Category Archives: Uncategorized

Project of the Week: Book stores and libraries

This week we wrap up education month with a tribute to books.

Libraries are repositories of information, places of learning and of
research. One of the ancient libraries, the Library of Alexandria is
credited with comparing different versions of books with empirical
standards which became the beginnings of the scientific method.
Libraries are filled with adventures of discovery wrapped in layers of
shush. Book stores are another source for book-learning, though the
brick and mortar versions are dwindling in some places.

The Project of the Week is to add local libraries and book stores to the map.

Librería El Ateneo. Buenos Aires photo by radioher and is
licensed CC-By-NC-ND.

Project of the Week: Museum

Rowr! Dinosaur week on OpenStreetMap could be even bigger than Shark
Week on Discovery TV!

As education month continues we turn our sights from schools to
museums. These places of wonder and learning range from traditional
displays behind glass with descriptive plaques at a museum of natural
history to interactive exhibits of levers and pulleys at a science
museum. Add your favourite local museums to the map. And don’t forget
the dinosaurs!

Add your favourite local museums to the map.

American Museum of Natural History photo by Smiley Man with a Hat is licensed CC-By-ND-NC

OpenStreetMap in multi-modal trip planner study

OpenStreetMap contributor, Ed Hillsman, was the senior research
associate on a multi-modal trip planner study. In it the authors
implement a multi-modal trip planner using transit feeds,
OpenStreetMap data and a variety of Open Source tools. Join me in
reading this weighty tome. My quick first glance suggests that it
will be well worth reading the full report.

or download the complete report (118 pp, pdf)

OpenStreetMap OpenID now open

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OpenStreetMap now allows accounts to be authenticated with OpenID as
an additional, optional authentication method for some OSM functions.
You may ignore this if you are not interested in OpenID. Some users
find OpenID an interesting way to reduce the number of passwords they
have to use in their travels on the internet.

If you have an existing OpenID or wish to create an OPenID for use
with OpenStreetMap, have a look at the OSM OpenID page on the wiki for important caveats.

Both Kai and Tom were key in
writing and implementing these improvements. Be sure to thank them if
you like OPenID. Perhaps buy them a beverage when you see them.

OSM License Upgrade – Phase 4 coming soon

Just announced on legal-talk[1]
is that Phase 4[2]
of the license change process is scheduled for this Sunday, 19 June
2011. During Phase 4, the 166,000+ contributors who have accepted
CT/ODbL will be able to edit. That is, the 406 contributors who have
declined CT/ODbL will not be able to edit after phase 4 has begun.

Those who have declined with their existing account may reconsider or
may open a new account to continue editing. Those who have already
accepted should be unaffected by the move to Phase 4.

If you have an unexpected problem with editing, please see #osm-dev on
IRC[3].

[1] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2011-June/006156.html
[2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Database_License/Implementation_Plan
[3] use your favorite IRC client for #osm-dev on irc.oftc.net, or the
web client at http://irc.openstreetmap.org

Weekly OSM Summary #19

May 30th, 2011 – June 14th, 2011

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

  • Thursday 7:30am (23rd June 2011 GMT/UTC+0) the API and map data editing on www.openstreetmap.org will be unavailable. The maintenance period is expected to last for 12 hours.
  • Updates for the Nominatim database, which is powering the search on osm.org, are paused for now since the database needs to be upgraded to use bigint since it has run out of integers.
  • Frontdoor is an experimental service for crowdsourcing and fixing address information with a very simple interface.
  • Scholarships are available for State of the Map for candidates that met certain requirements.
  • There’s a video competition in which you can win a trip to SotM in Denver.
  • Kothic JS is a full-featured JavaScript map rendering engine using HTML5 Canvas.
  • There’s a new public transport layer on openmap.it. It’s currently in beta stage, only covers Europe for now and is updated once a week.
  • User Sk53 writes about his experiences in using OSM full history extracts and handling OSM history data.
  • Harry wood did a video interview with VisionOn.TV and also wrote about the issues involved in creating video tutorials for OSM.
  • XHT (Xhouse Tool) is a tool to get OSM buildings into X-Plane (a flight simulator).
  • Christopher Osborne was speaking at Next11 in Berlin about “Visualising Big Data” (video).
  • Geofabrik now supplies daily OSM extracts for all US states (pbf and bz2).
  • Members of the German OSM community and employees of the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance met for a workshop regarding the potential of crowdsourced crisis mapping. Here’s a write-up.
  • A new public transport map for Switzerland.
  • Patrick Weber and Tim Waters have posted their write-ups about WhereCampEU. Martijn van Exel also wrote about WhereCampEU and some interesting ideas on how to get newly signed-up users to become regular contributors.
  • Taginfo moved to a new domain, taginfo.openstreetmap.org. “In addition to the main taginfo instance that contains data for the whole world, there are currently three public Taginfo instances for Ireland, Switzerland, and Italy.” A taginfo-dev mailinglist has also been set up.
  • OSM now accepts OpenID signups.
  • Navigon releases new POI packages based on OSM data for 44 countries with 2.2 million points.

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

Scheduled downtime Thu 23 June 2011

Thursday 7:30am (23rd June 2011 GMT/UTC+0) the API and map data
editing on www.openstreetmap.org will be unavailable. The maintenance
period is expected to last for 12 hours.

The following services will be unavailable during the maintenance period:
API, editing features of www.openstreetmap.org and
planet.openstreetmap.org including replication diffs.

The wiki, mailing lists and help.openstreetmap.org will be unaffected.

Purpose: Some of the core servers are being re-located to another data-centre.

Additional information will be posted on the wiki as the maintenance
window approaches:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Servers/June_2011_Maintenance

http://blog.osmfoundation.org/2011/06/09/downtime-announcement-23-june-2011/