Monthly Archives: April 2011

Project of the Month: Sport and activity month

May is sport and activity month at Project of the Week.

The joyous sounds of children playing. The roar of the crowd at a
well executed play. The Project of the Month is to map your local sport fields. Put
your local sport fields on the map.

This is your Project of the Month. 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 or Project of the Month.

Image of the Week: OpenWhateverMap

Media_httpwikiopenstr_hqwkp

OpenStreetMap contributor, Firefishy, created OpenWhateverMap.org to
demonstrate a variety of map themes all at the same time.

OpenWhateverMap was launched on 01 April 2011.

This is a Featured image, which means that it has been identified as
one of the best examples of OpenStreetMap mapping, or that it provides
a useful illustration of the OpenStreetMap project.

If you know another image of similar quality, you can nominate it on
Featured image proposals.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Featured_image_proposals

OpenStreetMap recognized by UN Foundation

Media_httpiimgurcomba_nnufs

The United Nations Foundation, the United Nations Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and others have recognized the
crucial role played by OpenStreetMap in relief efforts in Haiti and
elsewhere.

Quoting from the UN Foundation Disaster Relief 2.0 Fast Facts

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a community of approximately
150,000 mappers dedicated to building a free and open map of the
world. OSM mobilized more than 640 volunteers around the world, who
scanned and rectified old atlases and maps and traced Haitian roads,
bridges, and buildings into the OpenStreetMap geospatial wiki using
tools that only required a simple web browser and time. In the
process, this community turned a blank spot on the map into one of the
most accurately mapped countries in the world—creating a map far
better than any available to the UN. By mid-March, OpenStreetMap had
become the de facto source for Haiti map data within most UN agencies
and the EC Humanitarian Unit. MapAction credits OpenStreetMap with
providing an essential service and for building a street map of Haiti
from scratch in about two weeks, a project that should have taken
about a year.

Project of the Week: Food Month – Delicatessen and Convenience Stores.

April is food month. We’ll be tagging various portions of the food
supply system in and around our homes. We’ll look at Farmers’ Markets
for the full month; venues for many vendors of food directly from the
source. Through the month we’ll look at individual vendors of various
foods. As always, Project of the Week and Project of the Month exist
only to encourage your mapping. You don’t need to wait for a project
to add a cheese shop to the map! Unless, of course, you waited for
this week! This week, prepared foods.

Delicatessen, convenience stores and prepared food

Prepared foods occupy that middle ground between groceries and a
restaurant. Some delicatessens have seating and table service, and
might be correctly tagged as {{tag|amenity|restaurant}}. But the
stock in trade of the deli is prepared food. Cured meat, or potato
salad, or caviar, or herbed olive oil for inclusion in your family
meals. The convenience store might provide you with a pre-made
sandwich and a carton of milk, but table service is unlikely. So is a
chair. Recent studies have found that urban areas with financial
challenges often lack the markets and grocery stores from earlier in
this project of the month.

This week we look at those not-quite-restaurants that are not quite
food vendors. The prepared food vendors such as delis and convenience
stores are the focus of this Project of the Week. Let’s put our local delis and convenience stores and other prepared food vendors on the map.

This is your Project of the Month. 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 or Project of the Month.

Deli photo by Liz Henry is licensed CC-By-ND

Image of the Week: OpenStreetMap in flight simulator

Media_httpwikiopenstr_cbejx

OpenStreetMap data is used to generate 3-D terrain data for a flight
simulator. In the photo above, terrain for the X-Plane filght
simulator is generated by a program called osm3xp.

This is a Featured image, which means that it has been identified as
one of the best examples of OpenStreetMap mapping, or that it provides
a useful illustration of the OpenStreetMap project.

If you know another image of similar quality, you can nominate it on
Featured image proposals.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Featured_image_proposals

Weekly OSM Summary #15

March 31th, 2011 – April 17th, 2011

A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world.

