the future of SoTM.
- Vienna will be held on October 29
5th geo-meeting. The purpose of this event is to create a platform for the exchange of views of lovers and a professional from the GIS sector. - On October 12, 2019 in Russia for the first time (in Moscow) the Missing Maps cardboard was organized, organized by Doctors Without Borders in conjunction with the Greenhouse of Social Technologies. According to the organizers, 36 participants drew 86% of the map of Bytridge province in southern Zimbabwe in 2.5 hours.
Humanitarian OSM
- On October 13, International Disaster Risk Reduction Day (#DisasterRiskReduction), the Giscience research group at the University of Heidelberg published an article about the tools they created to provide humanitarian assistance during and before disasters. In addition, they shared a list of resources that they can provide for seminars, conferences, and cartographic congresses or research projects and related events.
Education
- A free five-hour Geospatial Analysis course is available at kaggle.com. It includes lessons on learning the GeoPandas utility set, which is a library for working with geospatial data in Python, coordinate systems, interactive maps, geospatial data operations, and proximity analysis.
Cards
- Which cards are not there, for almost any need. Therefore, there is also a map that displays motorcycle parking marked in OSM.
We pass to OSM
- 115.bel - a Belarusian website where citizens can report faults on roads, cycleways, street lighting and other urban sites, and receive a response from the local authorities. Not so long ago, it was updated . Now OpenStreetMap is used as the background map, and the address data, apparently, was also obtained using OSM. Most likely, the tiles "stretch" from the main server to osm.org.
Licenses
- Facebook's indication of OSM data attribution, or rather non-indication - this topic has more than once provoked discussions on the OSM Foundation mailing list. Some members of the OSM community expect action to be taken to stop this ongoing violation of the OSM Data Terms of Use. Frederick Ramm of the OSM Foundation Council, as well as Simon Poole of the Licensing Working Group, hope that the draft OSM Attribution Guide will be approved soon.
Software
- Andreas Burki on the Swiss Talk mailing list is interested in (automatic translation ): why does skuettel.ch set its cookies for users on umap.osm.ch? As it turned out, on the UMAP start page are examples of maps that use third-party sites. At the same time, for some reason, they can “embed” their cookies, which really can be unsafe.
Programming
- Brian DeRocher on GitHub invited OSM developers to post a new Microcosms section on osm.org, which is a set of features to support local mapping teams and the events in which they participate. The change request is large enough and consists of 64 proposals.
Did you know …
OSM in the media
- In Pokémon Go could not play on the Greek island of Salamis, as the whole island was tagged
natural=bay (bay), which caused the game to believe that this area is covered with seawater. Although this misunderstanding has already been fixed in OSM, Niantic (the developer of Pokémon Go) has not yet updated the data. But after this question was raised in one of the topics on Reddit, it seems that the developers paid attention to this problem. (information from Eurogamer website)
Other geo events
- The Guardian announces a project under which it is planned to scan all of the land on Earth using an aircraft equipped with lidars. The aim of the project is to preserve documentary evidence of world cultural, environmental and geological treasures. Preparing a 3D card with a resolution of 20 cm will cost an estimated $ 15 million.
- Chris Fleet, in an article titled “Creating, Managing, and Increasing the Potential of Large Layers with Geo-referencing Online Maps,” talks about a program for linking and using the historical cartographic collection of the National Library of Scotland, which also provides OSM community access to its funds.
- Geospatial World has published an article on the evolution of the Google Maps service. Despite the fact that the material recalls the events of 2005, when Google launched its mapping service, there are not enough details.
- A major US gas and electricity supplier, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, is currently massively shutting down California to prevent forest fires. However, this company laid out the geography of disconnections in the form of shape-files, which professionals in the field of GIS technologies can work with, and not a traditional map that is accessible and understandable for most. This caused outrage, but the San Francisco Chronicle made a convenient online map using the Leaflet. Power outages affected more than 1 million people. They began after a terrible forest fire in 2018, which claimed the lives of more than 80 people, and is also believed to have begun after a power line malfunction.
- Mongabay has published an article by Pratyush Tripati and Tedzha Malladi from the Indian Institute of Humanities Geospatial Laboratory in which they talk about using Sentinel-1 satellite imagery to indicate the extent of recent floods in Assam and Bihar. The results shown on OSM charts without coordinates are a good example of how mapping can help during rescue operations.
- Geoscience Australia, an Australian government agency, said it has stopped printing and selling paper topographic maps since December 2019. This decision was caused by a reduction in budget financing and a decrease in demand for paper cards.
- Website pocketnavigation.de did review (automatic translation ) new satellite navigator by Garmin «Overlander», which comes preloaded with the map based on OSM.
- Massey University Press published the book We Are Here: an atlas of Aotearoa by Chris MacDowell and Tim Denis. In fact, this is a thematic atlas of New Zealand, which is called Aotearoa in the Maori language. Of particular interest to map lovers is that some notes, data, code (Python, R) and style sheets (Mapnik) are posted on GitHub.
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