Monthly Archives: November 2011

SotM 2012 Call for Venues is now open

We’ve had 5 great State of the Map conferences. Manchester, Limerick, Amsterdam, Girona and Denver. Big question is: where are we going to be in 2012?

We would like to have your help with finding a great venue for the largest annual OpenStreetMap conference.

Would you like to have the 2012 edition of State of the Map in your city? Submit your proposal on our Call for Venues page on the wiki. More details about criteria and the information we would like to have from you can also be found at that wiki page.

We hope to announce our 2012 venue in the beginning of the new year.

The next OpenStreetMap conference

We’ve had 5 great State of the Map conferences. Manchester, Limerick, Amsterdam, Girona and Denver. Big question is: where are we going to be in 2012?

We would like to have your help with finding a great venue for the largest annual OpenStreetMap conference.

Would you like to have the 2012 edition of State of the Map in your city? Submit your proposal on our Call for Venues page on the wiki. More details about criteria and the information we would like to have from you can also be found at that wiki page.

We hope to announce our 2012 venue in the beginning of the new year.

Half A Million And Counting

We reached 500,000 registered OpenStreetMap users last night. Yes. That’s an army of half a million people who can edit OpenStreetMap!

This project is all about mass collaboration. Thousands of people coming together on the internet to build something great: a free map of the world. If you’d like to join these ranks, head to openstreetmap.org and hit the sign up link in the top right hand corner. We’d love to have you!

When you have an account on OpenStreetMap.org you can edit and add to the map. This is what it’s all about. We need lots of people, not just to join, but to progress on to the next step where the fun really starts. Zoom in on your neighbourhood and move across to the edit tab, to enter the map editing interface. If you didn’t already try this (we know there’s lots of you), give it a go today! Contact the community if you have any questions or problems. Let us know what’s holding you back. In recent months we’ve made great strides in making it easier to edit the map, with a stream of innovations from developers of the editors, and initiatives to create new documentation. But there’s plenty more work to do on this, so that OpenStreetMap can reach a million users, and (more importantly) so that all these users will have a go at editing!

Weekly OSM Summary #31

November 14th, 2011 – November 28th, 2011

A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) world.

  • The OSM Foundation is planning the final steps to switch to the new license. Read the full blog post here. Also, the Licensing Working Group (LWG) announced some information about the database re-build here.
  • The OSM.org website had a minor update. You will find two new selections in the layer switcher in the upper right corner. The Transport Map by Andy Allan and the Open.Mapquest map.
  • The German OpenStreetMap community has a new website too. You can find a blog post about the new layout and design here.
  • Some important information from our Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT). All members need to confirm their membership. Read the full text here. Further the HOT Team is asking for help for their Samoa simulation.
  • First results of the new Engineering Working Group (EWG) can be found here.
  • More information about the past Hackweekend in London can be found here.
  • The Portugal community turned in a proposal to host the upcoming SOTM 2012. Read it here.
  • Pascal conducted a new analysis of the OSM Inspector routing view.
  • In preparation for Christmas: A XMAS Map.
  • “The Brave Mappers Project – The story of OpenStreetMap in Amsterdam in pretty shapes and colors” by Martijn.
  • Peter developed the new “OSM History Renderer” tool. It creates your own OSM history animation. Find his project and an example for Karlsruhe (Germany) at github.
  • Two employees of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation created a more US style tileset. You will find the github URL and the map URL here.
  • ITO World created a new US road fatality map using OSM as a basemap.
  • With World Airport Codes the next website changing to OSM has been introduced. Read more about the change here.
  • Osm2pgsql is used for example to create a database for rendering OSM data. The latest version of this tool has several updates. It would be great to gather some benchmarks now.
  • Jochen created a plug-in for QGIS that allows the user to use the JOSM remote control feature.
  • The Overpass API has now a mirror in Russia. What is the Overpass API and what can you do with it?

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

Authors: Pascal & Dennis – (thx @ “Wochennotiz”)

New ways to see OpenStreetMap data

Two new tile sets are now featured on the OpenStreetMap.org site. The
Transport Layer and the MapQuest Open layer both use the same Hot
Fresh OpenStreetmap data that we all know and love. Each tile set
presents that data in a different way, for a different audience by
making careful choices about how to render OpenStreetMap data.

The Transport layer, courtesy of Andy Allan shows public
transportation infrastructure like subways and bus routes and train
stations.

Media_httpiimgurcomcz_eqasq

The MapQuest Open layer, courtesy of MapQuest shows highway shields and toll
roads.

