The 2014 Annual General Meeting of the Swiss OpenStreetMap Association which will take place on Saturday, April 5th 2014, 11am in the Restaurant Schützenhaus, Wynigenstrasse 13, Burgdorf
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You will find the full agenda here.
After the meeting there will be an informal lunch and a mapping party. If you already know that you will be attending, could you please indicate so for planning purposes by e-mail to info@sosm.ch
We hope to see many of you in Burgdorf.
At its last meeting the SOSM board decided to hold the upcoming annual general meeting on April the 5th 2014. Planned location for the meeting and associated mapping party is the region Burgdorf / Kirchberg in the canton Bern.
Unluckily the 5th collides with the 2nd day of SOTM-FR, however we had decided on this Saturday as one of the small number of free days left in the first half year before SOTM-FR was announced.
At the last SOSM board meeting we had a short discussion about membership levels and what kind of numbers that we should expect. The discussion led to two actions, on the one hand we decided that we would, as an experiment, mail all new contributors with a short welcome mail, and on the other hand it piqued my curiosity how many contributors we have historically had and what the current growth rates are (having the numbers handy tends to help when talking to the media too).
The last time I generated overall contributor numbers for Switzerland was a good two years ago and was then at over 6’000, the current number is just over 9’000. The value was generated from a full history extract of Switzerland from November 2013, further inspection of the extract shows that the oldest node in Switzerland was added on August the 15th, 2005. There may have been older anonymous contributions or contributions that were removed during the licence change, but this is the best date we have. This would indicate a growth rate of over 1’000 contributors per year, this number seems to be further supported by the 104 welcome mails we have sent to new mappers over the last 4 weeks.
Naturally Switzerland has a certain influx of non-domestic mappers, on the one hand due to neighbouring countries with strong OSM communities, on the other hand due to its popularity as a tourist destination. But as we know from a pure count point of view, larger, mobile mappers are a small minority and shouldn’t effect the above numbers significantly.
Just over a year ago I started running daily street name completeness checks for Switzerland based on a list of street names by municipality generated out of the federal “Gebäude und Wohnungsregister” (GWR), see my original article for more information and http://qa.poole.ch/ch-roads/ for the daily updates.
For technical reasons I decided to move the contents to a new server late December and during the process I’ve made a couple of updates and changes that need some explaining. On the one hand I’ve updated the GWR list to the December 2013 one on the other hand I’ve somewhat changed the logic of the road (contrary to other object types with names) statistic generation. One of the more annoying trends in the GWR list is that more and more municipalities are no longer correctly filing the object type in their submissions and are either using “unknown” or leaving the field empty (which I map to “none” in my statistics”), despite the large amount of building going on, the number has actually gone down in absolute terms by roughly 500 over the year 2013. This naturally makes the data substantially less useful for us, and I would go as far as saying it makes the data less useful for its primary purpose too.
However it is clearly not our job to discipline such behaviour, we just want as good as possible estimates of how many named streets there actually are. To achieve that I’ve now added some heuristics to take this undesirable behaviour in to account:
The GWR numbers reported are corrected correspondingly. As of today this reduced the object count for “unknown” by 8’374 and for no object type by 4’438, adding a total of 12’812 to the GWR road count. For continuity and documentation purposes the old statistics are still calculated daily and are still available.
More interesting than the above changes is how much progress we have made over the past year. In the following table non-road objects are summarised in one number.
| GWR 2012-06-01 | OSM 2012-11-01 | % | GWR 2013-12-01 | OSM 2013-12-27 | % | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Roads (old) | 104’150 | 62’258 | 60% | 103’606 | 74’969 | 72% |
| Roads (new) | 117’598 | 87’759 | 75% | |||
| Other (old) | 77’316 | 14’101 | 18% | 78’284 | 21’414 | 27% |
| Other (new) | 64’292 | 8’598 | 13% |
As can be seen from the above we managed to add 20’024 names in just over a year, confirming that we should have as good as possible coverage of street names latest in two years.
To conclude, and most impressive, a map from early 2013, and current versions using the old and new logic
We have added a daily generated OsmAnd map file to the data we are providing on planet.osm.ch Now you can benefit within 24 hours of navigation related changes that you make to OSM. We will naturally gladly support other navigation programs and devices if requested and within the limits of our resources.
Mid October 2012 I produced updated statistics on road lengths in OSM for Switzerland, a year later it is time for an update.
The statistics show an increase of a total of at least 23’000 km from 152’000 km a year ago to 175’000 km now. As already seen in the last update the length of all roads with higher classification does not show much movement, a clear indication that the major road network is very complete.
