As already mentioned at last year’s AGM, we got a new server, and we have now taken this server into operation. Thank you to Init7 for sponsoring the hosting of this server.
The new server enables us to now render OSM data worldwide.
At the annual general meeting end of March we presented our yearly activity report. Some of those activities were already reported in this blog:
Keen visitors may have noticed, we’ve re-launched our osm.ch site. Thanks to Flavio and Claudia and Michael for making the website more modern and professional looking. Comments on the new site are always welcome. Either here in the comments, as a mail to us, or by opening an issue on github or even a pull-request.
With a new logo designed by Roman, we finally came around to produce stickers. We distributed one sticker to each member with the invitation to our annual general meeting. In case you would like to get some stickers, just ask. We will gladly send you a couple of them.
There are two planned power outages:
Due to construction work in the building where the SOSM servers are located. All SOSM services are unavailable during that time:
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: 
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.
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:
Thank you to Yohan Boniface, who is the main developer, for providing us with such a nice tool.
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
To reduce clutter I’ve shortened some of the usage strings:
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.
The designers and operators of OpenTopoMap have been kind enough to allow us to include it as a background layer in umap.osm.ch Please note that the maximum zoom level for this layer is limited to 16.
Thanks to efforts of Michael (datendelphin) the move of the SOSM
provided services to the new SOSM servers in Bern is nearly complete.
See http://sosm.ch/wikimedia-donates-old-toolservers-to-sosm/ and
http://sosm.ch/adfinis-offers-hosting-location/
As part of the move I’ve updated the osm.ch portal a bit and added the
ability to pull translations from transifex. Up to now the portal was
only in German, I’ve added an English version leaving French, Italian
and Romansh to do.
The transifex project can be found here
https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/osmch/
Given that there are currently only 43 strings, I fully expect that we
will have the missing three languages covered tomorrow :-).
On a more serious note we are always looking for people that can help
with the translation of content on sosm.ch which is currently
predominantly German and English. If you want to help send us a mail to
board@sosm.ch
Update: translations for all aditional languages were done by Friday the 24th of April!
Our current server is a rented root server located in Germany, because comparable offers in Switzerland are a lot more expensive.
Adfinis is now hosting our new servers at their center in Bern. A big thank you to Adfinis for making it possible to run our services in Switzerland!
