Weekly OSM Summary #87

January 13th, 2014 – January 27th, 2014
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world.

Richard Fairhurst wrote some code that adds routing to the main OSM webpage. Code and Running Demo, click “Get Directions”.
Sticker: “We’re On The Map!”
The OSM contributor cosmicpop created the 20,000,000th changeset.
More than 100,000 map notes have been reported by now. Some statistics.
The Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT): Support Haiyan/Yolanda Reconstruction – Contribute Public Use UaV (Drone) Imagery.
Harry Wood published the slides, notes and an audio recording of his “Typhoon Crisis Mapping ODI talk“. He also wrote a blog post for the HOT website with “Some editing stats from the Typhoon Haiyan response“.
The Google Crisis Map for Tacloban City now also supports OSM.
Richard Weait wrote a blog post about the quite interesting topic of mapping for the OSM render engine.
Serge Wroclawski about „Edit Wars in OpenStreetMap“.
Tom Chance used OSM data of London for strategic planning.
Frederik Ramm published a webpage that calculates the number and size of map tiles of a given bounding box.
Node-tileserver has been published. It is a lightweight tileserver using NodeJS. It can serve bitmap and vector tiles and is designed as a fast and easy-to-install tileserver that renders OpenStreetMap data.
Rail routing worldwide based on OSM data.
How to make an OSM wallpaper.

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

Weekly OSM Summary #86

December 30th, 2013 – Januaray 13th, 2014
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world.

Buenos Aires (Argentina) will host the next State of the Map (SotM) 2014 conference.
Why the World Needs OSM.
Goodbye 2013, Hello 2014!
OSM: A Year of Edits 2013.
Mappy New Year! What are your plans for 2014 and for the 10th anniversary of OSM?
OSM UK: What should we do this year?
Attribution and all that (a rant).
How many mappers are there in Switzerland?
A report of the Salvador (Bahia, Brazil) mapping party.
HOT Activation in Central African Republic: Review of current progresses.
The next Karlsruhe (Germany) hack weekend will take place on February 15th/16th, 2014.
Changes made in the OSM Kort game are updated in the OSM database now.
OSM routing with GraphHopper and Java on Raspberry Pi.
Badita Florin published the first edition of state of the map Romania 2013.

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

Hack Weekend December 2013

Last December we had a hack weekend in London, thanks to AOL UK/MapQuest (my employer) for donating meeting space in their offices and food. About 20 people turned up and did some awesome stuff and we, at the Engineering Working Group, thought you might be interested in what went on and perhaps running your own event.

OSMers hacking away at the Hack Weekend in London, December 2013. Thanks to SK53_OSM via flickr for this photo under CC-BY-SA 2.0.

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Buenos Aires hosts SotM14

After being in Europe, North America and Asia, it is time to explore yet another continent. We’re happy to announce that the 8th international State of the Map 2014 conference will be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina (map) on November 7th – 9th.

OSM is a truly global project with people all over the globe. Having SotM14 in Argentina is a great way to show the world what’s going on in South America regarding OSM and it can help strengthen the local OSM communities there.

If you haven’t made holiday plans for this year yet, why not consider Argentina in the spring? (yes, it will be spring there)

In case you live in Europe or North America and you feel Argentina is too far away? You’re still invited to join SotM-EU (Karlsruhe, June 13 – 15) or SotM-US (Washington DC, April 12 and 13).

More details about SotM14 will follow later this month. Stay tuned.

[UPDATE: Lots more details can be found at stateofthemap.org]

(image by benontherun.com cc-by-nc-sa 2.0)

Weekly OSM Summary #85

December 16th, 2013 – December 30th, 2013
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world.

The call for presentations for the upcoming State of the Map Europe (SotM-EU) is available here.
A new version of the JOSM OSM editor has been published. For Windows users switching to JAVA version 7 is recommended.
Simon Poole updated the “Street Name Completeness Statistics” for Switzerland.
SK53 wrote a blog post about mapping off-piste OSM ski routes for freeriding.
Steven Vance wrote a blog post about his work to ensure a proper bike routing in the Chicago Bike Guide.
The Hiking and Trail Riding map got a small redesign and is now again available in English. Give it a try here.
OSM contributor MorbZ published an iOS app for displaying and editing opening hours of OSM shops, bars, restaurants and more.

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

Weekly OSM Summary #84

December 2nd, 2013 – December 16th, 2013
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world.

The next State of the Map Europe (SotM-EU) will take place June 13-15, 2014 at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences (Germany).
The next State of the Map United States (Sotm-US) will take place April 12-13, 2014 in Washington DC.
The next US Winter Editathon 2014 will be on January 18-19, 2014. Find your location here.
The next Berlin (Germany) OSM hack weekend will take place on January 24-25, 2014.
Bluehost.com donated two new OSM tile servers.
An additional OSM database server has been added to the main OSM infrastructure in December 2013.
Simon Poole published some new OSM contributor statistics.
A blog post about the collaboration between the British Red Cross, the American Red Cross and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team project during the Typhoon Haiyan response.
A blog post by Kate Chapman about “OpenStreetMap and Yolanda: A Report from Manila“.
Richard Fairhurst and others created a new bike map for the UK.
Andy Allan wrote a blog post about the OSM elevation tag with its value of ’0.00000000000′ and broken OSM imports.
Aaron Lidman created a name-suggestion-index which helps with correct spelling and tagging in OSM. This new functionality has also been integrated into the iD OSM editor.