Growth is mainly due to the increase in minor roads, tracks and paths mapped, which in turn is likely to have been driven by improved coverage with aerial imagery in 2013.
| OSM classification | length (km) | length (km) | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| motorway | 1’508 | 50% of the length of one-way segments | 3’009 | one-way segments counted fully | ||||
| motorway_link | 343 | “ | 684 | “ | ||||
| trunk | 365 | “ | 515 | “ | ||||
| trunk_link | 54 | “ | 106 | “ | ||||
| motorway + trunk | 2’270 | 4’314 | ||||||
| primary | 4’973 | includes _link | ||||||
| secondary | 5’382 | “ | ||||||
| tertiary | 10’978 | “ | ||||||
| unclassified | 18’326 | “ | ||||||
| residential | 25’858 | |||||||
| service | 8’750 | service=alley and unspecified | ||||||
| driveway | 1’052 | service=driveway | ||||||
| parking aisle | 1’002 | service=parking_aisle | ||||||
| track | 16’313 | tracktype unspecified, neither foot or bicycle = designated | ||||||
| track grade 1 | 11’454 | neither foot or bicycle = designated | ||||||
| track grade 2 | 20’176 | “ | ||||||
| track grade 3 | 11’688 | “ | ||||||
| track grade 4 | 3’390 | “ | ||||||
| track grade 5 | 2’129 | “ | ||||||
| track total | 65’150 | |||||||
| path | 22’180 | neither foot or bicycle = designated | ||||||
| pedstrian | 365 | |||||||
| footway | 7’354 | plus path and track with foot=designated | ||||||
| cycleway | 1’196 | plus path and track with bicyle=designated | ||||||
| combined cycleway / footway | 578 | track, path, cycleway and footway either with explicit or implicit designated values for foot and bicycle | ||||||
| Total | 175’404 |
We have a new set of tiles in LV95 projection (aka. CH1903+ or EPSG:2056). It is the standard osm.ch style, rendered with mapnik in LV95. You can look at it on the test page http://www.osm.ch/chlv95.html. This is our first try, without having real applications for it yet. Feedback would be welcome. If you find this useful or if you find any issues, please leave a comment.
The tile server URL template is http://tile.osm.ch/2056/{z}/{x}/{y}.png
Switzerland in LV95 projection (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0)
Geonick told us in the comments that LV03 (the “old” one from 1903) is still widely used. For now tiles in both projections will be served. To keep the load low on the server, we would like to serve only one set of swiss projected tiles. So depending on usage and performance requirements we might shut down one set of tiles in the future. The test page for LV03 is at http://www.osm.ch/chlv03.html. The tile server URL template is http://tile.osm.ch/21781/{z}/{x}/{y}.png
I had a presentation at the FOSSGIS conference in Rapperswil about the data quality of OpenStreetMap in Switzerland (recording and presentation in German).
Some of the analysis was already posted to this blog previously (post about street names). But there is also a lot of new stuff in this presentation.
This map shows house numbers per person, so it shows where we already have lots of house numbers. For more details see the address layer of qa.poole.ch. As a reference value there is the address import of Denmark with a density of 0.4 addresses per person.
The railway network was completed in 2010 in OSM. Interestingly, the length continued to grow. By now, most of the network is mapped with track accuracy.
It is quite difficult to get reliable references for points of interest. One source I found is the “BFS Betriebszählung 2005”. It knows 23’077 restaurants and 4’683 hotels in Switzerland. OSM has about 10’000 restaurants and 2’500 hotels.
Hiking routes in OSM: 10’103km
Hiking routes according to wandern.ch 60’000km
Cycling routes in OSM: 7’957km
National routes are complete in OSM: 3’452km (officially on veloland.ch 3’242kmb)
Regional routes 4’581km (not yet complete)
Skating routes in OSM: 678km
National routes 460km (of 625km according to skatingland.ch)
Will the mapping activity stay the same, and will we have:
Thank you to Sarah Hoffmann and Simon Poole for their contributions to this analysis.
Just in time for FOSSGIS 2013 our technical team has launched osm.ch. Many thanks to MIPLAN AG for transferring the ownership of the domain to us. Osm.ch will be the home of all services provided by SOSM to assist mappers in Switzerland.
Screenshot of osm.ch
The following services are available on osm.ch
Please note that we don’t have the resources to guarantee any level of availability for the services above.
On Saturday SOSM had its first regular Annual General Meeting. To make it a bit more interesting we combined it with a mapping party in Moutier and surroundings, a slightly undermapped region in the Bernese part of the Jura. More on that later.
The highlight of the AGM was the election of three new members to the board replacing Stéphane Henriod who is extremely busy with HOT related activities and is most of the time in far away countries and Thomas Ineichen. A big thank you to both for the work they did in the first half year of SOSM.
The newly elected board members are
They join the incumbent boad members, Sarah Hoffmann and myself, that were duly reelected, as were the auditors Otto Wyss and Arthur Bonino.
The assembly passed a budget that includes funds for a leased server for SOSM services and we expect to announce what will be available in the immediate future.
Detailed minutes will be available in short while on this site.
Back to the fun stuff.
Half of Moutier has been mapped for quite some time, however aerial imagery for the 2nd part and for the villages in the same valley just became available early this year.
Prior to Saturday we did some armchair mapping resulting in this:
Screenshot from qa.poole.ch, red are mostly roads that were traced from imagery. As you can see a number of the villages didn’t actually have anything mapped. Nothing to feel all too bad about:
The picture shows what commercial navigation data was for the village Belprahon roughly in the year 2000, everybody starts small as you see. With the data gathered on Saturday the valley looks like this
Most of the remaining red is due to roads not being signposted or not having names in the first place, not to forget that the house numbers seemed to be really small on average making them extremely difficult to read. The result is not perfect, but a lot better than before and the village of Belprahon now looks like this in OSM
Again thanks to everybody that participated!