Monthly Archives: June 2011

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.

Membership updates

The membership team have been running a bit behind on OpenStreetMap Foundation membership renewal reminders. They should now have sent an email for everyone with an expiry before early June and have replied to everyone who has renewed or joined. If you expected to hear from them or if your main email address has changed, please send an update to the membership team at membership@osmfoundation.org

Scheduled downtime Thu 23 June 2011

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.

The following services will be unavailable during the maintenance period:
API, editing features of www.openstreetmap.org and
planet.openstreetmap.org including replication diffs.

The wiki, mailing lists and help.openstreetmap.org will be unaffected.

Purpose: Some of the core servers are being re-located to another data-centre.

Additional information will be posted on the wiki as the maintenance
window approaches:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Servers/June_2011_Maintenance

http://blog.osmfoundation.org/2011/06/09/downtime-announcement-23-june-2011/

Downtime announcement: 23 June 2011

Thursday 23rd June 2011 7:30am (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.

The following services will be unavailable during the maintenance period:
API, editing features of www.openstreetmap.org and planet.openstreetmap.org including replication diffs.

The wiki, mailing lists and help.openstreetmap.org will be unaffected.

Technical: Some of the core servers are being re-located to another data-centre.

Additional information will be posted on the wiki as the maintenance window approaches:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Servers/June_2011_Maintenance

WIN a FREE trip to State of the Map 2011!

Starting today you have an awesome chance to win a FREE trip to State of the Map in Denver!

Create a fun and unique video about what OpenStreetMap means to you and why you should be chosen and you could be the lucky winner!

Here are the details:

 

OpenStreetMap Video Competition

Create a 1-3 minute video with the following criteria to guide you:

1. The video should be fun, unique and show what OpenStreetMap means to you.

2. Explain why we should choose you to be at State of the Map 2011!

3. Normal necessities and niceties:

No vulgar language

No nudity

No animal cruelty

4. Video must have CC, CC-BY or CC-BY-SA licensing

5.  Post your video to YouTube.com with the hash symbol: #sotm11

6. Email your submission (plus link to video) to video@stateofthemap.org.

Hint: Promote your video on twitter, blogs, FaceBook, etc to get more views!

The competition is open now until July 8th, 2011 11:59pm PST.

Winner will be announced by July 15th, 2011.

Winner will be chosen by a combination of video popularity and by the SotM organizing committee.

Enter as many times as you like!

No purchase necessary.

*Free trip includes round-trip flight, hotel for three nights and one (1) Passport ticket to State of the Map 2011.

 

Scholarships available to State of the Map 2011

Today the State of the Map committee announced a program to cover full travel and accommodation costs for mappers to attend State of the Map 2011 in Denver, Colorado (United States).

More information about scholarships can be found on the State of the Map website and the OSM wiki page. 

Here are the general guidelines: 

 *candidates should be from places where costs would prohibit attendance, developing countries and places that are “interesting” geopolitically. 

 *ideal candidates for funding are from countries with a small OSM community, perhaps just a few mappers in total.

*nominees have made a significant start at mapping their city, either through imagery or with their own GPS, and are directly familiar with the process of OSM. They may have started communicating among themselves, and made plans and scoped out the process for their local district. But, the community is nowhere near critical mass, and they need the inspiration and support to take OSM to the next level.

 

Nominations should be sent to scholarship@stateofthemap.org. For each nomination, include the mappers name, OSM user name, email address, location, and a paragraph or two on why they’d be great to have at SOTM. Self nominations are accepted.

The nomination period is open until June 25th and the number of scholarships rewarded will be based on the success of fund-raising. You can also be part of the “Sponsor-a-Mapper“ program, to help fund deserving mappers to attend State of the Map.