Weekly OSM Summary #14

March 20th, 2011 – March 31th, 2011
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world. We’re sorry that this issue is late and brief again, but we (especially Pascal) are caught up in organising the last bits for the upcoming FOSSGIS conference, the German OpenStreetMap conference.

  • “The city Saransk was mapped in only 50 hours. User osmisto has organized the first Russian online mapping party: it’s still cold outside, so almost everyone attended.” Here’s a video showing the progress – impressive!
  • China is imposing stricter roles against online map services (People’s Daily online). It’s unclear how OSM will be affected by this.
  • Recent improvements to the Mapnik style now make it render e.g. driveways and labels for florists.
  • Jochen Topf writes about new ways to make map renderers. He suggests to build smaller toolkits that can be combined; he already started a few experiments in code.
  • Martijn von Exel has made a tutorial for a self-updating local OSM extract.
  • Harry Wood created a bus map for London.
  • The future of areas?!
  • The OSM Inspector made by the Geofabrik has been moved to faster hardware. Also new is the multipolygon problem view.
  • Cyclestreets is celebrating their second birthday and take a look back at the last year in their blog.
  • OSM-3D made by the University of Heidelberg has been updated to include a virtual globe and is now covering most of Europe.
  • This wiki page is great resource to learn more about mapping buildings with aerial imagery.
  • ITO Map (mentioned before) is now available globally.
  • A new, second beta of Maps4Macs has been released. Improvements include a better search syntax, support for PBF files and live track display when recording a GPS track.
  • Show Your Journey (syj) is a website to share routes. The new version now supports the upload of complete routes (as GPX or KML).
  • Safety Maps – Make and share maps of safe places to meet in the event of an emergency.
  • Version 0.2 of the Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) has been released with lots of improvements.
  • A small python script to generate posters of Cloudmade map tiles.
  • Mapjumper is a Chrome extension to easily jump from one online map provider to another.”
  • Imposm is an importer for OpenStreetMap data. It reads XML and PBF files and can import the data into PostgreSQL/PostGIS databases.

Authors: Jonas, Pascal & Dennis
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