One of the differences between Switzerland and other countries during the pandemic is that hotels have been permitted to stay open. Not all have done so, but there are around 400 that have kept their doors open.
“Bleibtoffen” now has support for displaying both open and closed hotels, and if your establishment is open, or you know of one that is open, please update this information on bleibtoffen.ch.
SOSM’s Annual General Meeting 2020 will take place on May 16, 2020. Place is yet to be defined and suggestions regarding that are welcome.
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.
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.
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 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”.
We are now offering a download of pre rendered tiles up to zoom level 17 on https://tile.osm.ch/tiles.html. The tiles are split up into the cantons as the whole of Switzerland is quite a large amount of Data.
You can download them to either host them yourself, or use them in an offline application.
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.
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.
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.
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.