Category Archives: Uncategorized

Join OSM PLUS – the OpenStreetMap Commercial Users Summit

Henk Hoff and I have been working with Steve Coast to develop the idea of a OSM commercial users conference. We have called it OSM PLUS – the OpenStreetMap Commercial Users Summit (http://osmplus.co/). Here is the announcement email:

The OpenStreetMap Professional Large Users Summit is going to be held just after SOTM US, on June 10th in San Francisco at the Marriott Union Square. You can register here. Be quick, space is limited.

OSM PLUS is new and focused on professional users of OSM data and toolchains commercially, academically, in government and elsewhere. It is a paid-for event and we expect it to be more of a conversation than a traditional presentation. Many professional users have similar concerns and expectations for OSM. We want to explore these in an environment focused on coming up with solutions.

Today, OSM is a volunteer-only organization. This focus doesn’t always satisfy the needs of many users. We want to have an open conversation about ways to make OSM better. Because of that, the program will be influenced by those who attend.

PS you can use the code “GPS” to get 20% off the ticket price if you register soon.

Weekly OSM Summary #64

February 25th, 2013 – March 11th, 2013

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

The Geofabrik updated their established and famous OSM Data Extract server. Furthermore they offer regional OSM Diff files.
Microsoft Bing offers some new high resolution satellite imagery.
Caerus is working with Stamen Design on a new version of Walking Papers. Read more about the new advantages here.
Some stats from Mapping Kathmandu.
A series of new blog posts about the architecture of the new OSM editor iD [1][2][3].
An interview with the OSM Chairman Simon Poole at swissinfo.ch: The globe, mapped by you.
The OSM History Viewer is back online. What is it?
You can find all Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) board minutes here. Also, HOT is now tax exempt in the US. Further, a new HOT task for Madagascar is available now. Derick Rethans created an animation of the HOT Mapping efforts in Mali.
The “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?” webpage shows the main and latest activity area of a contributor now. To get more information read Pascal Neis’ blog post here.
OWL API and History Tab Beta are back online. Thanks Pawel!
Seasonal mapping: Some stats about ski piste data collections in the past few years from Yves.
The video of the “Virtual Mappy Hour – Let’s Talk MapRoulette” is online at Youtube.
Garmin Connect now uses OSM maps too.
“State of the OSM Coastline” a blog post by Jochen Topf.
Richard Weait wrote a blog post about the Toronto OSM Hack Weekend.
“A OSM GPS Tile Type” by Tom MacWright. It hits the OSM GPX API, processes GPX with toGeoJSON, draws pictures with Canvas and it is Open Source.

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

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

Weekly OSM Summary #63

February 11th, 2013 – February 25th, 2013

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

The next global State of the Map 2013 conference will take place in Birmingham (UK), September 6th-8th. If you would like to participate, you can already sign in at Lanyrd.
A new “Best of OSM” poster for the year 2013 is out now. You can find the poster here and the new webpage here.
We are looking for new project ideas for the Google Summer of Code 2013.
Two new tile servers were added to the OSM project.
The HOT project needs your help to map Kunduz! Also a new online tool helps to map Mali. Some general HOT information: A blog post about the EUROSHA by Stephane Henriod can be found here. A link to the article can also be found at the News page in the UN-Spider blog.
Martin Elmar created a graphic showing the magic moments in OSM history.
In 2012 the OSM Foundation received a donation of 5000$ from duckduckgo, thank you very much!
And again a nice map comparison between OSM, Google Maps, Nokia and Yandex. This time for the City of Chelyabinsk (location of meteorite explosion).
Would like some news about the status of the OSM editor Potlatch2? A statement by Richard Fairhurst.
Mikel Maron wrote a blog post about (Not) finding local OSM communities.
A video by Simon Rogers shows how you can create a meteorites map with CartoDB and OSM data.
Michael Migurski on how you can process OSM data in Hadoop.
At the Hackweekend in Karlsruhe (Germany) Andi and Jochen created a first prototype for a potential new Map Feature table.
Keypadmapper3 is a new tool that helps to map house numbers for the OSM project. It was developed for the Android platform and your contributions will also be saved in the OpenCellIDs project.
A new tutorial for Igor Brejc’s Maperitive tool can be found here: A Hiking Web Map in Ten Easy Steps.
Steve Coast started a Crowdfunding-project to create GPS-Art-Posters.

