News from the world of OpenStreetMap № 461 (05.14.2019-20.05.2019)

Is it possible to avoid traffic in the city? ¹ | Hans Hack map data OpenStreetMap

Mapping

• New tagging scheme police=* approved by 30 votes.

Community

• For several weeks in a row, blogs on osm.org have been subjected to spam attacks. Some community members offer to take countermeasures , for example, to introduce the pre-moderation diaries of all new project participants. The user alexkemp, who has previously raised this topic on the forum, suggests that the current wave of spam is just the beginning.
• OSM Foundation in Japan held a meeting in order to rally the local community, in which both the members of the board of this foundation and the simple cartographers took part. Many proposals for community development were voiced, including on improving the quality of mapping organization and promoting OSM.
• Ilya Zverev in his blog “SHTOSM” ponders (link leads to a post in the Telegram channel) about why paper cards may be needed in the 21st century.

Developments

• According to Laura Mugeha on her Twitter, currently in the conference program “SotM Africa” , which will be held November 22-24, 2019 in the city of Grand Bassam (Côte d'Ivoire), there are not enough master classes. They are waiting for applications from everyone.
• The conference "State of the Map" in the United States, which will be held September 6-8, 2019 in the city of Minneapolis (Minnesota), received a report from just one woman. At the same time, the organizers want at least half of all speeches to be prepared by women.

Education

• The GIScience research group at the University of Heidelberg, using the example of health-related tags, studied how data in OSM changes over time. The results of the study allowed a deeper and better understanding of the typical mapping models, including understanding the reasons for filling certain territories with these tags, the appearance of specifications ( amenity=hospital -> amenity=clinic ), and also showed that such tags begin to be used randomly if one or another the country begins to provide humanitarian assistance.

Cards

• Is it possible to avoid traffic in the city? Hans Hack made a map Berlin, showing the places that are most removed from the roads.
• The Swiss public geoportal, which recently introduced an OSM-based test vector map , updated the map using the Mapbox rendering engine. Jeff Connen of Luxembourg reported that geoportail.lu would “copy” it. Gonza from Argentina noted on his Twitter account that mapa.ign.gob.ar also integrated OSM into his base map.
• Greenpeace made an air quality map in Russian cities. As a basis used OpenStreetMap.

Open data

• The mayor's office of Tolyatti (Samara region) a year ago made its official GIS-portal "EMGIS" open. She not only transferred it to the license Creative Commons Attrubution 4.0 Int., But also allowed the OSM community to use its data for the needs of the project.

Software

• OSGeoLive 13.0 moved to alpha testing, and therefore developers are looking for volunteer testers. OSGeoLive is Live (works without installation) a Linux distribution based on Lubuntu, which contains various open source GIS programs.
• Peermaps is an autonomous map service project based on distributed network technology. Its developers believe that their project will become an alternative to commercial map providers, such as Google Maps, for example. They plan to use peer-to-peer (P2P) methods for file sharing. The project has already received funding to create a prototype, which will be a constantly updated map based on data from OSM.
• Russian Osmer Alexander Pankratov and Alexander Istomin developed a style for JOSM - “Building_Levels_Labels” , which highlights objects that do not have floors.

Do you know…

• ... what's on post # 100 on Pascal Neuss's blog? The tools developed by Pascal became an integral part of the OSM ecosystem.
• ... The fact that the Russian company NextGIS has developed an interactive map showing the dynamics of the political borders of Russia and its predecessors. Also, its developers described in detail how they worked on this project.
• ... how to celebrate stores selling vegan, halal, kosher or gluten-free foods? Use the following keys for this: diet:vegan , diet:halal , diet:kosher , diet:gluten_free . Did not find the right key? Then look here .
• Old-timers OSM probably remember that the service “Maxheight” was created in 2012. Now he not only shows where the maxheight=* tag is missing, but also learned how to display other tags that are somehow related to the movement of freight transport. On the Wiki, you can read about how to improve OSM with this service.

Other "geo" events

• Amnesty International, a non-profit organization, with the help of satellite maps and volunteer recruitment, analyzed airstrikes on the Syrian city of Raqqa (the " Strike Tracker " project). Data for this project collected more than 3 thousand volunteers. The results of the work are posted on the project website , where you can also find a map that is based on OSM.
• The Mapillary #CompleteTheMap project resumes its work in June. Read more about this in the company blog.
• Microsoft announced the release of a version of the game Minecraft with augmented reality , which will be called " Minecraft Earth ". This statement was widely reported in the media, for example, in Wired and CNN . It is expected that the game instead of GPS will use the Spatial Anchors technology implemented in Microsoft Azure, which is a combination of the capabilities of the Azure system and OpenStreetMap data. Let's see how the game will affect OSM. Earlier, similar games (Ingress and Pokémon GO) were released by Niantic.
• Garmin has released a navigator - Garmin Overlander (€ 699), in which a topographic map is preinstalled based on data from OSM. The fact that the card is made using OSM is mentioned in the German press release (automatic translation ).

---

Communication of the Russian participants of OpenStreetMap is in the Telegram chat and on the forum .
There are also groups in social networks VKontakte , Facebook , but they mostly publish news.
Join OSM!