News 2024 - Week 35

WeeklyOSM

The latest news about OpenStreetMap in a weekly format. Published every Sunday.

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Tricks and tips on how to draw buildings [] | © Koreller | Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

Mapping

  • [1] Koreller showed us a series of tricks and tips on drawing buildings (and shapes in general) using JOSM with the best symmetry and alignment.

Mapping campaigns

  • Inspired by the Paris 2024 Olympic Games the UN Mappers hosted a mapping competition in August. Check out the final results.

Community

  • Bastian Greshake Tzovaras wrote about why Panoramax is an important contribution to the open source mapping landscape.
  • In Episode 249 of the Geomob Podcast, Ed interviewed Jo Walsh, an early OpenStreetMap pioneer, exploring the beginnings of the open data movement, the rise of initiatives like OpenStreetMap, and the ongoing challenges and future prospects for open data.
  • Ceejay Abilay shared his experience of speaking at the OpenStreetMap in-person training event hosted by Grab Philippines and the OpenStreetMap Philippines Community.

Events

  • SotM Latam 2024 has extended the deadline for submitting proposals until Tuesday 10 September. You can send your abstract of up to 500 words via the event’s Pretalx platform. Those who are unable to attend in person will be able to submit their presentation, in video format of up to 10 minutes, at a later stage. Registration is free.

Education

  • Marcos Dione had an OpenStreetMap editing session with his kids and later asked if there was a staging tool for parents to review and correct their children’s edits. NeatNit recommended using the OSM sandbox instance for this purpose, while Matt Whilden suggested using the iD/Rapid export edits feature.

OSM research

  • A team of researchers has developed a suite of computer-assisted map design tools, aimed at creating maps accessible to visually impaired individuals, based on OSM data.
  • HeiGIT reported that they have assessed the completeness of OSM building data using new data. Results indicate that from 2023 to 2024 completeness in most areas of the world rose more slowly than in previous years.

Software

  • Due to the introduction of a new class of anti-feature and problems with the F-Droid update, Organic Maps has been hidden from the default F-Droid search results for some users.
  • Yohan Boniface invites you to participate in the beta testing of a new version of uMap.
  • catme0w, a Google Summer of Code 2024 contributor, has shared their progress made on Stadia Maps’ Ferrostar project, an SDK for building turn-by-turn navigation applications.
  • The latest version of JOSM has a new option, ‘warn’, to only print warnings and errors to the terminal. This can be useful when collecting information to report a bug.
  • Miles Alan has developed Mepo, an OSM map viewer app for mobile and desktop Linux.
  • A bug in the Android version of Organic Maps 2024.08 is adding outdoor_seating=no to POIs when they are edited. The bug is currently being worked on.
  • Raymond Camden explained how to load CSV data into a Leaflet web map.

Programming

  • BuntingLabs has a fee-based service for downloading OpenStreetMap data as GeoJSON. You can filter by tags, select by bounding box, and export as GeoJSON, all in a single curl command.
  • Marquis de Geek has developed FlightSpy, a JavaScript application that generates an itinerary of what you’ll see from an aeroplane’s window throughout your entire journey. It uses both Flightradar and OSM data.

Releases

  • Beta 1.1.0 of the Panoramax Android app has been released. It allows you to conveniently contribute street images to the open Street View alternative from your mobile phone. The release has an APK attached, in case you want to give it a try.

Did you know …

Other “geo” things

  • Mountain biking in Germany’s forests will be still allowed , at least according to a new draft of the Federal Forest Act. A previous draft of the act last November (we reported earlier) caused significant concern in the biking community, as it proposed major restrictions on mountain biking.
  • Geoo is a geography learning game where you guess flags, capitals, and landmarks, and then compete with others on an online leaderboard.
  • In the latest episode of Developer Voice, Stadia Maps’ co-founder, Ian Wagner, discussed Ferrostar, Stadia Maps’ Rust-based open-source navigation SDK.

Note:
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This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, TheSwavu, barefootstache, derFred, rtnf.
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