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.”
Our new umap service made quite a good start. We had quite positive feedback from several people. But there was also a problem reported by Adfinis SyGroup: They added a map to their home page using umap. Now when the homepage is was with SSL the browser denied the embedding of umap which was without SSL (known as mixed content blocking). And not only did they make us aware of the problem, they even offered to pay for the necessary SSL certificate. Thank you for sponsoring the certificate!
We now support SSL on our sites, for example https://umap.osm.ch.
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
This is the start of a likely infrequent and irregular series of posts on stuff that I found out using uMap.
One of the more annoying things about uMap is that there is no obvious way to hide the edit pencil on a full screen map. While only users that you have allowed can actually change your map configuration, it just isn’t good design to have a control element that just frustrates your users.
The solution: add “allowEdit=0” to the URL as for example below:
http://umap.osm.ch/en/map/hundekot-tuten-spender_2?allowEdit=0#9/46.9709/8.3318
You can now use 5 additional tile layers on umap.osm.ch
If there are specific further layers that you would like to have available, please to not hesitate to ask.