Candidature for State of the Map 2020, HSR Rapperswil, 19-21 June 2020

Update
The SotM 2020 will be in Cape Town. We congratulate the team from Southafrica and look forward to the conference next year.

We would like to inform you about some recent developments. Every year the OpenStreetMap community meets at the international conference “State of the Map” (SotM). This year the event will take place in Heidelberg.

Up to two weeks ago no applications for the SotM 2020 event had been received by the SotM working group. In light of that situation we, the HSR Hochschule Rapperswil and the association SOSM, were asked if we could submit a bid, which we have now done.

We see this as an opportunity to expand the Swiss community and to present ourselves as a cosmopolitan host.

Please reserve the 19-21 June 2020. We hope for an active participation, and that some volunteers will contact us as helpers as soon as it is clear which location will win the bid. The decision is expected by the end of September. 

Burgen-Dossier – Eine Kooperation von Wikimedia und OpenStreetMap (Schweiz)

Wikimedia und OpenStreetMap wollen in der Schweiz enger zusammenarbeiten. Den Anfang soll ein gemeinsames schweizerisches Burgen-Verzeichnis mit Karte, Fotos und weiteren Informationen machen.

Für den Samstag, 27. April 2019, ist ein Arbeitstreffen beider Communities und weiterer Interessierter auf Schloss Lenzburg (AG) geplant, um die verschiedenen Arbeiten zu koordinieren und sich gegenseitig die verschiedenen Projekte und Unterprojekte näher zu bringen.

Wikipedianer und weitere Interessierte erhalten eine Einführung in OpenStreetMap. Mapper und weitere Interessierte bekommen Wikipedia-Projekte nähergebracht. Am Nachmittag stellen Experten die Projekte OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia sowie Wikivoyage, Commons (Fotos) und evtl. Wikidata näher vor. Sie werden zeigen, wie man editiert, und stehen für Fragen zur Verfügung. (“Ask Us Anything”)

Das Ziel ist die vollständige Darstellung aller Burgen und Schlösser auf OpenStreetMap (OSM) und Wikipedia (WP), angefangen mit den Kantonen Aargau und Zürich.

Weitere Informationen und Anmeldung zur kostenlosen Teilnahme auf dieser Wiki-Seite.

Allianz faires Urheberrecht

Der Vorstand der SOSM hat diese Woche beschlossen, die Allianz für ein faires Urheberrecht in der Schweiz zu unterstützen.

Auch wenn wir von der am meist diskutierten vorgeschlagene Änderung, die “Linksteuer” nicht direkt betroffen wären, scheint es uns nicht sinnvoll Regelungen einzuführen die, zugunsten von einzelnen Unternehmungen, versuchen die Zeit zurück zudrehen, und in diesem spezifischen Fall auch noch handwerklich katastrophal sind.

Die weniger besprochene weitere Änderung, die Einführung eines Äquivalents des Lichtbildschutz, den wir aus anderen europäischen Ländern kennen, betrifft uns aber direkt.

Bisher hatte die Schweiz eine sehr hohe Hürde, die überwunden werden musste um einen urheberrechtlichen Schutz einer Fotographie zu erhalten (Bundesgerichtsurteil “Meili Foto” ). Dies wird nun ins Gegenteil gekehrt, mit dem Resultat, dass man davon ausgehen muss, dass auch automatisch und mechanisch aufgenommene Bilder in Zukunft geschützt sind (also Luftbilder, StreetView, Mapillary und so weiter) und ebenso daraus abgeleitete Werke nur noch mit der Erlaubnis des jeweiligen Rechteinhabers erstellt werden dürfen. Der Bundesrat schliesst dies zwar in seiner Botschaft zur Revision aus, der Gesetzestext selber scheint aber dazu im Widerspruch zu stehen.

Auf jeden Fall ist die Rechtssicherheit für uns bei der Benutzung solcher Quellen nicht mehr vorhanden, was nicht in unserem Interesse sein kann.

OpenSchoolMaps.ch – Promotion of open maps in the classroom

OpenSchoolMaps.ch is a new initiative to promote open maps in geography and computer science lessons in Switzerland. Teachers at secondary and grammar school level are the main target groups. To all who know teachers in geography and computer science: Pass this news on, www.openschoolmaps.ch!

Both the maps (data) and the materials are made freely available (so-called “Open Educational Resource”), so that everyone can contribute to them, use them freely and pass them on – even outside the classroom. Mainly free data from OpenStreetMap is used.

This small project was initiated by Stefan Keller, SOSM board member and professor at the Geometa Lab of the HSR. It fits to the two focal points, school and tourism, which the association has set itself this year. The SOSM also owns the web domains openschoolmaps.ch and openschoolmaps.org.

The content on OpenSchoolMaps.ch is just the beginning. We are looking for contributors who want to take part in the project, be it with feedback, translations or software tools. Interested parties can contact the project managers as described under OpenSchoolMaps.ch > “Weitere Unterrichtsideen”.

Map on osm.ch now includes contour lines

The default style on osm.ch now includes contour lines and is updated to the latest version of the openstreetmap-carto style sheet.