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

Weekly OSM Summary #83

November 18th, 2013 – December 2nd, 2013
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world.

A redesign of OpenStreetMap.org is live since the beginning of December, 2013. You can find additional information in a blog post here.
A set of improvements has been pushed to uMap. With uMap you can create a map with OpenStreetMap layers within a minute and embed them into your website.
Seth Vincent wrote an introduction to leaflet. Additionally, Chris Hill published a tutorial (1 & 2) on using leaflet. Leaflet is an open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps.
During the #hackess hackathon in Paris, a route planning prototype for wheelchair users has been implemented based on OSRM and OSM data. A demo is online here.
A number of Spanish video tutorials showing how to use the OSM JOSM editor.
A blog post by Peter Karich on how to set up your own OSM graphhopper routing service.
OSM France started a quality study around French OSM administrative boundaries.
Rafa Gutierrez wrote a blog post on how to create GoPro video maps.
OSM contributor Belecker published a new JOSM plugin (Tracer2) to extract areas, with focus on buildings from graphics (no photos). Read more in the OSM wiki.
Adam Jordanek created a website which shows bars, pubs, restaurants and other facilities with their corresponding opening hours. Give it a try here.
SK53 wrote a blog post about the last OSM hack weekend in London.

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

Goodbye 2013, Hello 2014

Simon Poole
OpenStreetMap Foundation Chairman

It’s customary at the end of the year and at the start of a new to reflect on what has been achieved and highlight noteworthy events in the past year. For OpenStreetMap 2013 would seem to me to be the year in which using our data is no longer extraordinary, but normal.

Over the course of the year we have seen devices from Bosch, Garmin and others being announced or delivered ex factory with OSM based maps, and we’ve seen a number of media houses switch to using OSM for their online publications. None of these seemed to be perceived as earth shattering, just matter of fact. The downside is that we have to actively remind ourselves that we, a small free and open project, are achieving astounding inroads in to an area of activity otherwise open only to governments and multi-billion dollar corporations.

For old hands 2013 is more likely to be noteworthy for two quite visible changes. One was the introduction of the new default editor iD. I would like to take the opportunity and specially thank the authors of previous default Potlatch 1 and 2 that are so closely coupled to the success of OpenStreetMap and which have served us, and continue to do so, well over many years.

The other change naturally was the deployment of the web site redesign replacing the sidebar and tab layout with the current design. If archive.org is to be believed the previous layout had been with us since December 2005 and it was not a surprise that there was some turmoil and emotions accompanying the change.

At the end of the year our special thanks should also go to the volunteers that keep our infrastructure running and further to all contributors big and small that make OpenStreetMap what it is.

From the perspective of the OpenStreetMap Foundation among our goals for 2014 are formalizing the relationship with our national and thematic organisations and to stabilizing our funding model going forward.

The project as a whole continues to show healthy growth both in coverage, participants, quality and usage. If I was personally asked what we need to consciously add more of, instead of just doing what we always do, I would point to address collection. While we added up to an incredible 1 million addresses per month in 2013 we really need to increase this a bit and while, naturally, some of this will come from imports, just walking around a block and jotting down the house numbers every time we are somewhere new could greatly increase the rate at which we approach the goal of including a free address dataset in the OSM data.

On this note, I wish everybody a happy new year and have a fun 2014 mapping.

Seasons Greetings

Seasons greetings to all OpenStreetMap contributors!

…and I hope you all had an OpenStreetMappy Christmas.

I know I did. On Christmas day I managed to use OpenStreetMap for our family Christmas walk, and contributed a bit more data (More on that here)

What other Christmassy map happenings have happened?

It looks like User:ubahnverleih has turned his family Christmas walk into more of an extensive mapping expedition than I did!
The german OpenStreetMap community lead the way with mapping Christmas Markets!
Derick Rethans has been writing a “contributing advent” series of blogs posts in the run up to Christmas, including some posts on contributing to OpenStreetMap.
MapBox have celebrated the holidays and visualised the holiday traffic!
User:RudiXXL thinks they spotted santa in OpenStreetMap landuse shapes.

How was your OpenStreetMappy Christmas?

OpenStreetMap infrastructure donation – Bluehost

Thanks to generous donations and active local community members, the OpenStreetMap distributed tile delivery infrastructure continues to grow.

Two tile servers, nadder-01 and nadder-02, have been added to the OpenStreetMap tile cache network. Based in Provo, Utah, USA, these servers provide tiles to the Americas.

Map tiles are delivered to users based on their GeoDNS location. The OpenStreetMap Foundation seeks additional distributed tile servers. If you would like to donate a tile server and hosting, please see the Tile CDN requirements page on the wiki.

We would like to thank the BOSS team (Bluehost Open Source Solutions) and especially Jared Smith at Bluehost.com for this generous donation to OpenStreetMap infrastructure.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organization, formed in the UK to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and to providing geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project. You can support OpenStreetMap by donating to the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

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