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

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

Weekly OSM Summary #62

January 27th, 2013 – February 11th, 2013

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

The first alpha1 version of the new OSM Editor iD has been released. Read more in a blog post. Also the new editor needs more translations, maybe you can help!?
Since last Saturday the OSM project has more than 2³¹ node identifiers (32 bit limit), this means that for processing OSM data you need 64-bit identifiers now.
The term “geocode” has been removed from the OSM wiki because of a trademark issue. Read the full announcement in the OSM Mailing-list thread.
The latest HOT tasks for the Syria activation. Also a blog post about “A return to Chad three months after the set up of the EUROSHA mapping team” and a guest post about HOT mapping in Nepal.
The State of the Map United States will take place in San Francisco, June 8th-9th.
A new study on User-Generated Content by the TU Vienna. Please help and fill out the survey!
Harry Wood wrote a blog post about the London Hack Weekend.
Tim Sutton updated the OSM-Reporter with some new features.
What type of hardware do you need for a planet OSM import that takes less than 7h?
The Open Source tool OSM2World has an online 3D map for Germany now.
OSM2GIS is a new website which can transform OSM data to several GIS formats such as *shp or kml. Try it out here.
A new online store offers printed OSM maps.
A blog post about a “Balloon Mapping Meetup” in San Francisco.

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

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

Weekly OSM Summary #61

January 13th, 2013 – January 27th, 2013

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

Only one week left to submit a bid for the call of venues for the State of the Map 2013.
TagInfo has been updated. Read more about the update and the integration into the new OSM iD editor in a blog post.
The Humanitarian OSM Project has some new tasks for Mali. Further the team board has two new members. And Mikel wrote a blog post about the first HOT board meeting of 2013.
You can now link OSM maps directly into your Tweets.
The OSMBuilding project is looking for 3D building data.
New aerial imagery for South Africa is available at aerial.openstreetmap.org.za
The user Zartbitter created a new quality check tool for OSM turn restrictions.
Go Map!! is a new OSM editor for iOS devices.
A new article by Richard Weait on how to add fonts in the Mapnik render software.
Leaflet 0.5 has been released.

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

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

Some European OpenStreetMap growth statistics

I often get requests about the growth and competitiveness of OpenStreetMap in regards to commercial maps. While OpenStreetMap excels especially when it comes to details, people want to see figures that are more comparable to the commercial maps – mainly navigatable road networks.

I came across some internal evaluations of the recent planet files and thought I just share those figures figures with. These statistics are Europe related and show the values separated for Western and Eastern Europe.

In general we can report a healthy growth over the last 9 months – despite the license change that caused some loss of data.

The drivable road network continues to grow in Western and Eastern Europe. While some countries like Germany have more or less reached 100% coverage of the driveable road network, others still have potential. In Eastern Europe I want to stress the growth of Turkey by 39% and Russia by 19%. In Western Europe we see Spain growing by 18% and France by 19%.

Turn restrictions show a strong growth – Eastern and Western Europe alike. Saturation has not been reached in any country –even Germany has grown by 34%.

The overall growth of road segments shows an uptake after the license change had been completed.

Overall we see stronger growth in Eastern Europe, which means the gap between Eastern and Western Europe is narrowing.

This is showing just an extract of available data but allows extrapolation with a good confidence level. If you have questions don’t hesitate to contact me.

Toronto OpenStreetMap Developer Weekend

Come one, come all, to the Second Canadian OpenStreetMap Developer Weekend, eh?

