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Weekly OSM Summary #38
February 27th, 2012 – March 12th, 2012
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) world.
- Foursquare switched to OSM. Some additional thoughts on that topic in a blog post by Andrew Turner. Also, Apple iPhoto uses some "old" OSM data now too. Read more about it in the OSM Foundation blog.
- The new OSM Foundation (OSMF) servers are up and running. Also, say welcome to the two new system admins: Ian Dees and Sarah Hofmann!
- Simon’s Cleanmap, which can be used for the remapping process, has a new layer "UNDELETE_IT". You can find some more information here.
- The OSM Inspector License View now supports Relations too. Here is the announcement.
- An article about the Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) in Indonesia.
- On OSMstats you can find new statistics for "Edits Per Country".
- MapBox.com offers a new mapstyle called “Streets” with global coverage based on OSM data.
- The "LightMap" created by the University of Heidelberg is a transparent overlay which highlights streets that include street lights. A second layer shows the type of street light.
- The Open Mapquest Map has been updated. For instance, street signs are now included.
- A tutorial by Till Nagel about "TileMill for Processing".
- "mapbook: a PDF map book creator" which uses the mapnik renderer.
- The Overpass API now supports permanent IDs to OSM objects.
- A new Open Source framework to create vector maps: Kartograph
- A new rule-based OSM renderer called "Smrender" has been officially released.
- Jochen Topf released a new tool to extract coastline data from an OSM planet file.
Did we miss something? You can contact us via weekly.osm@googlemail.com
Authors: Pascal & Dennis - (thx @ “Wochennotiz”)
OSM database downtime 20 March 2012
On Tuesday 20th of March 2012 between 13:45 and 16:15 (GMT / UTC) the
primary database server will unavailable due to emergency maintenance.
* www.openstreetmap.org web site will not allow user login or edits
(Potlatch). [1]
* API and map database editing (using JOSM, Merkaartor etc.) will be
unavailable.
* planet.openstreetmap.org will be available but no new diffs will be
generated during the outage.
* Forum (no logins)
* trac (bug-tracker, no logins)
* help.openstreetmap.org (no logins) Other services will NOT be affected - all of the following are
expected to function normally:
* tile serving (“View The Map” & “Export”)
* Wiki
* Nominatim (search)
* mailing lists
* subversion and git (source code repositories)
* donate.openstreetmap.org Technical: Database Server Smaug: Replacing faulty motherboard.
Supplier Engineer Onsite. We have contingency hardware available. 1: Maps will still be viewable on the openstreetmap.org homepage and
on other people's websites. Sincerely
Grant Slater
On behalf of the OpenStreetMap sysadmin team
New imagery for Australia
Grant has done some work to make new imagery available for Australia. It's grayscale imagery for all of Australia at 2.5 metre resolution.
Read more about this on the talk-au mailing list, and load the imagery into your editor as follows:
JOSM tms url: tms:http://agri.openstreetmap.org/{zoom}/{x}/{y}.png (or just pick it from the 'available default entries')
Potlatch background url (Background > Edit> Add): http://agri.openstreetmap.org/$z/$x/$y.png (It will be added to Potlatch imagery default in a few days.)
Weekly OSM Summary #37
February 13th, 2012 - February 27th, 2012
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) world.
- The State of the Map (SotM) 2012, held in Japan, needs a logo.
- A blog post about the switch of geochaching.com from Google to OSM.
- The Guardian published an article titled „OpenStreetMap: 'It's the Wikipedia of maps'“ as part of the „Britain’s 50 new radicals“ series.
- The websites of the European Union are recommending OSM as a webmap.
- An new analysis by Martijn about the State of the OSM Road Network in the US can be found here.
- The Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) is looking for help to create a creole OSM-Book in Haiti.
- Version 0.3 of the Leaflet JavaScript library for interactive maps has been published.
- A python module implementing the Overpass API for OSM map data queries.
- A new map for on the road showing hotels, camping areas and other useful information.
- An OSM map with ASTER hillshading (30m raster) of the University of Heidelberg.
- The open source tool Freemind allows the integration of geo-positions and OSM maps now.
- A new open source tool termed OSM Explorer allows rendering and routing on Windows.
- SteveC initiated a new project: opengeocoder.net
- A Youtube video about a mapping party in Russia can be found here.
