Weekly OSM Summary #19

May 30th, 2011 – June 14th, 2011

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

• Thursday 7:30am (23rd June 2011 GMT/UTC+0) the API and map data editing on www.openstreetmap.org will be unavailable. The maintenance period is expected to last for 12 hours.
• Updates for the Nominatim database, which is powering the search on osm.org, are paused for now since the database needs to be upgraded to use bigint since it has run out of integers.
• Frontdoor is an experimental service for crowdsourcing and fixing address information with a very simple interface.
• Scholarships are available for State of the Map for candidates that met certain requirements.
• There’s a video competition in which you can win a trip to SotM in Denver.
• Kothic JS is a full-featured JavaScript map rendering engine using HTML5 Canvas.
• There’s a new public transport layer on openmap.it. It’s currently in beta stage, only covers Europe for now and is updated once a week.
• User Sk53 writes about his experiences in using OSM full history extracts and handling OSM history data.
• Harry wood did a video interview with VisionOn.TV and also wrote about the issues involved in creating video tutorials for OSM.
• XHT (Xhouse Tool) is a tool to get OSM buildings into X-Plane (a flight simulator).
• Christopher Osborne was speaking at Next11 in Berlin about “Visualising Big Data” (video).
• Geofabrik now supplies daily OSM extracts for all US states (pbf and bz2).
• Members of the German OSM community and employees of the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance met for a workshop regarding the potential of crowdsourced crisis mapping. Here’s a write-up.
• A new public transport map for Switzerland.
• Patrick Weber and Tim Waters have posted their write-ups about WhereCampEU. Martijn van Exel also wrote about WhereCampEU and some interesting ideas on how to get newly signed-up users to become regular contributors.
• Taginfo moved to a new domain, taginfo.openstreetmap.org. “In addition to the main taginfo instance that contains data for the whole world, there are currently three public Taginfo instances for Ireland, Switzerland, and Italy.” A taginfo-dev mailinglist has also been set up.
• OSM now accepts OpenID signups.
• Navigon releases new POI packages based on OSM data for 44 countries with 2.2 million points.

Did we miss something? You can contact us via weekly.osm@googlemail.com.