OpenStreetMap data is used to generate 3-D terrain data for a flight
simulator. In the photo above, terrain for the X-Plane filght
simulator is generated by a program called osm3xp.

This is a Featured image, which means that it has been identified as
one of the best examples of OpenStreetMap mapping, or that it provides
a useful illustration of the OpenStreetMap project.

If you know another image of similar quality, you can nominate it on
Featured image proposals.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Featured_image_proposals

April is food month for Project of the Week / Month. We’ll be tagging
various portions of the food supply system in and around our homes.
We’ll look at marketplaces for the full month; venues for many vendors
where you can buy directly from the source. Through the month we’ll
look at individual vendors of various foods. As always, Project of the
Week and Project of the Month exist only to encourage your mapping.
You don’t need to wait for a project to add a cheese shop to the map!
Unless, of course, you waited for this week! This week, we address the
cheese shop and other specialty food ingredient shops.

This week we look at food vendors who offer specialty ingredients. The
butcher, baker, cheese monger, fish shop, and other specialty food
stores are the focus of this Project of the Week. Let’s put our favourite specialty ingredient vendors on the map.

This is your Project of the Week. Make suggestions. Inspire other
mappers. What is it about contributing to OpenStreetMap that
interests you? Postboxes? Bowing alleys? Share your OpenStreetMap
interests by suggesting a Project of the Week or Project of the Month.

Cheese photo by nikoretro is
licensed CC-By-SA

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnNyM41ZcYk?wmode=transparent]

We first told you about the Saransk Mapping Party last month when OpenStreetMap contributors showed us
an animation of the mapping event. A month later, they have created a
video that combines animation of the mapping party with various
renderings for various uses and photos of the ground truth. Enjoy the
video.

This is a Featured image, which means that it has been identified as
one of the best examples of OpenStreetMap mapping, or that it provides
a useful illustration related to the OpenStreetMap project.

If you know another image of similar quality, you can nominate it at

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Featured_image_proposals

OpenStreetMap contributor ungzd reports that what seems to be
OpenStreetMap, or at least Mapnik appears in a story on a Russian news program.

An automated translation to English suggests that building janitors
are offered a 33% salary increase in exchange for having their
location monitored during the work day.

You can see a map of London from OpenStreetMap in an episode of
K9. More details on the OpenStreetMap Foundation Blog.

It’s nice to see interesting projects using OpenStreetMap for
interesting things. Geocaching.com have a Beta map that allows
users to select OpenStreetMap mapnik tiles as one of many basemaps.
This is pretty cool. What’s even cooler is that we may be approaching
the point where OpenStreetMap and Geocaching start to make each other
noticeably better.

Geocaching and OpenStreetMap seem like a match made in a top of the
line GPSr. As a long time OpenStreetMap participant, it has always
seemed like a natural match. It seemed to me that Geocachers would
like OpenStreetMap. Why did it take me so long to try geocaching?
And what secret did I learn that Geocachers will want to know?

Learn the secret about OpenStreetMap that your Geocaching friends will want to know.

The MapQuest Open team have done it again! Check out these cool tricks they’ve created for OSM fun:

API allows searching the OpenStreetMap (OSM) data by name=value pairs or bounding box! Very cool stuff if you’re trying to find all the golf courses in OSM data in the greater Denver area:http://open.mapquestapi.com/xapi/api/0.6/node%5Bamenity|leisure=golf_course%5D%5Bbbox=-105.20983780356221,39.59556488319815,-104.66052139733415,39.83325197240866%5D  

Here’s the link to the actual tool:  http://open.mapquestapi.com/xapi/ all GUI and pretty with an XML response. 

The Nominatim Pre-Indexed Data Service gives OSM developers another database location (hosted on the MapQuest servers) from which to download the large Planet OSM data file from – the beauty is that this data file is already indexed so you don’t have to waste any time indexing a 15GB+ file! Once a developer has Nominatim running on their local server, they can download, via the NPI Data Service, updates approximately every 5 minutes.

A recent quote from the Open team:“you can set Nominatim up on a fairly crappy machine as long as it has reasonable disks, because a single processor home computer can load it from NPI.” They’re all about keeping things easy for anyone wanting the latest and greatest geocode data from OSM! 

Lastly, they’ve created a Broken Polygon Report that anyone can use to help make OSM data better and more accurate via JOSM or Potlatch 2. Think of how you’ve been editing an area only to find a sizable chunk of map data that is just messed up and you have to correct that first, before finishing up your edit…arugh! Another example is when OSM had an issue last December where a broken polygon ended up having all of Virginia being shown in Maryland. A broken polygon can mean that any map area can get “flooded” by another, as one polygon’s fill bleeds into the other via that broken gap. This report allows folks to easily find these little (or big) errors and fix them!

You can read more about XAPI, NPI and the Broken Polygon tool on the DevBlog and click on the pretty hyperlinks here:http://devblog.mapquest.com/2011/04/07/xapi-npi-broken_polygons/ 

Big, huge, massive thanks go out to Matt Amos, Brian Quinion, Kumiko Yamazaki and Cameron Thomas for making this happen! 

Food month continues. The Project of the Month is farmers’ markets
where you can buy fresh food ingredients directly from the farmer.
This week we look at grocery stores, where we can get fresh food
ingredients but they might be from further away and from many vendors.

This week we look at fresh fruit and vegetables from shops large and
small. For smaller shops we have greengrocers, for larger we have
supermarkets.

For project of the Week add your local grocery stores to the map.

This is your Project of the Week. Make suggestions. Inspire other
mappers. What is it about contributing to OpenStreetMap that
interests you? Postboxes? Bowing alleys? Share your OpenStreetMap
interests by suggesting a Project of the Week or Project of the Month.

Greengrocer photo by artq55 is licensed CC-By-SA.