Did we miss something? You can contact us via weekly.osm@googlemail.com
Authors: Pascal & Dennis - (thx @ “Wochennotiz”)
Foursquare chooses OpenStreetMap
The social location check-ins application FourSquare has 15 million
users worldwide, and now they are using OpenStreetMap! The foursquare
website now features lovely custom rendered OpenStreetMap maps.
research and testing, OpenStreetMap and MapBox was simply the best fit
for us
http://blog.foursquare.com/2012/02/29/foursquare-is-joining-the-openstreetmap... This will surely be a great boost to OpenStreetMap contribution too,
as people spot areas where the map needs to be improved. Foursquare
users, welcome to the OpenStreetMap community.
Help find who killed Ulf
We had sad news in January that our friend Ulf had been murdered in
Germany. Ulf's family have asked if we can help find those who
murdered Ulf? Please see the up-to-date reports, and photos of
suspects:
killed Ulf haven't been found yet, very probably because they left the
country the morning after the crime. East European mappers, especially
from Lithuania or Poland, might have seen them, or they might at least
know about message boards in their language where the pictures and
description can be posted. At http://ulf-m.blogspot.com, there are now English, Lithuanian and
Russian language versions, a Polish Version will follow. We are
thankful for any help in circulating our appeal in any appropriate
form.
The Value of Immediate Feedback
You may have heard of Bret Victor from his “Kill Math” project and the beautiful differential equation playground that he has created with his Interactive Exploration of a Dynamical System.
It caused quite a stir a while ago and since then we have seen Apple take on some of those ideas in its new eBook push. Even if you’ve seen it before it is definitely worth a refresher viewing:
Since then, Bret has apparently been quite busy building some proof-of-concept tools for designers and weaving together some of his ideas into an amazing talk.
The talk showcases UI concepts that allow programmers and designers to interact with their creation directly instead of through symbol based abstraction, the idea being that such symbol based abstractions are better suited for paper than the digital canvas and create a barrier between the creator and their creation.
In a few short demos Bret shows how powerful developer/designer tooling can truly be. These livecoding demos really showed me how valuable immediate feedback can be.
I have often ‘played’ with an algorithm in a dynamic/exploratory environment such as MATLAB when trying to solve a problem, and then when I have a handle on how the data feels re-implement the algorithm into another language to integrate with the rest of the system. After seeing this video I’ve decided that kind of workflow can be improved. Visualisation should not be an afterthought. It should be implemented first.
This video is well worth your time:
Multithreaded access to a SQLite database
If you use SQLite like me you’ll know that it is amazingly powerful, convenient, and compact. However if you have an app that needs to do a lot of database IO concurrently with SQLite you may run into the fact that it is classically single-threaded and does not give you the guarantees that are present in normal RDBMS systems. Here is a nice writeup of a few of the strategies you can use to perform SQLite reads/writes in a multithreaded app. Worth a read if you use SQLite. Link.
Weekly OSM Summary #36
January 30th, 2012 - February 13th, 2012
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) world.
- The “License Change View” of the OSM Inspector is updated every four hours now.
- Several OSM Users reported that the Bing aerial imagery has been updated or that new images have been added. Read more here.
- OSM data and Garmin GPS Maps for Syria generated on an hourly basis are available now. Based on the Bing aerial imagery you can add missing streets.
- A Hack Weekend will take place in March in Toronto. Get more information here.
- Belarus has a new OSM Project page now too: openstreetmap.by
- Some OSM users noticed that several military areas in Germany are now masked in the German Bing aerial images. According to Steve Coast, a German agency requested this.
- The Tiles @ Home server will be shut down by the end of February 2012. A big thank you for hosting this service in the past! Read the full announcement here.
- A new JOSM-Plugin speeds up the download time of OSM data. Read more about it here.
- On OSMRanking you can create daily updated rankings based on your edits in the OSM database. You can find an example of the "Members of the OSM Foundation Board" here.
- Steve Kay created an OSM Tag Network of Edinburgh.
- Lanyrd.com shows upcoming events on an OSM Map now. For instance the German FOSSGIS & OSM Conference 2012 in Dessau
- With Active.com and Toursprung two additional websites switched from Google to OpenStreetMap.
