Category Archives: Uncategorized

SOSM is now an OSMF Local Chapter

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When we founded SOSM in June 2012 one of the topics was if we should aspire to becoming a formal local chapter of the OSMF. At the time it wasn’t urgent since the OSMF hadn’t actually finalised a template agreement or actually accepted a local chapter, it took nearly another 3 years for the first chapter to be admitted (Iceland early in 2015).

In 2012 and every time we had discussed the matter at an AGM the SOSM board had made clear that we would hold a members vote when the time was ripe and that took place at our AGM in April of this year. Still even with the approval of our members it has taken us another 5 months to actually get the agreement signed at the global State of the Map conference last week.

img_1284

We don’t expect any drastic change with this step, however given that so much of our work deals with government offices, political and other advocacy groups, having “official” status cannot hurt. The other part of the equation is that the agreement gives us a formal licence to use OpenStreetMap and other related trademarks in Switzerland.

Looking forward we expect to see more collaboration with other local chapters going forward and expect them to grow in importance as stakeholders in the project.

https certificate now provided by Let’s Encrypt

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Since almost two years we offer encrypted access to our services. Back then we bought a certificate for two years, which will soon run out. But fortunately, since this year, there is Let’s Encrypt which provides certificates for free. I’m happy to announce that we have successfully switched and are now able to provide encrypted, secure access without additional costs to the association (except the few days of time spent setting it up).

Mapping Party St. Gallen April 2nd 2016

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View of St. Gallen

After the SOSM AGM we will have our traditional post-AGM mapping party. This time we will concentrate on improving the mapping of St. Gallen the 8th largest city in Switzerland.

As always everybody is invited to come, including joining us for lunch at 12:00 at the Hotel Am Spisertor, Moosbruggstrasse 1, 9000 St. Gallen.

If you intend to join us for lunch please send us a short note at info@sosm.ch

SOSM 2016 Annual General Meeting

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Agenda for the 2016 Swiss OpenStreetMap Association Annual General Meeting

Agenda der Generalversammlung der Swiss OpenStreetMap Association 2016

Saturday, April 2nd 2016, 11:00,

Samstag, den 2. April 2016, 11:00,

Hotel Am Spisertor, Moosbruggstrasse 1, 9000 St. Gallen

  1. Opening and Welcome / Eröffnung und Begrüssung
  2. Election of the minute taker and vote counters / Wahl des Protokollführers & der Stimmenzähler
  3. Adoption of minutes of the 2015 AGM / Annahme des Protokolls der GV 2015
  4. Activity report 2015 / Tätigkeitsbericht 2015
  5. Financial results 2015 / Jahresrechnung 2016
    •  Auditors report / Bericht der Kassen
    • Presentation by the treasurer / Bericht des Kassiersprüfer
  6. Membership fees 2016 / Mitgliederbeiträge 2016
  7. Budget 2016
  8. Elections / Wahlen
    • Board / Vorstand
      • Candidates for all positions are welcome. Pascal Mages will be stepping down as treasurer and will have to be replaced.
      • Kandidaten für alle Positionen sind willkommen. Pascal Mages tritt als Kassier zurück und muss ersetzt werden.
    • Auditors / Kassenprüfer
  9. Vote on the OSMF Local Chapter agreement / Abstimmung über den OSMF Local Chapter Vertrag
  10. Any other business / Varia

Translating osm.ch

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new_osmch

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!

Just 20’000 left to go …

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Two years and a couple of months back I started running daily street name completeness checks for Switzerland. See my original article for more information, information on the changes for 2014 (this article points out some of the quality issues with the GWR) and http://qa.poole.ch/ch-roads/ for the daily updates.

On the 12th of March we passed the 100’000 street name mark implying that in 27 months we have added nearly 40’000 names that were previously missing or unverified, leaving roughly 20’000 to go.

GWR 2014-12-01* OSM 2012-11-01 OSM 2013-12-27 OSM 2015-03-12 %
Roads 121’041 62’258 87’759 100’012 83%
Other 63’673 14’101 8’598 12’465 20%

* the GWR values are corrected for the issues discussed in the December 2013 blog post and are not the raw numbers. This is the reason for the decrease in numbers of non-road objects.

Naturally I do not expect to reach the 100% mark any time soon. There is quite a high number of municipalities that do not sign post their roads, making independent verification very difficult to impossible (this is not the same as not having street names in the first place which is not a problem) and naturally these places don’t tend to be where hot spots of OSM contributors are. On the other hand there is still a lot of very low hanging fruit which simply needs verification. Low hanging in this case means that the roads in question can already be found in OSM, but there are simply spelling differences that we need to investigate (see the original article on how to handle differences between the GWR and reality).

Please don’t forget the 2015 SOSM Donation Drive to enable us to continue to operate this and other services.

 

March 2015

December 2013

January 2013

 

High Resolution Aerial Imagery from the City of Zürich

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zh-luftbild-beispiel

A couple of weeks back the city of Zürich expanded the available layers on its public WMS server to include areal imagery of the city from multiple years. Of particular interest to us is the 2011 data which is clearly superior to what has been available up to now and is a lot better georeferenced. This will allow us to address some of the issues we have in central Zürich and is a huge leap forward from the Bing/Yahoo imagery we’ve had until now.

We hope that this sets yet another example for other Swiss cities and cantons, to open up their WMS servers. SOSM will continue to negotiate with other cantons and cities (see http://sosm.ch/projects/cantonal-aerial-imagery/ for progress).

Many thanks to the GIS office of Zürich!

Using the imagery in your editor

For JOSM users the WMS server can be queried with

http://www.gis.stadt-zuerich.ch/maps/services/wms/WMS-ZH-STZH-OGD/MapServer/WMSServer

For P2 and iD users we have added the layer to our mapproxy configuration and it can be accessed (with placeholders) with:

P2: http://mapproxy.sosm.ch:8080/tiles/zh_luftbild2011/EPSG900913/$z/$x/$y.png?origin=nw

iD: http://mapproxy.sosm.ch:8080/tiles/zh_luftbild2011/EPSG900913/{z}/{x}/{y}.png?origin=nw

 

uMap Instance for Switzerland

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It has been a long time in the making, but at last, we are happy to announce that a SOSM hosted uMap instance is available: umap.osm.ch .

uMap allows you to create hosted map configurations that contain base maps, data sources and manual annotations.

An example of what can be done with very little effort: the “Swiss style” map with car sharing locations queried from the Overpass API.


See full screen

While the data displayed in the example is static, the same can be done with a direct query of the OverPass API or similar sources. Data that is limited to Switzerland can be retrieved from the SOSM Overpass service, and to make that a bit easier we now have a local Overpass Turbo instance.

To create your own map on umap.osm.ch you simply need an account on www.openstreetmap.org and allow umap.osm.ch access to it.

A special thank you to Sarah for setting up the system for us and to Yohan Boniface for developing uMap.