Monthly Archives: October 2012

New Tile Server in Moscow

For the second time this month, the OpenStreetMap Foundation has a generous donation of OSM infrastructure to announce.

A new tile server, gorynych, has been added to the OSM tile cache network.

We would like to thank Yandex for providing the new tile server in Moscow. We’d also like to thank the local OpenStreetMap community, especially Dmitry, who was instrumental in the Yandex donation.

Map tiles are delivered to users based on their GeoDNS location. The OpenStreetMap Foundation seeks additional distributed tile servers. If you would like to donate a tile server and hosting, please see the Tile CDN requirements page on the wiki.

Yandex is the leading internet company in Russia, operating the most popular search engine and the most visited website. Yandex also has demonstrated support for Open projects by hosting a mirror for Linux distributions and other F/LOSS projects and a jabber server.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organization, formed in the UK to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and to providing geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project. You can support OpenStreetMap by donating to the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

Weekly OSM Summary #54

October 8th, 2012 – October 22nd, 2012

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

  • The OpenLayers project is calling for funding. You can support this great project here.
  • Tom Hughes added functionality similar to OpenStreetBugs to the main OSM site. You can find some additional information here.
  • Last weekend the State of the Map Scotland was held in Edinburgh. You can find some information at the wiki page or in the tweets by Shaun McDonald.
  • ITO introduced a new video at the State of the Map US conference, which shows edits made in the United States from 2007 to 2012. Martin Davis published some notes about the State of the Map US in his blog.
  • A new streaming replication mechanism has been developed to keep a local OSM database up to date.
  • You can find Alex Barth’s summary and wishlist regarding future work at MapBox, based on the Knight Foundation funding.
  • Do you want to actively contribute to the Leaflet project? Leaflet is an open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. Find more about it here.
  • The OSM Inspector has a new layer with routing errors (islands) which is provided by the OSRM Team. Find more information in Dennis’ blog post.
  • Do you want your own OSM Mapper Baseball card? Check out Richard’s idea.
  • Steve Coast introduced the new OSM Commercial Users Conference: http://signup.osmcuc.com

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

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

Weekly OSM Summary #53

September 24th, 2012 – October 8th, 2012

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”)

New Australian caching server

Posted to the talk-au mailing list some news from Grant Slater and the sysadmin team:

Have you noticed faster tiles this week? Australia now has a map caching server located in Brisbane. The server is used to speed up the standard tile.osm.org “Mapnik” map style.

Browsing the map on http://www.openstreetmap.org/ should now be more responsive. This new server, named ‘bunyip’, first started providing tiles on Tuesday.

We thank Kris Amy for providing the server and hosting. Thank you, Kris!

If anyone experiences any issues or hiccups, please let me know.

Technical: 

Server specs are here

OpenStreetMap tile servers use GeoDNS (PowerDNS with Geo backend) to locate the closest tile server. The DNS regions / cache-server can be viewed here.

To check which server you are being directed to use the command:
nslookup tile.openstreetmap.org
or
dig tile.openstreetmap.org

Regards
Grant – Part of OSM sysadmin team


Apple Maps

Apple’s new maps for iOS6 make use of OpenStreetMap in some parts of the world. We’re not sure how extensive this use is, but it’s fair to say they are mostly using other sources. Apple have used TomTom as a key supplier of data for example. This means that inaccuracies in apple maps are probably not the fault of OpenStreetMap (contrary to some commentary!) However OpenStreetMap is mentioned in apple’s credits, and we have spotted some areas where we think we can see our data in use. For example here in Islamabad:

We welcome Apple (or anybody else!) using our map data and we’d like to see them use it more.

If you are having problems with the maps on your phone, have a look at an app that only uses current OpenStreetMap data. That way, you’ll know the source. And if you find that the data in your area can be improved or updated, you can improve it! We hope you’ll join us and help make a free and open map of the world. There are so many OpenStreetMap powered apps (click here for a list). If you already have a favourite, please add a comment below to tell us which one it is, and why.

If you’re an iOS developer you can use an OpenStreetMap map within your app. You have a choice of several different libraries to do this: The open source route-me, or offerings from MapQuest or from CloudMade.

If you’re not an iphone user maybe you’re bored of all this apple talk. We do have apps for android and also windows mobile, blackberry, symbian and much more besides. Developers have brought our free and open data to many different mobile device platforms and navigation devices.

Whichever technologies you’re using to view maps, we hope you’ll choose free and open map data from the not-for-profit OpenStreetMap project.