Building Addresses Canton Berne

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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

  • usage
  • house
  • street/place

josm-bern2

 

To reduce clutter I’ve shortened some of the usage strings:

  • Wohnhaus – WH
  • Bauernhaus – BH
  • Garage – G
  • Scheune – S
  • Gebäude – B

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.

Kartendruck am GEOSummit 2016 in Bern

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Am 8. und 9. Juni findet in Bern wieder die Messe GEOSummit statt. OpenStreetMap ist zwar nicht mit einem eigenen Stand vertreten, aber wir machen dieses Jahr wieder die Aktion, dass wir am GEOSummit wieder Karten aus OSM Daten rendern. Diese werden freundlicherweise von Canon (Schweiz) vor Ort gedruckt. Hier der Bereich, den wir an der Messe anbieten können:

extent-small

Dieser Ausschnitt ist verfügbar zum Karten rendern am GEOSummit. Der hier gezeigte Stil ist OpenTopoMap.

Wir haben den OSM Standard, Swiss Style und auch OpenTopoMap Kartenstile im Angebot.

Wer nun eine schöne, A1 grosse, gedruckte OSM Karte haben möchte, soll doch am GEOSummit beim Stand A05 vorbeikommeOSM_flyer_CH2016rh-frontn. Da der GEOSummit Eintritt kostet, haben wir auch gratis Tickets abzugeben. Wer also eine gedruckte Karte möchte, und dafür ein Ticket benötigt, melde sich bitte bei uns. Der GEOSummit findet in der Bernexpo (Karte) statt.

Weiter werden am GEOSummit auch die druckfrischen A7 OSM-Flyer verteilt.

Aktive Mapper können gerne ein paar holen kommen.

Report from the SOSM AGM and Mapping Party in St. Gallen

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Achavi view of objects that were modified or created during the mapping party

Objects that were modified or created during the mapping party

Last Saturday, the yearly SOSM AGM and subsequent mapping party took place in St. Gallen. We elected Raphael as our new treasurer during the AGM, since Pascal stepped down from this position and whom we would like to thank again for his work. Philipp was elected as a new revisor to replace Raphael, and Roman as an additional assessor to the board, where he will mainly take care of doing more marketing. Apart from that, there were no further changes regarding the board or revisors. After the OSMF had accepted our application in the beginning of this year, we unanimously decided to sign the local chapters agreement. We will thus soon be in a regulated relationship with the global OSMF.

After a fine lunch, we split up the old town of St. Gallen between us and set out to collect addresses and POIs, and also to update existing data. Along the way, we were also able to enjoy the nice and springlike weather. Some of us met again in the late afternoon to digitise and further improve the collected data, and to talk about experiences and tips related to OpenStreetMap. A remaining, in the meantime rather small group finally went for a cosy dinner in a nearby restaurant to finish the day.

According to a rough estimation based on the Overpass-API, 58 objects have been deleted, 615 were modified and 716 newly added during the mapping party. However, at least Simon had added several buildings before the mapping party already, which are not part of these statistics.

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

Missing Crosswalks – A MapRoulette Challenge

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Take part of this MapRoulette Challenge which is about checking if there’s a pedestrian street crossing (crosswalk) or not. This verification goes on until it’s all done. MapRoulette is a kind of gamified website and a mapping campaign similar to MapZen’s targeted editing series.

image

Once integrated in OpenStreetMap (OSM), crosswalks are shown in web maps (e.g. OSM Cycle Map/OSM Radfahrerkarte/OpenCycleMap, OSM France and OSM2World). And they are useful for pedestrian navigation apps (like OsmAnd).

So help OpenStreetMap to improve this missing information!

image

Figure 1: Cycle map from OpenStreetMap main page showing pedestrian street crossings (crosswalks) as yellow dot markers.

A crosswalk node needs to be placed as part of a way. It requires the tag highway=crossing (search for “Crossing” e.g. in built-in online editor “iD”). For the capture of other attributes like the existence of islands or traffic signals see Key:crossing on OSM Wiki.

Important notes: When using editor “iD” the presets suggest tag crossing=zebra. This tag is mainly used in UK. Since this challenge is in Switzerland you can delete this tag. Finally: When saving, a changeset comment is needed. You can use there e.g. “Missing Crosswalks Challenge”.

image

Figure 2: A “Street Crossing” node shown in the online editor “iD” built-in OpenStreetMap main page.

The street crossings (crosswalks) in fact are coordinates our automated process found in aerial images by using a parallel image detection algorithm. This new software works mainly with yellow crossings of Switzerland on aerial images with certain quality at zoom level 18.

The coordinate data around eastern Switzerland has been extracted at December, 2nd. 2015. This covers about a tenth of the total area of Switzerland.

Contact us if you have questions or ideas around this hot topic.

Happy mapping!

This article was originally published on geometalab.

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!

SOSM 2015 Annual General Meeting

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Agenda for the 2015 Swiss OpenStreetMap Association Annual General Meeting

Saturday, April 18th 2014, 11am,Lago Lodge, Uferweg 5, CH-2560 Nidau

  1. Opening and Welcome
  2. Election of the minute taker and vote counters
  3. Adoption of minutes of the 2014 AGM
  4. Activity report 2014
  5. Financial results 2014 –
    • Presentation by the treasurer
    • Auditors report
  6. Membership fees 2015
  7. Budget 2015
  8. Elections
    • Board (candidates for all positions are welcome.)
    • Auditors (note Otto Wyss will no longer be available)
  9. Trade registry registration
  10. Application for OSMF Local Chapter Status
  11. Any other business