I found this interesting article (in French) from a famous online newspaper (lemonde.fr) about a high mountains range, called “Tumuc-Humac”, which was supposed to be found between south of the French Guiana and north of Brazil. The article explains that the high mountains do not exist. It’s a myth, beginning in 1758 when a Spanish expedition mentionned a mountain called “Tumunucuraque” for the first time… in the today’s Venezuela ! But any way, many other expedition went to this region, between French Guiana and Brazil, searching the high mountains, unknown by the local tribes, but possibly to find the famous Eldorado city. This region was a blank map for a long time, being difficult to access (no navigable rivers). At the end of the 19th c., two French explorers separatly validated the mountains range but we know today that their reports were over-exaggerating the high mountains which are in reality only small hills or “inselbergs” (or “monadnock”) (btw, one of the explorer was killed by a local tribe, so the mapping party wasn’t easy anyway). But the myth of the “Tumuc-Humac” mountains has continued and the name of the mountains range can be found in many maps. And today, Brazil has named a national park “Tumucumaque”. But in the last half century, historians and geographers shattered the myth of a high mountains range and their discovery story.
And what about OSM ? When we search the name “Tumuc-Humac”, we find one street in the French Guiana capital. No mountains between French Guiana and Brazil in OSM. Not a surprise since the area is almost blank, the region is still very wild and difficult to access, a funny location for a mapping party.
But OSM “search” returns also geonames with one “Tumuc-Humac Mountains” ! Surprisingly, wikipedia provides an article about the Tumuk Humak Mountains but doesn’t say anything about the story and the myth about the high mountains range :

… See full entry

After reading this blog post: https://blog.amigocloud.com/sub-meter-data-collection-with-an-iphone-into-openstreetmap/

I checked one of the created ways done after a survey with centimeter accuracy: osm.org/way/329799637

Unsurprisingly, all surveyed nodes have been imported in OSM. But OSM doesn’t need a node every 30 centimeters, even not every meter if the angle is null.

Someone to contact Ragi Burhum, AmigoCloud CEO, to explain that JOSM is also providing a “simplify way” function ?

Very funny this conversation on twitter:

https://twitter.com/reizkultur/status/565147019023753216

OrdnanceSurvey, like the IGN in France, despises OSM amateur cartographs but is calling for amateur (and free) photographers to illustrate their new printed maps … “Do what we say, not what we do”

Here an interesting blog post from Jordi Inglada/CESBIO about the incoming imagery from the ESA/EU-Copernicus satellites Sentinel-2 (or here) which will be published with an open license compatible for OSM tracing. The program is designated for global land-cover mapping (4 bands at 10 m resolution).
Our challenge will be to retrieve this data in a usable form for us (e.g. georeferenced, rectified and cloudless, TMS served). Also Jordi Inglada says one word about open source softwares from CNES which could be used to convert pixels into landuse polygons.
As quoted from his blog: “This means that we have free data and free tools. Therefore, the complete pipeline is available for projects like OSM. OSM contributors could start right now getting familiar with these data and these tools.”

(from Sébastien Dinot talk-fr ML post)

Express your opinion about the relation “type=person” here: osm.wiki/Proposed_features/Relation:person#Voting
This is also questioning the limits of the project (what has to go into OSM and what not)

Je viens de tomber sur un article du journaldunet.com qui mentionne OSM (et même wikipedia) dans une liste de projets de type crowd-sourcing (collaboratifs de masse) suivi d’une dénonciation des supposées dérives qu’ils engendrent.

Il y aurait “un vent de révolte” parmi les contributeurs qui se plaignent de voir leur travail bénévol récupéré par des entreprises commerciales. Les exemples cités comme imdb ou Oculus tapent juste et justifient l’article (il aurait pu aussi mentionner CDDB comme ancêtre de ce genre d’arnaque).

Mais il ne faut pas mettre tous les projets collaboratifs dans le même sac ! Lorsque cette personne écrit “Même de manière indirecte, les contributions sont systématiquement récupérées puis monétisées au seul profit des plate-formes.”, ça n’est pas possible avec OSM pour une raison très simple : la license OdBL ne permet pas sa transformation en license fermée (avec appropriation des données), les contributions appartiennent toujours à leurs auteurs et la clause “SA” ou “Share Alike” (“partage à l’identique” en bon français) empêche qu’une entreprise privée s’empare des données OSM et les améliore pour son seul profit (pour être plus exact, ils ne sont pas obligés de verser leurs améliorations dans OSM directement mais de mettre ces améliorations à disposition du public sous la même license - à charge ensuite à quiconque de les reverser dans OSM s’il le souhaite). C’est aussi grâce à cette clause que les usages commerciaux d’OSM ne sont jamais une menace pour les contributeurs puisque n’importe qui peut refaire la même chose avec un modèle ouvert et gratuit.

… See full entry