Monthly Archives: March 2011

Project of the Week: Music Shop

They aren’t as common as they used to be, or perhaps they have merely
changed form. Some of us have a music store on our phones. Others
might have to travel to the next town to find a Bricks and
Mortar music shop. The used to be called Record Stores;
ask your grand-parents about them.

The Project of the Week is to add your local music shop to the map.

This is your Project of the Week. Make suggestions. Inspire other
mappers. What is it about contributing to OpenStreetMap that
interests you? Postboxes? Bowing alleys? Share your OpenStreetMap interests by contributing a Project of the Week.

Photo of phonograph cylinder player by Jalal Gerald Aro
is licensed CC-By-SA

OpenStreetMap at Where 2.0 and Wherecamp

OpenStreetMap will be at Where 2.0 this April 19-21 with a booth in the exhibition hall. Following Where 2.0 is WherecampSF and several OSMers helping plan a mapping party on Friday during the geogames! Learn more about each event below. 

 

The Business of Location: Where 2.0 April 19-21, 2011

Where is business: where people live, where they go, and where, when, and how they spend their money are now key factors in business success. From product development to distribution, marketing, and sales, location technologies help companies identify, understand, and serve their markets far more effectively than ever before.

The O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference explores the intersection of location technologies and trends in software development, business strategies, and marketing. The source for all things location-aware, Where 2.0 brings together CTOs, marketers, developers, technologists, researchers, geographers, startups, business developers, and entrepreneurs, to shed light on the issues surrounding:

Development- Mobile, Development- Location, Business and Strategy, Marketing, HTML5, Data Collection, the future of mapping and much more.

Zero in on the business of location at Where 2.0. Join us April 19-21, 2011 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara in Santa Clara, California.

extracted from the where 2.0 website

Wherecamp SF: April 22-23, 2011

WhereCamp is an unconference for people fascinated by place. We are an eclectic crowd ranging from urban cartographers, environmentalists, locative media artists, augmented reality developers, simulations and modeling theorists.

Often people wanting to simply understand more about the space or fund in the space also are drawn into the fold. The San Francisco version ends up being an (unofficial) Where2.0 after-party with intense conversation, presentations and dialogue. Many people say it is the highlight of their year. We’re fully sponsored and the event is free to attend but participation is mandatory – you are expected to present your projects or at least give your voice to other peoples presentations.

Join us! All you have to do is participate, educate, learn, contribute and share. We all want to hear each others voices – yours too. Sessions are organized in a bottom up way where any participant can propose a talk, topic or discussion which are held in multiple streams in multiple rooms simultaneously.

 

Weekly OSM Summary #12

02/24/2011 – 03/09/2011
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world:

  • Registration for the SOTM.EU is now open. Early bird tickets are 60€. The organizing team announced, that they’ve confirmed Steve Coast as a keynote speaker. The Call for Papers was also extended till 20th of March.
  • MapQuest enabled bicycle and pedestrian routing for the whole world. Transit routing is now available for six cities in the US.
  • The OSM User Groups Map got a new domain http://usergroups.openstreetmap.de/.
  • A map of the highway status in France http://beta.letuffe.org/ (from red to blue)
  • poi.openstreetmap.nl provides a POI-Export function for Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg.
  • A neat data visualization video showing public transport in Rennes using OSM data donated by the city of Rennes.
  • ITO World is working on ITO Map, a future map rendering service.
  • The 100,000,000th way was recently added to the database.
  • The OSM History Viewer has been repaired and is working again.
  • For South-East Asia there (German) is a visualization available, which shows unmapped streets and waterways. In the map you can find objects which are only available in Google and not in OSM.
  • Walking Papers is testing some new print features and needs your help.
  • Jochen Topf has developed a tile server for Tirex using Node.js
  • Christoph Eckert is generating preprocessed OSM maps for MoNav on the German dev server.
  • “OSM2World is a converter that creates a three-dimensional model of the world based on OpenStreetMap data. The model can be exported to different formats.”
  • OpenStreetMap is planning to participate in the Google Summer of Code again this year. Ideas will be collected here.
  • The developers that worked on some awesome new features during the OpenLayers Mobile Code Sprint are looking for people to test of the new stuff.
  • The Google Sketchup Plugin has its own wikipage now.
  • The Firefox-plugin “Operator” extracts so-called mikroformat-information of websites (for example addresses). User:FrViPofm has extend the tool for OSM and is searching for further active developers now, who are willing to translate the French tool into several languages.
  • A new build of Maperitive supports SRTM1 and custom digital elevation models (DEMS) now.
  • pyTrainer is a tool for Linux with a focus on ForeRunner. It can display GPS-tracks in graphs, maps and uses OSM in its current version. An article about this topic can be found here HanBlog.net (German).
  • The company Omniscale announced a free OSM parser (imposm.parser).
  • OpenTrail, an Android OSM app for walkers and hikers, has been released.
  • With the new version of the “Open GPS Tracker” Android app, you can now upload GPX files directly to the OSM server.
  • Fixing things in the OSM database without actually knowing what you’re doing is always a bad idea – here’s a recent example.
  • An iPhone app was causing several outages and periods of slowness last week due to an abusive breach of our tile usage policy.

