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.

May 16th, 2011 – May 30th, 2011

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

• The email for users, who didn‘t accept the new Contributor Terms so far, is ready now. It should be translated in as many languages as possible. A first batch of emails has already been send out now.
• Blog post by Patrick Weber about “Where’s the Search” field on the OpenStreetMap.org main page. Maybe as a result of this post, the search field has now been moved to an upper left position on the main OSM page.
• Muki Haklay repeats the comparison for the UK between the OSM and Ordnance Survey Meridian 2 datasets. You can find an interactive webpage with the results here.
• We now have more then one million relations in our database!
• Open Data in Vienna is now available and the first application is out: The Toilet Map Vienna. An Augmented-Reality-App based on Open Data from Vienna.
• A new mailling list for the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF) is available.
• The OSMF-Wiki has a new skin made by Harry Wood. This way you can differentiate it from the normal OSM wiki.
• Jakob Altenstein wrote a bachelor-thesis about the efforts of the OSM license change. It is available in German here.
• A new series shows how communities from different countries map around the world.
• Pascal Neis wrote a blog post about the new Web-GUI for the Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) with OSM data.
• Some thoughts from Olvier Kühn about “Could a less restrictive share-alike license give OpenStreetMap data a boost?“
• Steve Coast pleads for moderation of the OSM mailing lists.
• First preliminaries for the change from 32bit to 64bit node IDs.
• The first tour guide with OSM maps has been published. It is available for ten cities along the Danube. You can find more information in German here and a screenshot here.
• OSM user “Head” created a haptomap with OSM.
• The project “building=yes” is a searchable directory for all buildings of the OSM database.
• Chris Hill wrote about his first impressions with Leaflet (an OS JavaScript library for making tile-based interactive maps for mobile/desktop browsers) und created a demo.
• A map by Magnificent shows areas a user can reach using public transport in a given time for certain cities.
• Employees of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster hosted an OpenStreetMap Mapping Party in São Paolo with 40 students. (Link is in German)
• Harry Wood wrote a summary of the last London Hack Weekend.
• Tim Adler published a usage statistic for the Wikipedia POI Layer here.
• A first GSoC project update from Customised OSM Tile Server and request for feedback.
• Martijn van Exel would like to start a new OSM service (for example with twitter) and includes some ideas about anonymous edits.
• A book about OpenLayers 2.10 has been published.
• TileMill’s latest version supports PostGIS and can render from an OSM database.
• Blog Post by Mike Dobson about “examining Google Map Maker and how its edit and authority systems function“. Part one and part two.

Did we miss something? You can contact us via mail.