Geographic
Who will contribute to People's Map?
It seems the People's Map have launched their online editor today, taking their mapping service from just showing their own pre-created maps to actually allowing people to edit the maps themselves and help them build up a map that they can sell.
The People's Map is great in some places (such as over the Isle of Man) because it has high resolution aerial imagery in places where OpenStreetMap doesn't yet. I might even be keen to spend time mapping the Isle of Man from their imagery, allowing them to use that data for their own purposes, as long as I could also re-use the time and energy I'd spend on that. In their 'fair and straight forward licensing' they even suggest that this could be possible (though I never got a response when I asked for clarification):
Users can associate their own private data to the People's Map without any ownership transferring to the People's Map Partnership
However, when going to sign up to try out their editing tools today, I would have had to agree to the following term in order to contribute:
You agree that the information you submit may be freely used by the People's Map in perpetuity. You will have no rights over the information once you provide it to us.
It will be really interesting to see if people actually take People's Map up on their offer of mapping the British Isles for them without being able to use that data until they pay for it. At least with OpenStreetMap data, you're free to do what you like, as long as you credit the project and make the data available again to others wanting to do the same. Oh, and it's all free.
Can the People's Map add extra value to what OpenStreetMap is already doing, by putting their revenue to good use, perhaps using it to validate the crowdsourced data?
DrupalCon Barcelona 2007 this week
Tomorrow I'll be traveling down to Barcelona with my colleagues for this year's DrupalCon.
Much like last year's OSCMS Summit (which basically turned into a DrupalCon) and DrupalCon Brussels it will be a great chance to meet up with other Drupal developers and users, see what others are using the platform for, join in discussions about its future and hopefully promote some of the pieces that we've been developing at work or have sponsored.
I'll hopefully be doing a lightning talk on the use of Drupal as a GeoCMS - if there are enough people interested - perhaps demonstrating some Google Earth integration through the KML module, GeoRSS integration, or even WFS integration (if I can get it working before then).
If you're going to DrupalCon and are interested in the geo aspect of Drupal (or geo in general), let me know or catch me there - I'll be the one with the 'geodaniel' name badge.
Pinpoint your OpenStreetMap diary entries
If you look back at the OpenStreetMap diary entries, the vast majority of them make reference to a place the poster has been mapping, but there was no way of actually specifying the location of that place. Now, if you're writing an entry in your OpenStreetMap diary (as any OSM user can) you can also specify a location for that entry.
When people view the diary entry they can now click through to view or edit that area of the map to see what you're writing about. Each pair of coordinates is wrapped in the geo microformat too, so if your browser knows how to handle them, it should be able to pick them out.
The feed of diary entries also includes the location information (currently only W3C geo, but should soon have actual GeoRSS too), allowing you to visualise them on Google Maps, for example, or any other geo-enabled feed reader.
Timestamp and address support in KML module
In addition to the recently implemented views support in Drupal's KML module, the latest Drupal 5 version of the module now adds support for time and addresses.
Each of the placemarks now has a timestamp based on its creation date in your Drupal site, allowing you to filter your content by a specific time frame using the Time controls in Google Earth.
Also, if you have added address information to your nodes then this will be added to the placemarks as well (in both freeform format and the xAL standard), allowing content to show up in Google Earth even if you haven't added specific coordinates to it through your Drupal site. The geocoding is down to Google Earth and sometimes things will default to 0,0 if it isn't able to work out where in the world it should go.
Map localisation in an international context
When you use an online maps of another country using a mapping service like Google Maps or Yahoo Maps, would you expect the place names on that map to be displayed in your own local language and/or script or to be in that of the country you're looking at the map of?
I was posting a video to one of our sites (naturally Drupal-based) at work today to test some functionality, and started wondering when I came to add a location to the post. The point of the test wasn't to check the mapping-based functionality in the site, but that is what caught my attention.
The video I was posting (one about giant hornets, and very cool, even if they do freak me out) was filmed on the Japanese island of Honshu, so naturally I wanted to geolocate it somewhere there in the general sort of area so others could see where it was filmed.
As I zoomed in to Japan I quickly noticed that all the place names were in Japanese with no English equivalent. That left me out of luck as somebody who knows the English name of the place but knows nothing of Japanese script. Looking to the west of Japan, Russia is in the same situation, having place names only in Russian. China, on the other hand, actually has place names in both English and Chinese (and they also have a localised version of Google Maps just in Chinese). Check out this map to see a couple of examples from that region of the world.
So my first question is, why are the maps showing multilingual names in some places but not others? Is it about data availability, perhaps the level of effort it would take to merge multiple datasets of place names for some countries?
Hopefully names will, in time, be shown in different languages for other countries too.
For these maps to be a truly useful international as well as local resource, place names should ideally be available in the local form as well as in other forms. Instead of picking one 'international' language such as English, they should probably be available in the local language of the country that the company has aimed a mapping portal at (Google has ones for the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, China, and about ten others).
So, for example, the US and UK portals would show place names in English by default, with the local language of the country displaying alongside. For others, such as the French portal, the French versions of place names could be used with the local version, falling back perhaps to the accepted international (usually English?) name of the place where there was no translation available. In Russia, the Russian version would be used if there was one, along with the local version.
Traditionally, maps were published by governments or other mapmakers within a country and would typically have the place names conveyed in the language of the publishing country (maps made in France would have all the names in French, etc.) because that's who the maps were targeted at. In a more connected, distributed world, the publishing country becomes less relevant and the target countries much more so.
It may be a lot of work but at the end of the day I think international maps should be localised into the language of the user. If the problem is data availability then the likes of Geonames and the implicit database of linkages between articles of different languages in Wikipedia could play a great role here with their growing databases of place names. In OpenStreetMap as well, we have the ability to store place names in as many languages as they have names (e.g. name:en=Isle of Man, name:de=Insel Man, name:fr=L'Ile de Man), though I think currently we only render the default name value on the main maps (which is likely to be the local language of that country). In the future this could be improved upon, as long as the data is in the database.
Update: a website called diddlefinger.com has been adding its own labels on top of Google's maps of Japan for a year or so now. Interesting use of the API to make things more usable for an international audience.