Authors: Pascal,Jonas & Dennis
Did we miss something? Do you want to help us collecting the news for next week’s issue?
You can contact us via mail or Twitter.

Working Group Summary

These summaries do not replace the formal minutes of the working groups, they are intended to be a quick and easy summary of recent topics before the working groups.

Communication Working Group

31 January 2011 – The CWG continued minor improvements to the OSMF blog web site. SotM was announced for Denver. CWG seeks OSM contributors who would like to translate materials for the OSMF web site.

Scheduled CWG meetings on 14 and 28 February 2011 were canceled due to scheduling conflicts.

License Working Group

01 February 2011 – Mike and Diane from Creative Commons joined the call and learned more about the OSM license upgrade to ODbL. Reviewed draft of CT v1.2.4 and started translation for international versions. An informal poll regarding per-changeset re-licensing was created. AND indicated their support for ODbL. Initiated contact with several web sites, etc. using OSM without the required attribution. Refer to Creative Commons community for guidance re OSM map in TV program.

08 February 2011 – LWG notes guidance from the board that waiting two or more years for Creative Commons to publish an acceptable data license is not in the best interests of OSM. Minimal response to the per-changeset re-licensing poll; 2 for; 2 indifferent. Translations of CT v1.2.4 are pending. Continued to pursue other attribution issues with contacts at several sites. No response from Creative Commons Community on CCBySA materials within TV shows or ads.

15 February 2011 – French translation of CT v1.2.4 in progress, information regarding the Italian translation is pending. Only five respondents to the per-changeset re-licensing poll; three for; two indifferent. LWG will not recommend creating tools to help manage this data. DWG has offered to help the individuals who wish to remove their questionable data and accept CT/ODbL. Extended poll to talk-gb for additional feedback. Geocaching.com has OSM options on their beta site and have improved their attribution, though a few lingering typos remain. SimpleGeo.com use OSM on a beta site. Attribution was corrected after contacting them. Still no reply for Ben Last / Nearmap regarding discussion in January. LWG decided against permitting revocation of CT acceptance.

22 February 2011 – French translation still in progress, information regarding the Italian translation is still pending. Coding for CT v1.2.4 is complete and pending review. CloudMade aware of their clients with attribution deficiencies; their tools ship with attribution on by default. GeoCaching.com aware of typos and fixing asap. SimpleGeo.com missed attribution on their live site as well and fixed it when notified. A new attribution / license deficiency came to the attention of LWG. CapeTownBicycleMap.co.za “didn’t use OSM but did look at colours for inspiration.”

01 March 2011 – adding decline button to CT page is in progress. CT v1.2.4 is live on http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/Contributor_Terms and pending on OSM.org. Other attribution deficiencies are in progress. Report of an iPhone app with correct attribution that was later removed.

Strategic Working Group

04 February 2011 – Further review of budgeting process; could be simpler. Review and revisions to tile policy and scorecard. Routing services scorecard and policy to follow.

11 February 2011 – Draft budget work flow document to be simplified further. Review tile policy and score card. Recommended the draft tile policy and score card to board for acceptance. Review of wikimapia use for discussion next week. First review of routing score card and policy.

18 February 2011 – Review simplified budget documents. To be referred to board for acceptance. Feedback from board on tile policy, “Clarify preference for non-commercial tiles.”

25 February 2011 – Budget recommendation forwarded to the board. Clarified “non-commercial” section of tile policy. Tile policy to be returned to the board for acceptance. Discussed Wikimapia and referred to the board without comment. Mikel to miss upcoming meetings due to travel; Henk to chair in the absence of Mikel. The SWG notes the withdrawal of Milo van der Linden from SWG and thanks him for his contributions.

04 March 2011 – Chaired by Henk Hoff. Steven to revise budget docs based on board feedback and discuss next week. Response on revised tile policy pending. Wikimapia was referred to board. Discussion routing services, particularly the merits of public facing routing service vs quality tool for mappers. Discussion to continue on mailing list and next week.

Project of the Week: Stationery shops

Would you pass me the quill and inkpot please?

A stationery shop may seem outdated in a paperless, electronically
connected world. There is something more formal about getting a card
or letter in the mail, something joyful in the anticipation of opening
an envelope, thick with greetings and dreams, from an old friend.
Let’s put the local stationery shop on the map.

What goes into a well-mapped stationery shop? Find out on the Project of the Week: Stationery shop page.

This is your Project of the Week. Make suggestions. Inspire other
mappers. What is it about contributing to OpenStreetMap that
interests you? Postboxes? Bowing alleys? Share your OpenStreetMap
interests by suggesting a Project of the Week.

The current Project of the Month: Bridge and Tunnel continues until the end of March.

Stationery photo by Simon Pearson is
licensed CC-By-ND.

Scientific American: Mapping the food desert

Scientific American has just published an article Amateur Cartographers Map Local ‘Food Desert’ by Francie Diep on urban
food quality.

A volunteer effort to map all the food stores in Brooklyn,
New York, is an example of two rising trends: citizen mapping and
increasing scrutiny of urban Americans’ access to healthy
food

Brooklyn Food Coalition are using OpenStreetMap to present their data
on the web.

Media_httpiimgurcomz6_hahjv

Deli photo by Catherine is licensed
CC-By.