(c) OpenStreetMap contributors

Elevation data created from a mash-up of SRTM and ASTER GDEM data. ASTER GDEM is a product of METI and NASA. Post processing was kindly provided by Yves Cainaud from opensnowmap.org.

New Routing Frontend

Update: the old interface is turned off. The new one is available at routing.osm.ch

 

There is a new routing user interface for osrm which I am testing at routingnew.osm.ch. I would welcome feedback here as a comment or on the Swiss mailing list.

Why the new interface?

There was no easy way forward. A little background: Last year, we bough some shiny new SSDs to speed up our servers. I decided to install the new Ubuntu 16.04 onto the new disks, the new long term support version. In the mean time, most services are moved to the server with the new Ubuntu and the SSDs, except routing. I couldn’t get our old version of OSRM to run on Ubuntu 16.04, so I was forced to upgrade to the newest version. But a lot was changed in OSRM in the mean time: the API for routing requests as well as the syntax for the routing profiles. That is the main reason why we still run such an old version. The old user interface we used is no longer maintained, therefore incompatible with the current API. But there is a brand new one, which does not support multiple routing profiles. So starting at the hack weekend in Karlsruhe, I hacked the profile selector into the new interface.

The plan is now to switch to the new OSRM and user interface on Sunday, March 19th.

Pre-announcement: 2017 SOSM AGM, April the 8th in Fribourg

The 2017 SOSM annual general meeting will take place on April the 8th in Fribourg, venue to be determined.

We will likely keep the format from the previous events: formal meeting before lunch, lunch, mapping and back to the venue.

If you have suggestions for or contacts with a suitable venue please get back to me.

The formal announcement will be published towards the end of March.

Looking forward to seeing you in Fribourg.

Building Addresses Canton Berne

As you may remember early this year we got permission to use the open address data from the Canton Berne in OpenStreetMap, this after a couple of years back and forth due to the new cantonal legislation and older usage terms that sounded as if the data might be usable but in reality didn’t allow it.

The address data is available from the cantonal open data portal however it is rather unwieldly (a good 400’000 addresses) and problematic to handle even in JOSM. I foolhardly promised to do something about that at the time, but didn’t get around to doing anything up to now. It should be noted that nobody has stepped forward and volunteered to organize an import of any kind, so my focus is simply proving it as reference data that can be used at a small-scale.

While my current solution is not perfect and will likely see improvements over time (for example the layer is currently opaque), it is probably  the best solution for now. I’ve produced a background layer from the data that shows

  • usage
  • house
  • street/place

josm-bern2

 

To reduce clutter I’ve shortened some of the usage strings:

  • Wohnhaus – WH
  • Bauernhaus – BH
  • Garage – G
  • Scheune – S
  • Gebäude – B

The data is hosted on sourcepoles QGIS Cloud system, many thanks to Marco and his team for supporting us. To make things simpler for iD users and work around some issues JOSM has with WMS servers we actually proxy this through our mapproxy instance.

The relevant tile URL is:

http://mapproxy.osm.ch:8080/tiles/GEBADRBE/EPSG900913/{z}/{x}/{y}.png?origin=nw

Please add a clear indication of the source in your changesets if you use this data.

Missing Crosswalks – A MapRoulette Challenge

Take part of this MapRoulette Challenge which is about checking if there’s a pedestrian street crossing (crosswalk) or not. This verification goes on until it’s all done. MapRoulette is a kind of gamified website and a mapping campaign similar to MapZen’s targeted editing series.

image

Once integrated in OpenStreetMap (OSM), crosswalks are shown in web maps (e.g. OSM Cycle Map/OSM Radfahrerkarte/OpenCycleMap, OSM France and OSM2World). And they are useful for pedestrian navigation apps (like OsmAnd).

So help OpenStreetMap to improve this missing information!

image

Figure 1: Cycle map from OpenStreetMap main page showing pedestrian street crossings (crosswalks) as yellow dot markers.

A crosswalk node needs to be placed as part of a way. It requires the tag highway=crossing (search for “Crossing” e.g. in built-in online editor “iD”). For the capture of other attributes like the existence of islands or traffic signals see Key:crossing on OSM Wiki.

Important notes: When using editor “iD” the presets suggest tag crossing=zebra. This tag is mainly used in UK. Since this challenge is in Switzerland you can delete this tag. Finally: When saving, a changeset comment is needed. You can use there e.g. “Missing Crosswalks Challenge”.

image

Figure 2: A “Street Crossing” node shown in the online editor “iD” built-in OpenStreetMap main page.

The street crossings (crosswalks) in fact are coordinates our automated process found in aerial images by using a parallel image detection algorithm. This new software works mainly with yellow crossings of Switzerland on aerial images with certain quality at zoom level 18.

The coordinate data around eastern Switzerland has been extracted at December, 2nd. 2015. This covers about a tenth of the total area of Switzerland.

Contact us if you have questions or ideas around this hot topic.

Happy mapping!

This article was originally published on geometalab.