Weekly OSM Summary #7

12/23/2010 – 01/10/2011

Every week a lot of things are happening in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) world. It can be hard to keep track of all the different communication channels and don’t miss any important news. That’s why we’ve created a short summary of all the news here. Enjoy!

  • The Call for Papers for the State of the Map conference 2011 in Denver has started.
  • The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is asking for help to trace the Ivory Coast.
  • The Call for Papers for the SOTM-EU in Vienna has started too. SOTM-EU is also on Twitter as @sotmeu and the hashtag is #sotmeu.
  • Oliver publishes two new videos of his interview series with OSMF board members: Mikel Maron and Henk Hoff
  • OpenStreetBugs is now reachable with the short URL osmbugs.org (via Wiki).
  • User:Bitsteller is creating isometric 3D maps from OSM data.
  • TriMet, which provides public transportation in the Portland, Oregon, metropolitan area, is using OSM data for their OpenTripPlaner. More projects are planed.
  • Klokan Přidals is working on a 3D globe rendered in a web browser using HTML5 Canvas with WebGL and OSM data. Here’s a demo video.
  • New WheelChairMap for Switzerland. More information in the wiki.
  • User:frink has created a speed camera map.
  • User:Gary68 has released a now perl module: “osmDB.pm is a module (in extension to osm.pm) to transfer data extracted from an osm file into a mysql database. It also provides functions to access this data.”
  • Jochen Topf has released Osmium, “a C++ framework for working with OSM data files. Osmium will parse OSM files (XMLor PBF) and call back into handlers for each object (node, way, relation) it encounters along the way.” Osmium is also available on Github.
  • A new version of the Bing Imagery Analyzers is online. The new release includes bug fixes and a transparency slider. Also: “The underlying tile.php now also supports TMS-type requests for easy integration with OpenLayers.”
  • OSM is going to have a booth at the FOSDEM (The Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting) in Brussels, Belgium on 5 and 6 of February, 2011. Mappers are invited to help to run the booth (Wiki).
  • FacilMap is an OpenLayers-based slippy map that aims to combine useful geographical information, renderings and tools of different projects into one reusable and extendable map (Wiki).
  • The new Maps Beta on geocaching.com now also includes OSM maps (MapQuest, Mapnik and OpenCycleMap).
  • Maperitive Build 1094 was released by Igor Brejc. One of the new things: “generate-tiles command now has the ability to detect whether tile contents have changed since the last run (using tile fingerprinting). This way only the actually modified tiles can be uploaded to an FTP server, saving you a lot of time and bandwidth.”
  • Merkaator 0.17.0 was released. New features include a Bing Maps plugin, French Cadastre plugin, GDAL raster background support and printing.
  • OSMTrack, an iPhone app designed specifically for contributing to OSM, was released as version 3.0 a while ago featuring offline vector map, multitasking, iPad support, etc (Wiki).

For more news, especially regarding new tags and wiki pages, you can check-out the community-updates over here.

Authors: PascalJonas, Brice & Dennis.
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