OpenSchoolMaps.ch – Promotion of open maps in the classroom

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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”.

Map on osm.ch now includes contour lines

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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.

SOSM Annual General Meeting April 7th 2018 Solothurn

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The 2018 AGM will take place in Solothurn on April the 7th, 11:00. The venue is at the

Amt für Geoinformation
Rötistrasse 4
4501 Solothurn

Many thanks to SOGIS for supporting us

The event will follow our proven formula with a roughly one hour formal part starting at 11:00, with lunch following and a fairly unstructured mapping party as the activity in the afternoon from 13:30 onwards.

Guests, including such that simply want to learn something about OpenStreetMap, are welcome to both parts. Could however both members and guests indicate to info@sosm.ch if they plan to attend, particularly for lunch, so that we can inform the restaurant how many guests they can expect.

Agenda for the 2018 Swiss OpenStreetMap Association Annual General Meeting

Saturday, April 7th 2018, 11:00,

Amt für Geoinformation, Rötistrasse 4, 4501 Solothurn

1. Opening and Welcome

2. Election of the minute taker and vote counters

3. Adoption of minutes of the 2017 AGM

4. Activity report 2017

5. Financial results 2017

– Presentation by the treasurer
– Auditors report

6. Discharge of the Board

7. Membership fees 2018

8. Budget 2018

9. Elections

– Board
Candidates for all positions are welcome.

– Auditors

10. Any other business

Planned Power Outages 16th of January and 6th of Feburary

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There are two planned power outages:

  • 16th of January, 04:30 – 08:30 AM CET
  • 6th of February, 04:30 – 08:30 AM CET

Due to construction work in the building where the SOSM servers are located. All SOSM services are unavailable during that time:

  • sosm.ch and osm.ch websites
  • Swiss overpass and overpass-turbo instances
  • Swiss routing services
  • Swiss umap instance
  • DIDOK comparison map

DINAcon Awards – Open Source Hero

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On Friday October 20th, a delegation of three members of the Swiss OpenStreetMap Association had the pleasure to receive the DINAcon Open Source Hero Award for OpenStreetMap long term contributors.

Picture of the DINAcon 2017 Open Source Hero Award für OpenStreetMap Langzeit-Mitwirkende. A glass block with the inscription DINAcon 2017 Awards 2017. OpenStreetMap Longterm Contributors

DINAcon 2017 Open Source Hero Award for OpenStreetMap Longterm Contributors.
Picture: Simon Poole

In its laudation, the jury acknowledged that the work on OSM is a continuous process and a lot of manual work, and that a lot of persistence was needed to get the project to the state it is today. This award was accepted in the name of the whole Swiss OSM community and the OSM community world wide.

Updates to overpass-turbo and routing

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 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: rectangle with magnifying glass

server outage

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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.

Metanet donates hard disks to SOSM

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Some of the SAS (this is a fast computer interface similar to SATA) disks we received together with the servers that we run osm.ch and related services on, have failed due to old age, and while we originally had an ample supply of spares now we’ve now run out.

Unfortunately, these disks are rather expensive to purchase new, if not to say uneconomic. Luckily Metanet has now helped us out by donating eight 2nd hand disks from their stock. This will allow us to defer a complete replacement for at least 1 to 2 years and make an unhurried decision on what to buy.

A big thank you to Metanet for supporting the Swiss OpenStreetMap Association.