As last year, Ryerson University is providing a dry roof overhead, lots of space, and rock solid wifi for the software development portion of event.

There will also be a public event, possibly an expert panel, Friday afternoon at Ryerson. Details to follow.

Also as last year, there will be a ton of socializing and meeting and greeting with the local OSM community Friday night and Saturday night.

Last year, attendees travelled to Toronto from England, The Netherlands, USA and even the Toronto suburbs. Join the fun! See you in Toronto.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Toronto_Hack_Weekend_March_2013

And there are sponsorship opportunities! Want to sponsor a core developer who could otherwise not participate? Want to buy the coders dinner and a few drinks? Let me know.

Weekly OSM Summary #60

December 30th, 2012 – January 13th, 2013

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

A new “Year of Edits” video showing the contributions to OSM in 2012 can be found here. Thank you very much Derick Rethans!
Many of you already know: the OSM project has more than 1 000 000 registered members since last week. You can find some online articles at TPM or futurzone.at (German) and some additional statistics by Harry Wood and Pascal Neis (at the end of the article).
The Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) wrote a review of their year 2012 and an outlook on 2013. Furthermore Mapbox helped to improve some satellite imagery that makes tracing data for OSM easier.
New aerial imagery for South Africa to trace OSM data is available now.
A few weeks ago, Frederik Ramm wrote a blog post about what would happen if every Mapper would contribute 1.000 addresses to OSM. Now he has created a list of accounts that have added addresses. You can find similar information at “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?“.
Dan Stowell wrote an article about “Data visualisation of pubs in UK & Eire” based on OSM data.
A new (beta) version of the OSM WatchList by Paweł Paprota is online, read his announcement here.
Pascal Neis created a new webpage where you can see other contributors in your area.
Some statistics showing the usage of the OSM Pushpin editor.
Alex Barth created a proposal for an “OSM contributor mark“. You can read and of course discuss the entire idea at the OSM talk mailing list.
The MapBox Satellite is available for tracing in JOSM for anybody now. Read the announcement here.
A new Kickstarter project introduces a GPS watch with a two inch screen and OSM maps.
There will be a few OSM events in the upcoming weeks:
- Open Data Day: Feb. 23rd, 2013
- State of the Map France: Feb. 23rd-24th, 2013
- OSM Hack Weekend London: Fed. 2nd-3rd, 2013
- OSM Hack Weekend Karlsruhe: Feb. 23rd-24th, 2013

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

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

1 million OpenStreetMappers

OpenStreetMap has just passed 1 million users! That’s a million people who have signed up on openstreetmap.org to join in with creating a free map of the world.

At first glance you may think that OpenStreetMap is a map. Those who know more will tell you that it’s actually a database; a flexible editable repository of free geospatial data. But above all OpenStreetMap is a community. A massive community in which people like you and me come together collaborate and help build this thing… and now there’s a million of us!

A massive community is what makes OpenStreetMap work. We need many people to sign up, and we need those people in every neighbourhood, in every corner of the globe, to chip in a little bit using our editing tools. In this way we have grown and progressed spectacularly throughout 2012. This wonderful video illustrates what a great year of map editing activity we had.

Who will join the OpenStreetMap community in 2013?

Songs about maps

What is the best song for your music player while you survey data for OpenStreetMap? Can you keep yourself entertained and inspired with a great playlist while you survey, or is the music too distracting? Are there songs that remind you of mapping? In past, some have suggested specific songs as anthems for mappers.

The following songs each have the words open, street, and map in them, though not in the string we prefer.

Map of Tasmania – Amanda Palmer
Soldier – Destiny’s Child
Movies – Lil’ Boosie
Home to Me – Jimmy Robbins
My Crew – Jean Grae

Are there more songs with the words Open, Street, and Map in them? Which songs or music would you suggest as a mapping anthem, or to inspire and motivate your surveys? Use the comments below to discuss. I’ll add some CanCon suggestions tomorrow.

OpenStreetMap Blog