- A video of Patrick Meier’s presentation about “Crisismapping” at the re:publica XI: "Changing the World, One Map at a Time". Also, a video of a presentation by Richard Cantwell at the Ignite Dublin about OSM and in particular about Haiti can be found here.
- “Around the Alps in 80 days“ a mapping project for the summer of 2012.
- A nice Blog Post about "OpenStreetMap Philippines: 2011 Year in Review" by Eugene Alvin Villar.
- An iOS App for OpenSeaMap is available now.
Did we miss something? You can contact us via weekly.osm@googlemail.com
Authors: Pascal & Dennis - (thx @ “Wochennotiz”)
Starry Night interactive visualisation
Petros Vrellis has used OpenFrameworks (which I used for my Kinect Pong demo) to create a beautiful fluid flow simulation of the famous Van Gogh painting ‘Starry Night’
Recommended viewing:
Weekly OSM Summary #35
January 16th, 2012 – January 30th, 2012
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) world.
- On Tuesday, Feb. 7th, 2012 the Night of the Living Maps will take place. It is a global Mapathon. Get more information here.
- The new webpage http://switch2osm.org is online! It helps you to switch your application to OSM (go figure). Ushahidi also uses OSM as their basemap now.
- The License Working Group (LWG) wrote about the license change here and a new mailing list for the “Remapping Process” has been created.
- The design and layout of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (H.O.T.) webpage has been updated. Also, a HOT presentation by Richard Welty can be found online here.
- On February 25th and 26th a Hacking Weekend will take place in Karlsruhe, Germany.
- With MapBox light a new online service has been published to use OSM maps for the visualization of different data. Read more here. Also, a minimalist OSM baselayer for MapBox.
- A map of Ireland showing hospital accessibility using an OSM basemap and Flex.
- Summary of all Stamen Maps which were created in 2011 based on free geodata.
- Andy Allan created a new Snapshot Server. It is a new and simple solution to use OSM data in overlays.
- An Open Source iOS App has been published. Read more here.
- An article explaining how to use R or more specifically the Maptools library instead of ArcMap. You can use the osmar package in R too.
- The new Red Sea volcanic island of the Zubair Group is already digitized in OSM.
- Want to create your own OSM key fob? Watch this.
- An article about OSM in Bangladesh.
Did we miss something? You can contact us via weekly.osm@googlemail.com
Authors: Pascal & Dennis - (thx @ “Wochennotiz”)
OpenStreetMap and Indoor Maps [Part 2/2]: The mapping proposal for OpenIndoorMaps [by Marcus Götz]
Following our first post on the challenges and opportunities of an indoor-extended OpenStreetMap, we now wish to concentrate on the specifics and provide a proposal for "OpenIndoorMaps". Before doing this, we provide some use-case scenarios that our proposal addresses. Use-Case scenarios for OpenIndoorMaps There are many possibilities or use-case scenarios for indoor maps or services such as routing or navigation. Imagine being a businessman at the airport: after entering the entrance hall you first want to go to the check-in counter and then to a nearby newspaper shop before searching for the lounge and then finally going to the gate. Normally you have to do this “navigation” by yourself, which can be quite a challenging task (especially in huge airports such as Chicago or Beijing). Another example is the following: you are visiting a huge shopping mall. Unfortunately you do not have much time, thus you need proper guidance inside the mall. Luckily, you have your OSM based indoor routing application on your mobile phone, which means that you can easily locate your desired shop or item and receive proper routing instructions inside the mall. Besides these two use-cases there are plenty of other scenarios such as navigation in hotels (imagine being in Dubai in the Burj Khalifa with more than 100 floors or in the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas with more than 7000 rooms), in universities, in museums, train stations and so on. As you can see, there are many meaningful examples of why indoor information is so important. The indoorOSM model proposal Basically, a building is represented as a feature (technically as a “relation”), whereby an attribute characterises it as building. One of the well known features of OSM is the fact that all kinds of additional building information such as the name or type can be attached to it. Every floor within the building is assigned a floor level while every entrance or exit of the building receives a unique ID in order to create a connection between the outdoor world and the indoor. Each floor is then assigned a corresponding level, (“floor-relation member”) such as level_0, level_1, level_-1 and so on (level_0 always denotes the ground floor). Each floor of a building (technically each relation-member of the main relation) is again mapped separately, whereby a specific floor level is selected during the editing session. Different building parts of a floor are mapped as room, hall, corridor, and so on. Each part of the building can contain features such as windows which can be described (tagged) in detail. Vertical connections are mapped as elevators, stairways and so on. A vertical connection can be connected to several levels (e.g. an elevator) or a single level (stairs). Extend the model to your needs! A full technical description can be found here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/IndoorOSM. Please do not hesitate to come up with proposals on how to improve and extend the model! Start mapping a building yourself! Start mapping a building yourself: Just open the JOSM editor, zoom to the location where the building is and start mapping the level shell as well as the building parts of one level (for example the ground level), and finally combine them in a relation. Afterwards, you can hide this relation (thus all ways will be invisible) and start with the next floor. When you have finished mapping all of the floors, simply create the building relation and add all floor-relations as relation-members.
