Category Archives: Uncategorized

Here be Dragons

Media_httpuploadwikim_hcaii

So what’s with the Dragons? As OpenStreetMap grew, and acquired more
computers to run the OpenStreetMap services, those computers needed
names. These server names provide a way to refer to a specific piece
of computer hardware, regardless of the services that device might
currently provide. Naming servers according to a theme has a long
tradition in IT circles. Typical server name themes include planets,
constellations, characters from specific books or plays, and other
popular culture references.

In 2008, the OpenStreetMap community decided to use dragon names as
the theme for OSM server names. Dragon names were chosen as a tribute
to the “Here be Dragons” marked on unexplored portions of maps and globes.
Several other themes were considered including the names of
cartographers and explorers.

And now we have even more dragons.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation, and the Operations Working Group, would
like to thank Nokia UK Limited and BitFolk.com
for their recent donations of hardware to the OpenStreetMap
Foundation. You can read more details about their generous donations on the OpenStreetMap Foundation Blog.

Dragon bridge photo by Dani_7C3
is licensed CC-By-SA

Vote for OpenStreetMap Foundation candidates for the Board

The 2011 election is under way for members of the OpenStreetMap
Foundation Board of Directors. Members of the OSMF can vote in person
at the annual general meeting at State of the Map or by proxy via email. You can join the OpenStreetMap Foundation. The list of candidates and voting details are found on the wiki.

Questions to candidates and discussions can be found on the OSMF-talk@ archives and on the Election discussion page on the wiki.

Vote photo by Marc Tarlock is licensed CC-By-SA

Weekly OSM Summary #25

August 22, 2011 – September 4, 2011

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

  • The 7th OpenStreetMap Anniversary Birthday party was celebrated worldwide. See the best birthday cakes here.
  • Elections for the OSMF board started! You can find additional information here and here.
  • The Licensing Working Group (LWG) will schedule a second mass-email to OSM contributors which have not agreed to the new license yet. Additional important information: „A very small number of contributors have declined the new contributor terms and asserted that their contributions are in the public domain. This does not mean that the collective data in the OSM database is public domain. Their “PD” position contradicts the explicit decline. Therefore the LWG takes the position that their contributions cannot be published under ODbL without acceptance of the contributor.“ Read all meeting minutes here.
  • You can pay your OSM Foundation membership with bitcoins too!
  • The Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) prepared a data import for Somalia. You can help to integrate this data to OSM. Read the announcement here.
  • „OpenStreetMap and Warm vs. Cold Geography“. Nice blog post by Martijn.
  • Simon enhanced the ODbL statistics with some new countries. Read more at his webpage.
  • A new version of the “Overpass API” now returns metadata such as timestamp and user name too. “The Overpass API (or OSM3S) is a read-only API that serves up raw XML encoded OSM map data. Overpass API includes functionality similar to that of XAPI“ (Wiki).
  • Last weekend the “State Of The Map Scotland 2011” took place in Glasgow (Scotland). 

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

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

Weekly OSM Summary #24

August 10, 2011 – August 22, 2011

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

  • OSM has more then 450 000 registered members by now. About 150 000 of those contributed at least one node to the project.
  • The OSM Licensing Working Group (LWG) announced some guidelines for the preparation for the license change. Read more details in the wiki page.
  • The OSM Foundation announced that the 2011 annual general meeting and election board members will be held at State of the Map, in Denver. You can find more information here.
  • Harry Wood created a map with an overlay of the riots in London. You can access the map here.
  • Serge created basic information videos about OSM with a total length of more than 2 hours. See the videos at youtube.
  • Pascal created a website last week which shows your or other OSM member’s contributions in a Heat Map. You can find his blog post here, and the webpage here.
  • In the OSM Wiki you can find a first proposal “to enable linking different datasets with OSM data” (OpenMetaMap).
  • Last week the Wired magazine published an article about “Amateur cartographers mistaken for criminals“.
  • The new „Engineering Working Group“ has its first meeting on Monday 22nd at 5pm GMT. Read the full message here.
  • The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) wrote about their work in Somalia. And they created some OSM manuals and guides. Read the announcement here.
  • In the fourth and final episode of “Geospatial Revolution” the Map Kiberia project is mentioned. See the complete video at youtube.
  • Some aerial imagery is now available for the mapping of the city of Dedaab in Kenya, Read the wiki page or the announcement at the mailing list.
  • The Ministry of the Interior and Sports of Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, published a raster map of entire Ruanda and permitted usage for OSM. Read more at the wiki page.
  • Harry Wood gave a presentation about humanitarian mapping with OSM. You can see his slides and slide notes here.
  • The Flosm-Map has now an Inkscap and Illstrator Export. Try it here (only available in German).
  • The OSM contributor “Ogmios” created a map (http://www.openqueermap.info) with a special overlay containing information for the homosexual community.
  • The “OSM Amenity Editor” is now Open Source. This tool allows you to edit OSM node features within a web browser. You can find the project at github.
  • The JXAPI now supports polygon queries. Read details here.
  • A new version of the German OSM flyer is available. You can order the flyer for free at the GeoFabrik. Read the announcement at the German Mailing List.

