My experience at State of the Map 2019 started long before the conference itself. As promised in my post after State of the Map 2018 in Milan, I decided to get involved in the OSMF State of the Map Organizing Committee, with the main task to re-propose an Academic Track after the success of the 2018 edition.

This has meant embarking in an exciting but challenging journey started at the end of 2018, where I had again - after Milan’s experience - the pleasure to work with the other members of the Organizing Committee (Christine, Michael, Gregory and Mikel) as well as with the great Local Team from Heidelberg lead by Martin. And, above all, this has meant working with the other members of the Academic Track Scientific Committee: Yair, Peter, Levente and Godwin. We were able to attract a lot of submissions, to edit the publication of the SotM 2019 conference proceedings, to put together a high-quality academic program and to run it successfully in Heidelberg. Thanks again guys, and thanks to all the authors who made the program great with their talks and posters!

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One year ago, the memorable experience of my first State of the Map conference in beautiful Japan ended with me being up on stage and announcing that the next edition of SotM would have been in Milan, hosted and co-organized by my university, Politecnico di Milano!

Coming to State of the Map 2018 in Milan has been a long and thrilling journey. First, I’m proud to say that I kept all the promises made one year ago: to become an even more active OSM contributor, to become a member of the OSM Foundation, and to contribute to SotM 2018 organization! I had the unique pleasure to work behind the scenes with the magic people making each SotM so successful: Rob, Gregory, Christine, Michael, Benoit and Mikel, with the local support of two special people: Alessandro and Francesco. Once again, thank you for your effort – it was great to work with you!

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As a big OSM passionate I will always remember year 2017, as it gave me the chance to join my first State of the Map conference: SotM 2017 in Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, on August 18-20, 2017. I was so lucky to be selected as a scholar, something I did not expect too much when I initially applied.

Even better, my application for a talk at SotM 2017 was also successful and I had the privilege of giving the presentation titled “OSM seen from a GIS researcher: experiences & perspectives”. The purpose of this talk was to give an overview on the ongoing research trends on OSM. More in detail, I presented three applications I have worked on over the last couple of years: 1) a procedure to assess the quality of OSM road networks; 2) an analysis of OSM tagging patterns; and 3) a GIS application to convert OSM data into Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) maps. The slides are available here, while the live recording of the talk can be found here. I was really surprised that my talk has generated so much interest in the audience. I am used to take part in conferences, but I’ve never received so many photos during a talk! I hope my presentation has inspired many people :)

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Dear HOT members,

my name is Marco Minghini and I come from Como (Italy). First of all, I wish to express my gratitude to Cristiano Giovando for suggesting my name for HOT membership. I would be delighted to become part of such a great community.

I have carried out my studies in Environmental Engineering (specialization in Geomatics and GIS) at Politecnico di Milano, where I obtained a BSc in 2008, a MSc in 2010 (both with honours) and a PhD in 2014. Since then I am working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the GEOlab (Geomatics and Earth Observation laboratory) of Politecnico di Milano in Milan (Italy).

I am passionate about open source software, that I use everyday in my research activity, and enthusiastic of open data. Since 2015 I am a Charter Member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) thanks to the contribution I have given in the education, promotion and development of open source geospatial software and open geodata. Despite knowing the OpenStreetMap project since my MSc studies, it was only thanks to my PhD research (focused on Volunteered Geographic Information and Citizen Science) that I really started to study the project, to understand its evolution and impact, to analyse its applications and to use its data. After almost three years since then, I have become an experienced researcher on OSM, particularly on topics such as OSM data quality, OSM contribution patterns and contributors’ motivations, and exploitation of OSM data to derive concrete products like land use and land cover maps.

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