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!
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.
On Friday we drove 870 km to Haarlem in the vicinity of Amsterdam to pick up three servers. Wikimedia has decommissioned their two year old toolservers and donated the hardware to SOSM. Thanks to Wikimedia Germany and Wikimedia Switzerland for making this possible.
This will enable us to run our services on our own hardware in Switzerland. Support the move by contributing to the SOSM donation drive 2015.
Dear friends of OpenStreetMap and SOSM
As you may know, SOSM provides a range of services for the Swiss OpenStreetMap community. Currently this is financed for a major part out of our regular membership fees, this however limits some aspects of our operations quite considerably. All services are currently run on a single, small leased server in Germany.
In 2015 we would like to
While we have the prospect of a number of in-kind donations to support the above, more on that soon, there is still the need for additional funds to cover cash outlays. Example: while we have a computer hardware donation arranged, the hardware will have to be imported and VAT on its value paid, just this single item would be substantially outside of SOSMs current annual budget.
To support the plans for this year SOSM board has therefore decided to explicitly ask for donations to SOSM in 2015 with the goal of collecting at least CHF 5000 over the course of the year.
Donations can made to
Postfinance account
85-53542-9
IBAN CH54 0900 0000 8505 3542 9
Swiss OpenStreetMap Association
Heitersbergstrasse 1
8962 Bergdietikon
Switzerland
Please note 2015 DONATION DRIVE on the payment. By default we will be publishing the names of all donors, if you don’t want to be mentioned, please add that either to you payment information or send mail to info@sosm.ch.
SOSM will be holding its 2015 AGM in Bienne/Biel, 11:00 at the Lago Lodge . We intend to follow the same format as previous years: short formal part, lunch and then some mapping. Agenda and venue will be announced by mid March.
Non-SOSM members are welcome, if you want to attend the meeting and/or lunch please send mail to info@sosm.ch since space is likely to be limited.
We’ve updated the imagery available via the SOSM mapproxy service to include more recent imagery for Solothurn and the recently releast imagery for the city of Berne. The imagery for the canton Solothurn is a mosaic of imagery between 2011 and 2014 provided by the cantonal GIS office SOGIS, replacing the old 2007 and 2011 orthophotos.
Together with the new AGIS imagery, the above has been added to the central OSM imagery index and should be available in iD, P2 and vespucci soon.
If you can’t wait, the imagery is available via the following pseudo URLs:
Berne:
http://mapproxy.osm.ch:8080/tiles/bern2012/EPSG900913/{zoom}/{x}/{y}.png?origin=nw
Solothurn:
http://mapproxy.osm.ch:8080/tiles/sogis2014/EPSG900913/{zoom}/{x}/{y}.png?origin=nw
As already indicated on the Swiss OSM mailing list SOSM has obtained the most recent imagery from the cantonal GIS office of the canton Aargau (AGIS). The imagery was recorded in July 2014 which on the one hand makes it very current, on the other implies that there is more foliage visible than on the 2011 imagery.
The imagery is available with the following pseudo URL for entry in OSM editors
http://mapproxy.osm.ch:8080/tiles/AGIS2014/EPSG900913/{z}/{x}/{y}.png?origin=nw
I’ll be adding the configuration to the central imagery repositories as soon as possible.
The tiles from this imagery were produced slightly differently than the previous ones with not quite satisfactory results from a visual point of view. It is possible that I might rerun the tiling later once we have some feedback.
SOSM will be running a donation drive soon to cover the costs of the imagery and a build out of our services, however please feel free to donate now (account details, please indicate if mentioning your name is allowed), your support if very much appreciated.
A thank you to the Hochschule Rapperswil and Stefan Keller for helping us with actually uploading the 190GB of data to the SOSM server.
There was a mapping workshop on 1st of November at BERNMOBIL, to map local Tram and Bus lines. This information should in the Future visualize the routes for passengers. We are of course happy that BERNMOBIL has decided to use OSM for this task. There was a good collaboration between experienced OSM mappers and the employees of the public transport company, who new the lines and stops very well.
Here an article in German from Fabio Walti, who organised this day: To the blog article (German)
As a thank you BERNMOBIL provided a very good lunch an refreshments, as well as a tour through the company and a towel to take home. Thank you very much for the good collaboration.
It’s Sunday morning* and the third day of the State of the Map conference is about to begin here in Buenos Aires, AR—fashionably late, just like the past two days. Today, the breakfast, too, was considerably delayed. Though, I still find it notable, that not only lunch, but also snacks in the coffee breaks and breakfast are included with the conference attendance.
The conference wifi only became available around noon yesterday, as the technical guy the organizers had hired to set it up hadn’t shown up.
Also yesterday, the city deputy of Buenos Aires came by and held a short talk. She told about her dislike of maps back in school, how in her political duty she realized the importance of maps for a democratic society and learned to appreciate and like maps. She also told about her thirteen year old son who is mapping electoral districts after he was disappointed they’re not in the (paper) atlas he got.
*Posting this in the afternoon, as Wifi was overloaded this morning.
I skipped on the pre-event on Thursday night, because I was still too jet-lagged that evening and went to sleep early. So someone else will have to report on that.
Friday night, after the first day of the conference, we met an online acquaintance of mine who by chance is also currently spending time with his family in Buenos Aires and joined the SotM crowd in the Post Street Bar. Three of us left there early, so my acquaintance could take us to La Americana, a fast food restaurant serving empanadas, baked or fried bread-dough dumplings, with a variety of delicious fillings, often with ground beef, but also vegetarian ones. Afterwards we went to a café to have some drinks. While the others chose tea with lemon, I had a ‘submarine’: Hot mild in which one dissolves a dark chocolate bar to get something resembling hot chocolate. We made our way back to the hotels around 0:30, the time the Niceto club would have opened that was announced as the place-to-be for after the Post Street Bar.
Yesterday (Saturday) us German-speaking attendants and speakers decided to get some of the famous Argentinian steaks for dinner. The locals were about to lead some other SotM participants to a bar and we tagged along, as they promised to show us a fine restaurant on the way to there. Arriving there, all that were with us ended up in the same café, and even more arrived as the location had been tweeted as the official SotM dinner meeting place of the evening. The locals ordered us a variety of regional starters, and several rounds of that, so we ended up full without having had steak.
Tonight (Sunday), though, it will be steak, we decided: “Not negotiable.”