Category Archives: Uncategorized

Image of the Week: Saransk Mapping Party

Media_httpwikiopenstr_fxhpa

OpenStreetMap contributor osmisto has
organized the first Russian online mapping party: it’s still cold
outside, so almost everyone attended. Find out more and see a larger animation from the Саранск (Saransk) mapping party.

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

Project of the Week: Music Shop

They aren’t as common as they used to be, or perhaps they have merely
changed form. Some of us have a music store on our phones. Others
might have to travel to the next town to find a Bricks and
Mortar music shop. The used to be called Record Stores;
ask your grand-parents about them.

The Project of the Week is to add your local music shop 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 contributing a Project of the Week.

Photo of phonograph cylinder player by Jalal Gerald Aro
is licensed CC-By-SA

OpenStreetMap at Where 2.0 and Wherecamp

OpenStreetMap will be at Where 2.0 this April 19-21 with a booth in the exhibition hall. Following Where 2.0 is WherecampSF and several OSMers helping plan a mapping party on Friday during the geogames! Learn more about each event below. 

 

The Business of Location: Where 2.0 April 19-21, 2011

Where is business: where people live, where they go, and where, when, and how they spend their money are now key factors in business success. From product development to distribution, marketing, and sales, location technologies help companies identify, understand, and serve their markets far more effectively than ever before.

The O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference explores the intersection of location technologies and trends in software development, business strategies, and marketing. The source for all things location-aware, Where 2.0 brings together CTOs, marketers, developers, technologists, researchers, geographers, startups, business developers, and entrepreneurs, to shed light on the issues surrounding:

Development- Mobile, Development- Location, Business and Strategy, Marketing, HTML5, Data Collection, the future of mapping and much more.

Zero in on the business of location at Where 2.0. Join us April 19-21, 2011 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara in Santa Clara, California.

extracted from the where 2.0 website

Wherecamp SF: April 22-23, 2011

WhereCamp is an unconference for people fascinated by place. We are an eclectic crowd ranging from urban cartographers, environmentalists, locative media artists, augmented reality developers, simulations and modeling theorists.

Often people wanting to simply understand more about the space or fund in the space also are drawn into the fold. The San Francisco version ends up being an (unofficial) Where2.0 after-party with intense conversation, presentations and dialogue. Many people say it is the highlight of their year. We’re fully sponsored and the event is free to attend but participation is mandatory – you are expected to present your projects or at least give your voice to other peoples presentations.

Join us! All you have to do is participate, educate, learn, contribute and share. We all want to hear each others voices – yours too. Sessions are organized in a bottom up way where any participant can propose a talk, topic or discussion which are held in multiple streams in multiple rooms simultaneously.

 

Weekly OSM Summary #12

02/24/2011 – 03/09/2011
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world:

  • Registration for the SOTM.EU is now open. Early bird tickets are 60€. The organizing team announced, that they’ve confirmed Steve Coast as a keynote speaker. The Call for Papers was also extended till 20th of March.
  • MapQuest enabled bicycle and pedestrian routing for the whole world. Transit routing is now available for six cities in the US.
  • The OSM User Groups Map got a new domain http://usergroups.openstreetmap.de/.
  • A map of the highway status in France http://beta.letuffe.org/ (from red to blue)
  • poi.openstreetmap.nl provides a POI-Export function for Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg.
  • A neat data visualization video showing public transport in Rennes using OSM data donated by the city of Rennes.
  • ITO World is working on ITO Map, a future map rendering service.
  • The 100,000,000th way was recently added to the database.
  • The OSM History Viewer has been repaired and is working again.
  • For South-East Asia there (German) is a visualization available, which shows unmapped streets and waterways. In the map you can find objects which are only available in Google and not in OSM.
  • Walking Papers is testing some new print features and needs your help.
  • Jochen Topf has developed a tile server for Tirex using Node.js
  • Christoph Eckert is generating preprocessed OSM maps for MoNav on the German dev server.
  • “OSM2World is a converter that creates a three-dimensional model of the world based on OpenStreetMap data. The model can be exported to different formats.”
  • OpenStreetMap is planning to participate in the Google Summer of Code again this year. Ideas will be collected here.
  • The developers that worked on some awesome new features during the OpenLayers Mobile Code Sprint are looking for people to test of the new stuff.
  • The Google Sketchup Plugin has its own wikipage now.
  • The Firefox-plugin “Operator” extracts so-called mikroformat-information of websites (for example addresses). User:FrViPofm has extend the tool for OSM and is searching for further active developers now, who are willing to translate the French tool into several languages.
  • A new build of Maperitive supports SRTM1 and custom digital elevation models (DEMS) now.
  • pyTrainer is a tool for Linux with a focus on ForeRunner. It can display GPS-tracks in graphs, maps and uses OSM in its current version. An article about this topic can be found here HanBlog.net (German).
  • The company Omniscale announced a free OSM parser (imposm.parser).
  • OpenTrail, an Android OSM app for walkers and hikers, has been released.
  • With the new version of the “Open GPS Tracker” Android app, you can now upload GPX files directly to the OSM server.
  • Fixing things in the OSM database without actually knowing what you’re doing is always a bad idea – here’s a recent example.
  • An iPhone app was causing several outages and periods of slowness last week due to an abusive breach of our tile usage policy.

