01/19/2011 – 02/01/2011
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! (Sorry, we couldn’t keep the weekly schedule because we’re still only two authors who are busy with other stuff too 🙁 )
- MapQuest donated 50,000$ to the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF). The money will primarily be used for upgrading and maintaining the hardware resources of the OSM project.
- Nominatim was subject to some improvements that should improve the search quality, especially in the US.
- Gregory Marler has written a small How-to for using Chrome’s Omnibox to search on http://openstreetmap.org.
- The new Java XAPI was online for a first public test last week. Due to hardware problems it’s now down again. A new graphical user interface for creating queries is also in development.
- MapQuest has released three new services: Open Guidance Service, Open JavaScript SDK and Open Tiles Service.
- “Orebro is Sweden’s first municipality to release geodata under an ODbl license, requiring attribution and ‘share alike’.” Link to the news article.
- The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has chosen its new logo.
- OpenStreetMap has reached 350,000 registered users.
- “Geo-Analytics on OpenStreetMap Road Data”: OpenStreetMap is adding about 90,000km of roads a week at the moment. More analytics here.
- User:SK53 has created a map that shows the density of pubs for every 5 square kilometer in the UK.
- Ito World improved its OSM Analysis service and made some analysis on the completeness of OpenStreetMap in Great Britian.
- Nick Whitelegg updated OpenTrailView and Freemap UK.
- FortiusOne developed a new map layer tool called Acetate. It allows one to compile several different map layers (roads, road names, POIs, place names) in a custom order and insert their own mashup data in between.
- Maps4Mac is an app for Mac OS X that is rendering OSM data on demand with Mapnik from a database.
- The before mentioned 3D globe – rendered with WebGL in your web browser – is now live.
- WheelMap is now available in Japanese too. They are also looking for translators to make it available in Portugese, Icelandic and more languages.
- Liberation, a French daily newspaper has started to use OSM as a base map on their website. Here’s an example article.
For more news, especially regarding new tags and wiki pages, you can check-out the community-updates over here.
Authors: Pascal & Jonas
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