Look at your result! Currently, there is no automated integration process of indoor maps into http://indoorosm.uni-hd.de. Therefore, if you have mapped a building, simply send a short notification to m.goetz [at] uni-heidelberg.de (mentioning the relation id of your building) and your map will be integrated as fast as possible. In the long run, a version with automated building integration can also be developed – assuming that there will be more and more building mapped indoors.
Weekly OSM Summary #34
January 2nd, 2012 – January 16th, 2012
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) world.
- The State of the Map (SotM) Conference 2012 will be held in Tokyo. Congrats Japan!
- The call for bids to host the State Of The Map US Conference is out now.
- The first US OSM Hack Weekend will take place in Washington on February 18th and 19th.
- Toby wrote a blog post about “License Change Mapping” a.k.a. Remapping.
- Simon’s CLEANMAP has a second new layer. The BADMAP now displays all data which will likely be removed after April 1st, 2012.
- A big "Thank you!" to all volunteers who supported the World Health Organization (WHO). Read the full letter here.
- StreetEasy.com is another webpage, which recently switched to OSM. You can find a general article here and a more technical one here.
- Wired.com published an article on how to switch to OSM.
- Pascal, Dennis and Alexander conducted several analyses regarding “OpenStreetMap in Germany 2007-2011”. Their study has been published as an open access paper.
- OSM Israel uses the OSM Germany webpage design now too.
- The new Wordpress Plugin “MapsMaker” integrates an OSM map into your blog.
- Rob wrote a really nice tool to create a HTML report for your GPS/GPX track. You can find more information on his webpage and his project on github.
- The aerial imageries of the GeoEye's OrbView-3 satellite are Public Domain. For more details on how to use them, read the announcement here.
- Gael presented the OSM project to the French senate. Watch the video (in French) here.
Did we miss something? You can contact us via weekly.osm@googlemail.com
Authors: Pascal & Dennis - (thx @ “Wochennotiz”)
Google IP Vandalizing OpenStreetMap
Last week Mocality, a Kenyan business data startup, caught Google scraping their data and the post made it to boing boing. Mocality tracked this down with some analysis of their logs and a sting operation, even recording phone calls that Google staff made which contained false information. Google have apologized and the incident looked closed, at least from the outside.
Unfortunately we have to report something similar is still happening to us from the same source.
Preliminary results show users from Google IP address ranges in India deleting, moving and abusing OSM data including subtle edits like reversing one-way streets.Two OpenStreetMap accounts have been vandalizing OSM in London, New York and elsewhere from Google’s IP address, the same address in India reported by Mocality.The most obvious vandalism started around last Thursday last week from these particular users however it may take us some time to do a full analysis. In fact over the last year we have had over 102 thousand hits on OSM using at least 17 accounts from this Google IP.These actions are somewhat baffling given our past good relationship with Google which has included donations and Summer of Code work. As a community we take the quality of our data extremely seriously and look forward to an explanation from Google and an undertaking to not allow this kind of thing to happen in the future.
Mikel Maron, OSMF board member, mikel@osmfoundation.org
Grant Slater, OSM Sysadmin, grant@osmfoundation.org
Steve Coast, OSM Founder, chairman@osmfoundation.org
Why was the post made? As an open community we respect the privacy of our members. We have to draw a line somewhere between open and closed communications not being available to community members. It was felt on balance that making the minimum facts public was the right thing to do.
