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Author Archives: Michael
Mapper podcast
The newest episode of the geomob podcast features a quite active Swiss mapper, Simon, who happens to be the the current president of the Swiss OpenStreetMap association. Tune in to hear about his motivation for the project, and his perspective on the OpenStreetMap community and its future.
Defikarte: A map for life
We’ve spoken to Christian Nüssli, the creator of defikarte.ch. You can read the German version here: Defikarte: Eine Karte fürs Leben.
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.
Updates to overpass-turbo and routing
overpass-turbo is an easy to use data mining tool for OpenStreetMap. To reflect the continued improvement of the tool, we have updated this software on the SOSM servers to the latest version. Thanks to Martin Raifer who is the developer of this tool.
routing.osm.ch also got an improvement: Now the link to the debug map works correctly and shows the routing speeds and turn weights used by the currently selected profile.
To access the debug map, click on this icon in the lower left corner: 
DINAcon
server outage
We had a server outage from Saturday evening June 24th until Monday afternoon June 26th. The main reason was that three disks had failed in the production server and had to be replaced. Fortunately, we had enough spare disks. Sorry for any inconveniences this outage has caused. Everything should be back to normal now.
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.
OSM Werbung in Wangen an der Aare
Das ist doch eher selten: Im Moment hängt in Wangen an der Aare ein Plakat, das für OpenStreetMap wirbt. Dies haben wir Roman Härdi und Markus Bubendorf zu verdanken, welche mit Erlaubnis der Chäsi Wangen das Banner am Baugerüst angebracht haben für die Dauer des Umbaus.
Das Banner hatte Roman Härdi drucken lassen nach diesem Design. Es war zuvor auch schon mal am GEOSummit zu sehen.
update to umap 0.8
A new version of umap was released a few weeks ago and we have updated our instance at umap.osm.ch to the newest version. New features include:
- Support for multi polygons
- A new search interface, returning a list of found places instead of going to the most likely one.
- Extended editing: For example polygons can now be converted to lines, or lines can be split into several parts.
- A history of saved states exists, allowing to go back to a previously saved point.
- The map can now be exported with all its properties and be restored on another instance for example.
- And many other things have been improved.
Thank you to Yohan Boniface, who is the main developer, for providing us with such a nice tool.