October 17th, 2011 – October 31th, 2011

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

• During last weeks Google Doc Summit 2011 an OSM book for beginners has been created. You can buy it here and find a preview here.
• The translations of the documentations for our well-known OSM Editor JOSM for Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Icelandic and Turkish don’t fulfill the minimum standards. You can help to improve it. Otherwise they will be dropped in future releases. Other languages require updates as well!
• The “ODbl coverage map” has been updated. The map shows the status of the OSM data related to the license change.
• For Toulouse (France) several datasets have been announced under the ODbL. Read more in our wiki.
• The official Maps for the “Giro d’Italia” are based on OSM data. Original – Translated.
• Annette and Peter won the inaugural Torsten Brand Award for their OSM project: “Look and Listen Map”. Keep up the good work!
• On October 23rd, 2011 an earthquake struck Turkey with a magnitude of 7.2. If you would like to help, you can find some information about which data sources you can use in our wiki.
• A new website with general OSM stats is online. It will be updated daily.
• Andy created a tool for Cyclestreets that imports and merges cycle way data of the Dft (Department for Transport) in Great Britain.
• The “London Cycling Guide” is now using OSM data. You can find a book review here.
• The “Heart of the Elephant and Castle Urban Forest Map” shows detailed positions of trees in London.
• Martin created an animation showing the mapping progress in Rome (Italy).
• You can add your ideas or suggestions for the Itomap to an OSM wiki page now. The First suggestions have been implemented already.
• Thomas developed a webpage which displays the data of several Web 2.0 services such as Wikipedia, Twitter, Flickr, Panoramio, Gowalla … on an OSM map.
• A really nice OSM map with 3D visualization for buildings in Poland.
• The Public Transport Map (OpenPTMap) will now be updated on a daily basis.
• A new PHP framework allows you to interact with the OSM API. Read a little bit more here.
• Matthias created some pie charts, which visualize the usage of the OSM tileserver by different programs and services.
• The Spanish administration has now an open data portal.
• At the OpenDataCamp several projects used OSM data. You can find the results in their wiki.
• The South African Census 2011 is using OSM for their “Verify Census Fieldworker” website (via Grant)

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

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

October 5th, 2011 – October 17th, 2011

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

• Nearly 100% of Denmark’s streets have been mapped by OSM. Currently 97.2% have been mapped. You can use a map or a form to search for missing ways.
• In Wales the road names show a completeness of more than 95%. Thx at Ito for their analysis. You will find further results at their webpage.
• The “Big Baseball Project 2011” tries to map all baseball fields around the world until October 27th, 2011. You will find the user ranking, a baseball-map and a beginner’s guide in our OSM wiki.
• France has now its own local OSM chapter.
• Martijn van Exel, Randy Hale, Jim McAndrew and Michal Migurski have been elected and Richard Welty has been reelected for the US local chapter. Congrats to them!
• Because of an Edit-War about the name of the city “Jerusalem” the name-tag will not be used any longer in this specific case. The question is should the name be written in Hebrew or in Arabic?
• The OSM Inspector “Routing view” is now available with a worldwide coverage. It shows errors in the OSM street network such as unconnected or duplicated ways. Read the full blog post and further news here.
• Researchers from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth conducted a „Comparison of the accuracy of OpenStreetMap for Ireland with Google Maps and Bing Maps“. Read their full paper here.
• The project OpenArialMap added some new images.
• Get your own Hiking Map in ten steps with Maperitive.
• Richard Fairhurst created a Ruby ODF Renderer for OSM data. Read his full announcement here.
• Peter Körner created some new extracts of the OSM full history database dump. His announcement at the OSM developer mailing list can be found here.
• Kai Krüger built some packages, to install and run your own OSM map tile server on an Ubuntu operating system. Find more information on the OSM wikipage.
• The Android app for the wheelmap.org project is now available at the Android market.
• “MapQuest launches Mobile Flash Maps API”. You can use it within Flash Builder 4.5 native mobile applications.

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

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

September 19th, 2011 – October 4th, 2011

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

• “LearnOSM.org provides a simple-to-use, step by step approach to learning how to make maps with OpenStreetMap”. Visit the new website here.
• The new OSM servers zark, soup, fiddlestick and eustace are online! Thanks to bitfolk.com and Nokia UK.
• “The Licensing Working Group has obtained explicit special permission to incorporate geographic datasets from data.gov.au in the OpenStreetMap project database published under any free and open license …“ Read the full announcement here.
• A new tool that helps to coordinate upcoming Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) projects is online. Read the full blog post about the “OpenStreetMap Tasking Manager” here. And the next HOT meeting will be on October 5th at 11pm.
• New international boundaries from the US Department of State are available. Read more here.
• Google released a new commercial spot for their Chrome browser in which they featured the Wheelmap.org project. Watch the German video on YouTube. Also, they are searching beta-testers for their Android-WheelpMap app. If you are interested, drop a mail to: android@wheelmap.org
• A nice blog post about mapping in Afghanistan.
• If you want to see “live” editing in the OpenStreetMap World, you can check “OSM Live“, “khtml.org” or “GeoXP“.
• A new blog post by Martijn van Exel: “Taking the Temperature of local OpenStreetMap Communities”.
• The Geofabrik also supports a free shapefile download of OSM land use areas now. You can read the full blog post here.
• OSMT is a new tool for splitting or merging OSM data.
• A new HTML5 demo shows the rendering of OSM data within the web browser. Try it out here.
• Michal Migurski provided a new website where you can download OSM data “for major world cities and their surrounding areas“. You can find it here.
• The 2.0 version of Mapnik is finally out! Mapnik is the software we use for rendering the main map layer for OSM.
• Michiel Faber and Guttorm Flatabø created a script that merges several GPS tracks into a “line of best fit” / average track.

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

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

September 5th, 2011 – September 18th, 2011

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

• The elections for the new board members of the OSM Foundation (OSMF) are over: “Congratulations to our new board members: Richard Fairhurst, Matt Amos, and Dermot McNally. Mikel Maron was also re-elected for the board.
• Several slides and videos of the State of the Map (SotM) 2011 in Denver are online. You will find everything here.
• Some notes from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) Meetup at the SotM 2011 in Denver are listened here.
• “The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is currently investigating the use of OSM for the capital of the Guinea-Bissau“. Read the full announcement here. You can help here!
• Blog Post about MapKiberia and the accident in Mukuru: „Building community resilience, because it’s not if but when“.
• Interesting article at iRevolution about „OpenStreetMap’s New Micro-Tasking Platform for Satellite Imagery Tracing“. Read the full blog post here.
• Nice video of the mapping progress in Georgia, watch it on Youtube.
• „The OSM-US GeoBus is back!“ WTF? Read more here 🙂
• A new mailing list has been created for the development of the “Ruby on Rails-powered“ OSM webpage.
• If you want to create OSM maps with the Adobe Illustrator, you can find a nice tutorial with seven steps here.
• The new OSGeo-Live DVD with a bunch of geospatial open source applications has been released.
• Osmo is a free tool which can import OSM data into a MongoDB collection.
• The Main OSM website is now running with OpenLayers 2.11. With this change it has improved mobile support.

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

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