What more details can we share? The source IP range: 74.125.63.* and two of the investigated accounts are: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/kane123 (This user was blocked for a day on Friday... and they continued vandalising on Monday after being made aware of their bad edits Source: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/79 ) and http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/sanganabongina
Do you have an example of malicious data? Yes, here: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/10375538 (London), http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/10375581 (New York City) where a user from that IP address modified one way streets [reversed and deleted]. Here: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/145893931/history where a user added a fake Olympic stadium.Have we spoken to Google? We are talking to Google and sharing all the information we have.Do we know if this was a coordinated activity? No. We simply know the IP address and the accounts and edit information, we’re not implying a grand conspiracy. The edits were made over many hours over multiple days - nothing that would happen as an accident by a new user.When and how is vandalism escalated? - Our vandalism policy is here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/VandalismWas this all overblown? As a very diverse and large community of over 500,000 user accounts we have a wide set of opinions even amongst the key people running OSM. This is welcomed and every member of our community is free to speak about how they see things.
OpenStreetMap and Indoor Maps [Part 1/2]
In most countries, OpenStreetMap played catch-up with the commercial maps. Indoor Maps are a completely new playing field. So far, none of the commercial providers have gained traction in the Indoor space. It is also an area where OpenStreetMap could take the lead and leave the commercial providers behind straight from the beginning. Wishful thinking? Maybe, maybe not. On the one hand, there is a lack of an Indoor approach for OpenStreetMap. On the other hand, there is no other map data with such attention to detail. Now there is also a very promising approach to Indoor Maps for OpenStreetMap by the University of Heidelberg and especially Marcus Götz, who is co-author of this post and who will present his approach in a succeeding post. In this post, we want to give a better idea of the opportunities and challenges for “OpenIndoorMaps”. The opportunity Germany has reached a leading position with regard to coverage in the OpenStreetMap universe. Around the Reichstag in Berlin, every single tree is mapped. In the Berlin zoo, every single animal compound is mapped. So, what’s next for mappers in those densely mapped areas? An obvious answer is to go indoors. The indoor space is the last frontier in mapping, and people are seeking and even expecting their well-known outdoor applications (e.g. navigation or local search) being adapted to the Indoor context. However, for transferring applications like openrouteservice.org or osm-wms.de indoors requires details about indoor spaces, and buildings need to be mapped inside. This is where the OSM community can build upon their strength of local knowledge and their attention to detail and as a result beat commercial data providers. The key difference Indoor applications require maps on top of each other to deal with floors. Floors need to be connected to each other. Floors need to be considered during capturing and during rendering. Different data is overlaid with each other, thus an appropriate methodology for capturing and visualizing the data is required. Especially a tall building with several floors results in many super-imposed ways when mapping the rooms, corridors and floor shapes in OSM, which makes the OSM mapping some kind of inconvenience (at least for inexperienced mappers). Mapping indoors results in a huge amount of data for a comparable small area. The challenges Capturing and rendering floors - How can different floors be mapped in OSM? What is an appropriate visualization of multi-level buildings? How can the OSM map be extended for indoor information? Privacy protection - Can the indoor space be mapped without limitation or are their additional privacy concerns to be considered? Indoor Measurement - What technology do people need to capture indoor maps? Which gadgets will take over the role of the GPS receiver for street maps? Is there some kind of publically accessible building information available? The Indoor Approach by the University of Heidelberg The Indoor Approach of the University of Heidelberg focuses on dealing with the concept of floors. Thereby, each floor is mapped in great detail, thus the shapes and geometry of rooms are also included. The developed approach builds upon the existing OSM technology with ways and nodes, and combines them with relations to a building. Additional information about doors or semantic information, such as room names, is also included. Essentially, a building can be fully mapped with existing OSM editors (mainly Potlatch or JOSM) and no additional extensions are required. Similar to other applications, the data can then be used for the creation of indoor maps and other applications. Part 2 of this post will describe the approach in more detail and intends to encourage a discussion to include the community in development of a feasible approach for the OpenStreetMap community.
We will go to Tokyo State of the Map 2012
Just announced. Details here:
http://stateofthemap.org/tokyo-host-for-sotm12/Algorithm Measures Human Pecking Order
The MIT Technology Review has covered a fascinating paper that concludes : “The way people copy each other’s linguistic style reveals their pecking order.”
Worth a read.
Link.
The original paper is here on the Arxiv.
