Category Archives: Announcements

SOTM day three: Simon Poole elected to the OSMF board

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The topic of the third and last day of SOTM was the community. For example, Peter Miller presented his very numerous speciality maps, or Bob Barr had a heart-warming talk on weather open street mappers are rather pirates or pilots. There was also a presentation on OpenStreetMap addiction and how to diagnose and treat it. I personally enjoyed Kinya Inoue’s presentation very much. He talked about his mapping of historical places in Japan (and how that suddenly brought him in a quite dangerous situation).

During lunch time, there was the annual general meeting of the OSMF, the worldwide OSM organisation. During this meeting, the OSMF board was elected, and we congratulate Simon Poole, the current president of SOSM, to his election as an OSMF board member, together with Henk Hoff and Frederik Ramm.

View from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building

And now it’s time for me to travel some more around Japan. Tokyo is huge (see picture, view from the metropolitan government building) but there are also other places to visit apart from the capital.

SOTM 2012: ODbL planet announced

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Tokyo by night

Near studio Alta in Shinjuku

Right now the State of the Map 2012 is taking place in Tokyo. This is an impressive city, and sometimes you feel like you jumped right into the (very crowded) future. The first day of SOTM was mostly about humanitarian and crisis mapping. (There were also some talks in Japanese, though I can’t judge those.) Today, there are more technical talks.

The most important announcement for all mappers was at the opening of the conference from Michael Collinson: The next planet will be ODbL licensed. So the redaction period is finally completed!

Experimental MapProxy Service

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We have a number of sources of aerial imagery available in Switzerland that are accessible by so called WMS servers. JOSM supports such servers directly, but P2 (the editor imbedded ob the OSM map page) users and users of a number of mobile apps cannot access such data.

Additionaly in some cases the imagery is not available in the “Spherical Mercator”  projection that most OSM tools use as default.

We now have, on a test and experimental base, a MapProxy instance running that supports reading imagery from WMS servers and serving this as Google/OSM format tiles, reprojected if necessary.

Up to now we have added 2 layers:

We will consider further layers, we would however point out that in the current environment the capacity of the server is limited.

City of Uster makes Aerial Imagery and Street Data available for OSM

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The City of Uster GIS centre has made aerial imagery and street data available for use in OpenStreetMap. The imagery was captured in 2008 and has 10cm nominal resolution. Access to the data is provided via the cities WMS server.

We thank Mr Neumann from the GIS centre for the cooperation and Michael Spreng for establishing contact..

The imagery can be accessed either via the City of Uster WMS or via the experimental SOSM mapproxy server. More information can be found in the Wiki.