  • The Preliminary program of the State of the Map Europe is out.
  • The third phase of the OSM license change starts on Sunday (April 17th 2011).
  • Toby Murray created a diagram of OSM members accepting/declining the new license and contributor terms
  • OSM’s contribution to the Haiti reconstruction is recognized by the Disaster Relief 2.0 report by the UN Foundation.
  • An article about a Humanitarian OSM Mapping Party in France.
  • Mikel Maron writes about Googles assumed „OpenData“ initiatives like MapMaker and their own Mapping Parties. A response from Frederik Ramm and Mikels second blog post.
  • Two weeks ago the German OpenStreetMap conference FOSSGIS 2011 took place in Heidelberg. There are video recordings of almost all the OSM talks here (in German obviously).
  • Rostock is the first German city, which has nearly all house numbers in OSM (only in German).
  • There will be a Taginfo Developer Workshop on May 7th/8th 2011 in Karlsruhe, Germany.
  • It seems that in Mitrovica (Kosovo) an edit war is coming up.
  • The City Saransk in Russia was mapped in 50 hours in an online mapping party. You can see the evolution in a video here.
  • Results of the hackweekend in London are in. The next hackweekend is already in the planning .
  • “Great Britain completely mapped in less than a year?”
  • Peter Reed created a tagging stat of the cycle-infrastructure in Great Britain.
  • The new OpenEcoMaps is available for some areas in Great Britain now. It displays “green data” from OSM as an overlay.
  • An experimental API server with Membase is online. Read more in jkoshys blog.
  • Steve Coast talks at “GeoWeb and Law” (after 3:40min)
  • The French ministry of justice website has a slippy map with an option to use OSM tiles.
  • OpenStreetBlock – a web service for turning a given lat/lon coordinate (e.g. 40.737813,-73.997887) into a textual description of the actual city block to which the coordinate points (e.g. “West 14th Street bet. 6th Ave. & 7th Ave”) using OpenStreetMap data.”
  • The Google Maps Terms of Service have been modified with a number of changes that relate to advertising and usage limits. Remember that OSM also has a tile usage policy for its servers, but of course you can always setup your own tile server (using Tile Drawer for example) or use tiles hosted by third parties like MapQuest.
  • MapQuest has released three new services. The XAPI service is using the newly developed Java XAPI. The Nominatim Pre-indexed Data Service can be used to speed up your own Nominatim installation process. The Broken Polygon Report for Nominatim can be used to fix polygon data in OSM.

Authors: Jonas, Pascal & 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.

Project of the Week: Cheese Shops and more

April is food month for Project of the Week / Month. We’ll be tagging
various portions of the food supply system in and around our homes.
We’ll look at marketplaces for the full month; venues for many vendors
where you can buy directly from the source. Through the month we’ll
look at individual vendors of various foods. As always, Project of the
Week and Project of the Month exist only to encourage your mapping.
You don’t need to wait for a project to add a cheese shop to the map!
Unless, of course, you waited for this week! This week, we address the
cheese shop and other specialty food ingredient shops.

This week we look at food vendors who offer specialty ingredients. The
butcher, baker, cheese monger, fish shop, and other specialty food
stores are the focus of this Project of the Week. Let’s put our favourite specialty ingredient vendors on 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 suggesting a Project of the Week or Project of the Month.

Cheese photo by nikoretro is
licensed CC-By-SA

Image of the Week: Saransk Mapping Party Video

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnNyM41ZcYk?wmode=transparent]

We first told you about the Saransk Mapping Party last month when OpenStreetMap contributors showed us
an animation of the mapping event. A month later, they have created a
video that combines animation of the mapping party with various
renderings for various uses and photos of the ground truth. Enjoy the
video.

This is a Featured image, which means that it has been identified as
one of the best examples of OpenStreetMap mapping, or that it provides
a useful illustration related to the OpenStreetMap project.

If you know another image of similar quality, you can nominate it at

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Featured_image_proposals