Media_httpiimgurcomt9_fjfkm

Engineering Working Group + Hack Weekend

cc-by2.0 Patrick Hoesly on flickr

Back in August we announced the formation of the Engineering Working Group, tasked with trying to attract more developers by lowering barriers to entry. Since then we’ve seen some good technical coding work and other achievements in and around the activities of this group:

  • OpenStreetMap is now rolling with rails version 3, thanks largely to the hard-working Tom Hughes. Besides deploying it, and ironing out a few nasty problems with sessions, he did the work of porting the code over. The website and API code needed to take account of differences and new features of rails 3, particularly the use of AREL for database querying.
  • Kai Krueger has packaged this rails code, and also Mapnik and mod_tile, into an unbuntu PPA. This packaging system offers a very simple way to install these tools (and keep them up to date) on ubuntu/debian . We’re currently testing this, and hope it’ll make it much easier for developers to hack on the code for openstreetmap.org.
  • Working with Mike Migurski we have a more attractive, and more helpful page sitting at planet.openstreetmap.org, the OpenStreetMap data downloads site. Mike, and stamen design, are also now providing “metro extracts” – more manageable (smaller) files for OpenStreetMap data, one city at a time.

In addition to these, the Engineering Working Group has dived head first into the big tasks of improving technical documentation, and tidying up the bug tracker.

Clearly these are things which would happen anyway within the OpenStreetMap developer community, and the achievements are down to the hard work of individual people. But the Engineering Working Group lends a little structure, and provides a forum for taking a step back and looking at these kinds of meta-development. Development which helps development!

You can find out more about the Engineering Working Group on the OSMF site, and anyone is welcome to join in their discussions, which take place every Monday on IRC (details)

London Hack Weekend – 26th, 27th

Perhaps you’d prefer to join in face-to-face? Come along to a “hack weekend”! EWG is also involved in this, and trying to get more developer events happening, in more locations. For the moment though we have one coming up at the end of the week…

See the London Hack Weekend details on the wiki (and sign up there)

Previous hack weekend at the same venue (MapQuest offices)

“An OpenStreetMap ‘hack weekend’ is a meet-up where we bring along laptops to an office space and spend the weekend doing some technical work to improve OpenStreetMap. This may be development of the “core” components, the editors, or any other side projects and pet projects we fancy hacking on. OpenStreetMap has development tasks sprouting from it in all directions. There’s work to do in almost any programming language, as well as tasks like documentation, and even some non-technical graphics design and translation tasks.

We mostly take a fairly unstructured free-form format. People turn up and start beavering away on something, or they turn up and see what they can help with. However we can also run more structured workshops if there is demand”

Whether you can make it to a hack weekend or not, we are always looking for more technical people to help with improving OpenStreetMap.

Classroom OpenStreetMap workshop

OpenStreetMap contributor Ilya Zverez reports on recent OSM workshops
in Russian classrooms.

Recently there were three mapping lessons in small towns of Perm
region, Russia. It went very well, from collecting data to drawing
maps in Potlatch. At the last meeting they even tried to send a
weather baloon with a camera (but photos were no good because of
strong wind). Here is project page, in Russian, but google-translated:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fosm.pe…
Photos and reports are in the wiki, also in Russian. One of major TV
channels covered it: http://www.5-tv.ru/news/47596/

OpenStreetMap used by TripAdvisor

OpenStreetMap contributor Harry Wood tells us
about a new application.

TripAdvisor have launched a set of free android apps providing city
guides for 20 popular world cities, and for the maps they’ve used
OpenStreetMap!

Each of the following cities has a dedicated app on the android marketplace: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Beijing, Berlin,
Boston, Chicago, Florence, Hong Kong, Hawaii, Las Vegas, London,
Los Angeles, New York City, Orlando, Paris, Rome, San Francisco,
Sydney, Tokyo, and Washington D.C., and each one comes with
OpenStreetMap in a nicely themed green colour scheme.

TripaAvisor Adroid app showing OpenStreetMap

TripAdvisor.com is one of the
largest travel websites on the web. You may know them for their hotel
and restaurant listings with user reviews. These are all available
within the app, and overlaid on the maps (although it should be noted
that they’re not using OSM for the locations of these things, and in
places it looks like they could use a bit of iterative wiki-style
improvement to their accuracy!) but we’re delighted to see them
taking OpenStreetMap data and rendering it in their own style. The
maps are also available offline, allowing travellers to avoid data
roaming fees.

ODbL progress

We’re planning the final stages of the switch over to the Open Database License for OpenStreetMap data. The OpenStreetMap Foundation Board discussed the license upgrade process and many other aspects of the project at their recent board meeting, and we’ll have more information about that from the board shortly.

One item that came out of the board meeting was the deadline to complete the license upgrade by 01 April 2012 and to publish the first OpenStreetMap planet file under the ODbL by 04 April 2012. The License Working Group supports this target date as a reasonable goal.

There are still many things to do before we are ready to publish the first OpenStreetMap planet file as an ODbL database. As always, community engagement and your participation are important. There will be more information and details on your favourite OSM community channels including the mailing lists and IRC. For now the process of contacting mappers yet to respond and remapping non-compliant data is still the priority.

There are various tools to help you get an idea of ODbL coverage in your country, or your local area. In particular, you can enable a view within Potlatch2 or install a plugin for JOSM to see the license status of elements.

Weekly OSM Summary #30

October 31th, 2011 – November 14th, 2011

A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) world.

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

Authors: Pascal & Dennis – (thx @ “Wochennotiz”)