Category Archives: Uncategorized

Project of the Month: Buildings

Media_httpuploadwikim_efidd

Adding buildings to OpenStreetMap has been difficult in the past.
Collecting a GPS trace of a building yields poor results because the
building interferes with GPS reception. But buildings can be
interesting to have on a map. Large collections of buildings in cities
can look very impressive. Lone buildings in remote areas can be
important landmarks for navigation. Or a shelter from bad weather.

There are more than 28 million buildings in the OpenStreetMap
database. Recent donations to OpenStreetMap contributors of aerial
imagery that permits deriving OSM objects without restriction have
made mapping buildings practical in more parts of the world.

The Project of the Month for February is to add local buildings to the map.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Project_of_the_week/2011/Jan_26

This is a Project of the Month. Project of the Week returns
next week, while PotM will continue until the end of February. These projects
inspire mappers to contribute data they might not have considered
previously, and allow us to be inspired by the projects of other
mappers.

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

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Project_of_the_week/Proposals

Timber framed building photo by WikiMedia user Gerbil
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gerbil
is licensed CC-By-SA
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

MapQuest supports OpenStreetMap

A financial donation for OpenStreetMap was announced today on the
OpenStreetMap Foundation blog. This latest donation follows their
dontation in September 2010 and many other activities in the OSM
community. Read about the donation on the OSMF blog.

http://blog.osmfoundation.org/2011/01/26/donation-to-osmf-by-mapquestaol/

The donation from MapQuest is not earmarked for specific use but will
be used to support OpenStreetMap operations. Typically, financial
support for OSM allows the purchase of big ticket items like a new
database server. You can see from the server upgrades page on the
wiki that many other bits and pieces go in to keeping OpenStreetMap
moving smoothly.

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

* note: The server room shown above is not the OSM server room.

CERN server room photo by Torkild Retvedt http://www.flickr.com/photos/torkildr/
is licensed CC-By-SA http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en_CA

Image of the Week: Danish aerial imagery donation

Media_httpwikiopenstr_yrzrw

Fugro Aerial Mapping A/S is a Danish aerial imagery company. Fugro
has shared their 40cm Danish photography with OpenStreetMap community
for tracing vector data in to OpenStreetMap

[Thanks to Peter Brodersen and Jonas Häggqvist for making this
happen]. See the project page for more details including how to start
using this aerial imagery for mapping in Denmark.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Fugro

Project of the Week: Banks and ATMs

Banks banks banks. Not the banks of a river, but financial
institutions. I’ll just run out to the bank for a moment. But which
bank is closest and most convenient? Do you need a bank with
wheelchair access, or with drive through service? Or are you looking
for a late night automated teller machine? We can put all of this
information on the map and that is the Project of the Week. Map your
local banks.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Project_of_the_week/2011/Jan_19

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.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Project_of_the_week/Proposals

Bank machine photo by Dave Stone http://www.flickr.com/photos/builtbydave/
is licensed CC-By-SA http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en_CA

Weekly OSM Summary #8

01/11/2011 – 01/19/2011

Every week a lot of things are happening in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) world. It can be hard to keep track of all the different communication channels and don’t miss any important news. That’s why we’ve created a short summary of all the news here. Enjoy!

For more news, especially regarding new tags and wiki pages, you can check-out the community-updates over here.

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

Image of the Week: Romanian landuse

Media_httpwikiopenstr_kmzih

Romanian landuse – data from EEA comprises 100K polygons, imported to
OSM December 2010

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

Project of the Week: Toilets

Where can you go when you need to go? The Project of the Week is to
add public toilets to the map.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Project_of_the_week/2011/Jan_12

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 Month.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Project_of_the_week/Proposals

Book photo by Paul Downey http://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/
is licensed CC-By http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en_CA

Weekly OSM Summary #7

12/23/2010 – 01/10/2011

Every week a lot of things are happening in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) world. It can be hard to keep track of all the different communication channels and don’t miss any important news. That’s why we’ve created a short summary of all the news here. Enjoy!

  • The Call for Papers for the State of the Map conference 2011 in Denver has started.
  • The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is asking for help to trace the Ivory Coast.
  • The Call for Papers for the SOTM-EU in Vienna has started too. SOTM-EU is also on Twitter as @sotmeu and the hashtag is #sotmeu.
  • Oliver publishes two new videos of his interview series with OSMF board members: Mikel Maron and Henk Hoff
  • OpenStreetBugs is now reachable with the short URL osmbugs.org (via Wiki).
  • User:Bitsteller is creating isometric 3D maps from OSM data.
  • TriMet, which provides public transportation in the Portland, Oregon, metropolitan area, is using OSM data for their OpenTripPlaner. More projects are planed.
  • Klokan Přidals is working on a 3D globe rendered in a web browser using HTML5 Canvas with WebGL and OSM data. Here’s a demo video.
  • New WheelChairMap for Switzerland. More information in the wiki.
  • User:frink has created a speed camera map.
  • User:Gary68 has released a now perl module: “osmDB.pm is a module (in extension to osm.pm) to transfer data extracted from an osm file into a mysql database. It also provides functions to access this data.”
  • Jochen Topf has released Osmium, “a C++ framework for working with OSM data files. Osmium will parse OSM files (XMLor PBF) and call back into handlers for each object (node, way, relation) it encounters along the way.” Osmium is also available on Github.
  • A new version of the Bing Imagery Analyzers is online. The new release includes bug fixes and a transparency slider. Also: “The underlying tile.php now also supports TMS-type requests for easy integration with OpenLayers.”
  • OSM is going to have a booth at the FOSDEM (The Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting) in Brussels, Belgium on 5 and 6 of February, 2011. Mappers are invited to help to run the booth (Wiki).
  • FacilMap is an OpenLayers-based slippy map that aims to combine useful geographical information, renderings and tools of different projects into one reusable and extendable map (Wiki).
  • The new Maps Beta on geocaching.com now also includes OSM maps (MapQuest, Mapnik and OpenCycleMap).
  • Maperitive Build 1094 was released by Igor Brejc. One of the new things: “generate-tiles command now has the ability to detect whether tile contents have changed since the last run (using tile fingerprinting). This way only the actually modified tiles can be uploaded to an FTP server, saving you a lot of time and bandwidth.”
  • Merkaator 0.17.0 was released. New features include a Bing Maps plugin, French Cadastre plugin, GDAL raster background support and printing.
  • OSMTrack, an iPhone app designed specifically for contributing to OSM, was released as version 3.0 a while ago featuring offline vector map, multitasking, iPad support, etc (Wiki).

For more news, especially regarding new tags and wiki pages, you can check-out the community-updates over here.

Authors: Pascal, Jonas, Brice & Dennis.
We missed something? You want to help us collecting the news for next week’s issue? 
You can contact us via mail or Twitter.