Weekly OSM Summary #89 | OpenStreetMap Blog

February 10th, 2014 – February 24th, 2014
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world.

First ideas for this year’s OpenStreetMap 10th Anniversary Birthday party are summarized in the OSM wiki. We’ll be partying at several locations around the world!
The OSM sys admins have enabled encryption (SSL) to all openstreetmap.org websites which enhances user privacy.
Commercial OSM users can show their support and join the OSM Foundation (OSMF).
Generate revenue for OSM by using dedicated links when shopping at Amazon.
Jochen Topf announced that Taginfo (a system that finds and aggregates information about OSM tags) has been moved on an OSMF Server. Harry Wood provides some additional information in his OSM blog post here. Jochen is also working on a data repository where you can test your developed OSM applications.
A study by the Red Cross stressed that armchair-mapping can not replace on-the-ground mapping for the assessment of destroyed buildings.
DaCor wrote in his “iD Newbie friendly feature request” post about adding IRC functionality to the OSM iD editor.
Saman Bemel Benrud and “Randomness in map design“.
OSM contributor SK53-OSM wrote a comprehensive blog post about the (in)correct OSM tagging of “wood, … or is that forest“.
OSM contributor igeopr about his “Project: 2014 Puerto Rico Roads Update“.
OSM Spain has a nice (Spanish) campaign to bring a friend to the OSM project. Similar to the famous “Best of OSM“, they created a “Best of OSM Spain“.

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

This post is also available in: Japanese

5 thoughts on “Weekly OSM Summary #89”

Pingback: OSM – Riassunto Settimanale #89 | OpenStreetMap

Sedhaus March 2, 2014 at 17:34

Hi – I’m just posting here because I didn’t know where else to, but is there an appropriate place to post a feature-request/feature idea?

I’m aware getting insane (and often technically infeasible) ‘suggestions is one of the more tiresome aspects of working on an open-source project, but I think the feature I’m interested sits pretty comfortably in the trifecta of ease-of-implementation, usefulness, and newness.

Basically, like many people, I move house regularly – maybe three times a year. One of the major problems each time I move is how to ensure I’m within commute-distance of work. Now, one way of solving this is to draw a circle around work, then choose a house within that circle. However, that’s very crude, since it doesn’t take account of the fact that a good public transport connection could make somewhere on the other side of the city, in terms of travel time, ‘closer’.

Now, I figure with OSM, you already have the ability to search for the quickest route between points A and B. But, what would be really useful would be a way of showing the shape of all the places within a given travel-time of a point. I figure you could use the same technique as you use for searching for the most efficient route, but simply mark on the map anywhere that’s within a certain time, regardless of route taken.

So instead of the circle, you would have an actual distribution of all the places you can live while still keeping your commute reasonable.

This would be a really useful feature, google maps doesn’t have it, and I think it wouldn’t be terribly hard to implement.

HarryWood March 5, 2014 at 00:00

Hi Sedhaus. This is the kind of thing developers can certainly experiment with using OpenStreetMap data, and indeed they do! Check out the wiki page about ‘Isochrones’ and the list of examples.