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

Early birthday present OpenStreetMap video series

OpenStreetMap contributor, emacsen, has just released a series of
OpenStreetMap videos for new OSM contributors.

In honor of OSM’s birthday, I present to the OSM community
a new series of videos on OpenStreetMap.

Video playlist

They’re a set of Khan Academy style videos. That is they’re each short
5-15 minute videos on a particular topic of OpenStreetMap. Right now
there’s about two hours of video, covering the basic concepts: all the
way from nodes and tags, to routing, changesets and
rendering.

The seventh Anniversary / Birthday of OpenStreetMap will be celebrated around the world on Saturday,
20 August 2011, in at least 6 cities. Organize an OSM party in your
town!

Weekly OSM Summary #23

July 24, 2011 – August 9,2011

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

  • The Map Kibera Team asked for donations so they can keep up their work. Please help them out so that this great project can go on!
  • “Buddy tickets” are now available for the State of the Map (SotM) in Denver. This means: “With our buddy-project you can get a second ticket with 50% off“. Read more here.
  • Andreas Hubel created a first alpha version of an indoor navigation website based on Javascript and OSM. You can test the website here.
  • The Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) had their first „HOT Chat“ on July 27 at 1 a.m. CET. Two chats a month are planned for the future.
  • A contributor in Great Britain was arrested during his mapping activities for the OSM project.
  • SimpleGEO announced that their Point-of-Interest database with more then 21 million points is now available for download under CC0 license.
  • A new service by Stephan Knauß shows the “areas” that you or other users have been editing in the world. Try it out with your own or a different user’s OSM username.
  • “MapQuery” is a new jQuery plugin and it uses OpenLayers to show maps on your website.
  • OSMSharp is an Open Source C# library to process and display OSM data. Read more in the OSM wiki.

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

All about tiles.

The Ordnance Survey recently announced that they had served the one billionth
tile from their OS OpenSpace program. They continue:

OS Openspace was launched on January 31 2008, to enable developers to
produce exciting and innovative ways of displaying information using
our maps. On average there are over 1 million tile downloads per day.

We, at OpenStreetMap, are pleased to see additional map tile sources
available for use in creative ways, such as Ordnance Survey’s own
internal car share program.

Congratulations to Ordnance Survey on the growth of their tile program.

Of course, OS does more than just serve tiles, they are also the
national mapping agency for Great Britain.

OpenStreetMap knows a thing or two about serving map tiles as well.
OpenStreetMap Foundation servers deliver about 4 million tiles per
hour. We deliver a billion tiles every 11 days. And OpenStreetMap
does all of this with donations and volunteers. Donations from people like you allow the OpenStreetMap Foundation to purchase the servers and
hosting and bandwidth that hold the OSM database, serve the community
of OpenStreetMap mappers and serve tiles. Volunteers, like the
indefatigable team of server administrators, keep all of this hardware
working.

Congratulations also to us. OpenStreetMap creates and updates a
global geo dataset every minute, provides services to citizen
cartographers around the world and serves up-to-date tiles on a
tremendous scale.

You can join OpenStreetMap and start improving the map now.

Tile photo by vidalia_11 is
licensed CC-By-SA

Weekly OSM Summary #22

July 11th, 2011 – July 24, 2011

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

  • The OpenStreetMap Project will celebrate its 7th anniversary in August 2011. There are several parties planed all around the world.
  • The State of the Map Europe (SotM-EU) conference is over and had more than 200 attendees from about 26 countries. You can find the videos of the talks and slides here.
  • The License Working Group released recommendations for „reconciling the data touched by users who have explicitly declined CT/ODbL“. Read it here.
  • Pascal Neis created a website where you can „fight“ against other OSM contributors: „OSMFight“. You can read more about it in his blog post.
  • Dennis Zielstra compared „Free versus Proprietary“ geodata in Florida. The complete analysis is available here.
  • There is an interesting discussion at the OSM mailing list about „Commenting and thumbs up/down feature for changesets“. Read the thread here.
  • A new map with “Marked Cycling Routes around the World” is online. It is available as an overlay and you can find it here.
  • The Humanitarian OSM was in Indonesia and reports about their activities in a blog post. Further they are searching for writing volunteers and plan to organize regular IRC “HOT Chats”.
  • CycleStreets, providing OSM cycle routing for the UK, is now available on Android.

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