Authors: Pascal,Jonas & Dennis
Did we miss something? Do you want to help us collecting the news for next week’s issue?
You can contact us via mail or Twitter.

Project of the Week: Stationery shops

Would you pass me the quill and inkpot please?

A stationery shop may seem outdated in a paperless, electronically
connected world. There is something more formal about getting a card
or letter in the mail, something joyful in the anticipation of opening
an envelope, thick with greetings and dreams, from an old friend.
Let’s put the local stationery shop on the map.

What goes into a well-mapped stationery shop? Find out on the Project of the Week: Stationery shop page.

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.

The current Project of the Month: Bridge and Tunnel continues until the end of March.

Stationery photo by Simon Pearson is
licensed CC-By-ND.

Scientific American: Mapping the food desert

Scientific American has just published an article Amateur Cartographers Map Local ‘Food Desert’ by Francie Diep on urban
food quality.

A volunteer effort to map all the food stores in Brooklyn,
New York, is an example of two rising trends: citizen mapping and
increasing scrutiny of urban Americans’ access to healthy
food

Brooklyn Food Coalition are using OpenStreetMap to present their data
on the web.

Media_httpiimgurcomz6_hahjv

Deli photo by Catherine is licensed
CC-By.

Image of the Week: OpenSeaMap and weather

Media_httpwikiopenstr_wtkrs

OpenSeaMap showing weather information for a storm in the North
Atlantic ocean on 14 February 2011

OpenSeaMap web site

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

Weekly OSM Summary #11

02/14/2011 – 02/24/2011

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

  • The True Offset web service is available since last week. True Offset aims to create a database of correction data for aerial imagery offsets.
  • The call for papers for this year’s SOTM.EU in Vienna is still open till the 28th of February. All the accepted speakers will get a free ticket to the conference. The organizing team is also looking for sponsors for the conference.
  • Travel Discounts for the SOTM conference in Denver are now available.
  • JOSM (latest) now supports MapCSS, a CSS like map style language this is also used by Potlatch 2.
  • ScanAerial is the successor of the JOSM plugin “Fuzzer” for the automatic tracing of seas and other water areas. The developer is looking for people to test the plugin and report bugs.
  • Forum user kendzi has developed a JOSM plugin that displays the scenery in 3D.
  • User:vvoovv has found a way to use Google Sketchup as an OSM editor.
  • OSMembrane is a new java application that offers a graphical user interface for Osmosis, the popular command line tool for manipulating large quantities of OSM data.
  • KeyPadMapper is an Android App specialized for mapping of house numbers.
  • The new MapQuest Android App has a dedicated OSM mode.
  • TileMill is a new open source map designing studio.
  • A chart visualizing “the most prolific contributors in the region and how contribution volume (not to be confused with quality!) changes over time.”
  • Maxim Dubinin has created some stats about the OSM community in Russia.
  • A new import is starting in Georgia.
  • DIY-StreetView is yet another initiative to make an open street view.
  • MapQuest is looking for projects that use its open services and could be presented at SXSW.
  • Everyone who missed the HOT conference call can listen to a recording of it and look at the notes here.
  • Steve Coast is looking for someone to take over future development of Transiki.org.

Authors: Pascal, Jonas & Dennis
Did we miss something? Do you want to help us collecting the news for next week’s issue? 
You can contact us via mail or Twitter.