News from the world of OpenStreetMap No. 462 (05.21.2019-27.05.2019)

Russian branch of GREENPEACE switches to OSM ¹ | Map data OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL Mapbox

Mapping

• Christopher Beddow of Mapillary wrote a post about two ways to use Mapillary data to edit OpenStreetMap.
• Joseph Eisenberg has prepared a description page for the new tag golf=cartpath, with which he suggests marking golf course lanes within golf courses.
• Leif Rasmussen wants to once again discuss and collect all the wishes about his proposed tagging scheme ( connectivity=) for complex intersections before proceeding with the vote. The author of this scheme believes that its use will allow storing much more information about lanes than the tag allows now turn:lanes=.
• Joseph Eisenberg proposes to make one single tag for designating a place for a tent and a camper on campsites - tourism=camp_pitch. In turn, the tags currently used for these purposes are camp_site=camp_pitchalso camp_site=pitchprohibited .

Community

• Recently, developers of the iD online editor have increasingly begun to implement new tags on their own, without involving and discussing with the OSM community. But the last straw that led to intense discussion of this situation was the fact that the OSM community forbade them (on GitHuB , in the OSM tag mailing list and in the general mailing list) to add railway/public_transport=platformanother tag to the tag highway=footway.
  The controversy was caused by the proposal to introduce a tag nosquare=yes, which would allow iD developers to "solve the problems of objects that do not have right angles." This proposal has been challenged by the OSM community, both on GibHub and on the general mailing list.
  During the discussion, some ideas were voiced, for example, creating an iD fork or developing separate rules for developers. Unfortunately, the heated discussion led to the fact that iD developer Brian Hausel blocked one of the tickets on GitHub, which was perceived by others as a too loud gesture, which in turn forced SomeoneElse to complain about the comment, which explained the reasons blocking.
  Discussion of this situation has reached the OSM Foundation mailing list. Kristina Karch proposed to do this at the site of the SotM conference, which will be held on September 21-23, 2019, but the proposal was rejected by the chief key developers iD Brian Hausel.
• Researchers from Denver and Singapore have published an article entitled «Corporate Editors in the Evolving the Landscape of by OpenStreetMap» ( «Corporate cartographers in the constantly evolving world by OpenStreetMap» ) in the journal «Isprs International Journal of Geo-Information » ( open-access journal, headquartered in MDPI) . The article discusses the impact of corporate cartographers working for companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Facebook on the development of OSM in the context of the gradual development of the companies themselves. The study was conducted on the basis of 10 specific companies. One of his conclusions: most often, corporations are interested in drawing roads. The authors of the article also raised the question: how should OSM cope with the growth of edits from corporate cartographers.
• The latest issue of the International Journal of Geographical Information Science has a number of articles on “volunteer geoinformatics,” many of which are based on an analysis of the contributions of OpenStreetMap participants. These materials are briefly reviewed in a review article prepared by Hakali and other authors.
• It seems that the platform on which the OSM forum is hosted is not entirely suitable for languages ​​spoken from right to left . This impedes the implementation of OSM's mission to create and support local communities. (In order to view the contents of the link requires authorization on the OSM forum)
• A new UN report notes a growing interest in crowdsourcing cards, and OpenStreetMap says that it is “the main basis for almost all the sciences that study risk.”

Events

• The preliminary program of the conference “State of the Map France” has been published, which will be held in mid-June this year in the city of Montpellier (France). Sign up !
• The sale of tickets to the conference “State of the Map Germany”, which this year will be held in the city of Heidelberg (Germany), has begun . Those who buy tickets in advance are promised discounts.

Humanitarian OSM

• Missing Maps, a non-profit organization, spoke about a recent campaign by CartONG, which is also a member of their association, in Burkina Faso on its blog . Previously, unofficial settlements around the city of Ouagadougou (the capital of Burkina Faso) were marked on the map only remotely: cartons were carried out, during which satellite images were outlined. But CartONG representatives, together with the local Yaam Solidarité group, trained cartographers and went “into the field” to collect various data.

Cards

• In Chelyabinsk, the election of municipal deputies began. The site, which shows the boundaries of constituencies and candidates running for them, uses a map based on OpenStreetMap.
• Steve Coast shared a link to an interactive article, “First you make a map,” which tells and shows how international trading became possible thanks to the maps.
• Mapbox has announced that it now offers everyone interested traffic data (traffic jams) that can be used in conjunction with HERE, TomTom and OSM cards. Data is collected using 45 thousand applications for Android and iOS, which every day transmit information about traffic intensity on 500 million kilometers of roads around the world.
• The gicycle user used OSM data to show that the planned ban on the work of bookmakers at a distance of 800 m from schools in Salzburg (Austria) in fact means their complete ban in the city.
• An interactive map based on OSM has been published on the Internet portal "Present" , which shows: what is the current status of the Russian language in all countries of the former Soviet Union.

We pass to OSM

• [1] Greenpeace's Russian branch has moved its Recycle map from Google to OSM. While the project is in beta testing.

Licenses

• Nuno Caldeira, in his tweet, complains that Facebook does not explicitly indicate that it uses OSM data.

Software

• Maps.Me again started doing weekly map uploads for its navigator. Only this update, which must be done "by hand".
• The Russian public organization Greenhouse of Social Technologies has written a plugin for WordPress that allows you to embed an OSM-based map in the system of this blog. The guys will be happy if someone tests it and gives them feedback.

Programming

• Pierre Beland posted preliminary versions of orthogonal functions for PostGIS in the OQ_Analysis repository on Github that allow transforming building polygons.

Releases

• A new version of iD is released - v2.15.0, in which the built-in validator is noticeably improved, the ability to make corners straight at open lines and individual angles is added, now you can also straighten not a whole line, but only a certain part of it. In addition, the new version has a lot of improvements, new features and bug fixes.

Do you know ...

• ... the R242 road to Malin Head on Inishauen Peninsula in Donegal County, Ireland, has recently been renamed R2D2 in honor of the Star Wars robot. Because in this area , several scenes were shot for the movie "The Last Jedi" (Episode VIII "Star Wars"), which was released in 2016. OSM still retains the old name, as there were doubts that this news is fake.
• ... how to mark a historical stone? It could be megalith: historic=archaeological_siteandsite_type=megalith

Other geo events

• Ed Freifogl (OpenCageData) talked about geocoding during an interview for the MapScaping podcast.
• Mapillary has launched an online platform where you can post a request to take a particular area or manually verify geospatial data that was extracted from images using Mapillary machine learning technology.
• Mapbox has changed its pricing scheme and now use the new calculation method. Details can be found on the Mapbox blog . Old prices can be viewed in the service "Internet Archive".

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