geodata
Guess where on the Isle of Man
Since I received the DVD of high resolution aerial imagery and maps from the Isle of Man Government last week, I've spent most of my spare time starting to digitise information for the OpenStreetMap project.
Using QGIS to load in the data, I started to gather all the names from the map that I could, including both place names (for small local areas, hamlets and villages that weren't already in the database) and also farm names. With over a thousand names, this is already a massive boost to the data in OpenStreetMap as it is data that would have been immensely difficult to gather on the ground.
The image to the left represents the shape of the Island, made up of all the points obtained from the map, and soon to be imported into the main database.
The three images below are of small areas that I have started to digitise the buildings of. I'm offering a prize (a pint at the next London mapping party perhaps) to the first person to guess all three places correctly. Two of them may well look familiar to anyone who I chatted to at the 5th birthday party of OpenStreetMap.
Most of the data in the images above (and future data others would like to extract for OpenStreetMap) would have been impossible (well, certainly extremely impractical) to gather were it not for the very generous support of the Isle of Man Survey in giving us a license to derive this information, for which I'm personally very grateful, and I know a lot of other people in the project are also excited about.
These images are licenced as CC-by-SA and the data behind them all will be in the OpenStreetMap database very soon.
Brush up your cartography skills
In September, the Society of Cartographers is going to be holding their 45th annual Summer School event in Southampton.
It's interesting looking through the programme to see just how much of the event is about data, and much of it coming from sources that didn't exist just a few years ago, from OpenStreetMap, the new UKMap and of course the various Ordnance Survey datasets that are available to organisations who can afford to pay for them.
I wonder how the content of this annual summer school has changed over the years since it started, as more and more data sources have become available for cartographers to use?
If you're in the UK and are interested in making maps, the event (7-9 September) looks like it will be a good place to see where cartography is heading, get some hands on experience in the workshops and also network with others in the industry.
Google Maps comes to the Isle of Man
It's taken quite some time, but it's great to see that Google Maps now has a map of the Isle of Man to go with the imagery they added a little while back. Thanks Google!
Just one day after I write about CloudMade announcing that they are donating their map of the Isle of Man to the OpenStreetMap project (see my post from yesterday), I notice today that Google Maps has added the Isle of Man to their list of places they have map coverage for (though no official announcement I can see on their LatLong blog as of yet).
I had my suspicions that there may have been an imminent release of maps for the Island when I noticed that it wasn't possible to add map data on the Island through their new MapMaker tool that allows you to add your own data to unmapped regions.
It's a shame that this data isn't editable like the CloudMade data that I'll soon be importing into OpenStreetMap though. Zooming into Castletown for a quick close-up look, I've already spotted an error (typo) in the naming of a road: check out Abrory road (should be Arbory Road) running into Castletown. If that was an error in OpenStreetMap data, it'd be a simple job to go in and fix that up so other users could benefit from correct data.
Update: In some places, it's just plain wrong, e.g. this main road in Ballasalla (A34) that has been re-routed down a footpath before joining up with itself again.
Isle of Man gets free map data
Map coverage of the Isle of Man has been slowly growing since I started contributing to OpenStreetMap in January 2006, spurred on at times by old Ordnance Survey New Popular Edition maps being made available to gather data from, and by the Isle of Man Government making some of its maps available too.
By this time last year the Manx map was looking in a pretty good state, though still lacking quite a lot of detail in the larger towns. The lack of detail was helped somewhat by the mapping party I organised at the end of last summer, but still didn't take the map to completion.
Around the time of the mapping party, little to my knowledge at the time, the founders of OpenStreetMap were making a concerted effort to map the island from scratch (under the guise of the startup map data company CloudMade) with the view of donating that data to the OpenStreetMap project. This method was in direct contrast to the piecemeal way the map had been growing up until that point and was more in line with the way commercial providers such as Navteq and TeleAtlas collect their data. With dedicated time, equipment and manpower, the methodology allowed for the map to be more accurately built up and methodically completed.
I'm happy to see that this weekend's State of the Map conference saw the release of that complete dataset. CloudMade's blog post and press release from yesterday give more information as well as a preview of the map.
Now that the data is available, I've agreed to lead the effort to import the data (licensed under a Creative Commons licence) into OpenStreetMap, likely replacing the existing maps built up by the piecemeal effort of a number of us volunteers with the results of the concerted effort from CloudMade, and afterwards adding back any of the original information that is complementary to the CloudMade map data (if any).
We should start to see the results of the new map over the coming weeks as I get time to import the data. I'm really looking forward to using this data in some of the web projects I've been doing in my spare time as well as maybe some others that have been floating around in my mind for a while.
Open Geodata Forum
I read earlier in the week about a discussion on open geodata occuring in London this week. Being interested in what they had to say I thought I might as well pop along and listen to the presentations. Open geodata, for those of you who may not know, is any kind of data which has some kind of geographic reference (such as a postcode, a place name or anything else which references a place on earth). In the US, much of this is freely available to the public because just about everything produced by government agencies can be used without any restrictions. In the UK however, there is a Crown Copyright placed on just about all of the geographic data produced.
The first presentation this evening was basically talking about ways of creating new geodatasets which could then be reused, by sending people out on the roads with GPS receivers, tracing roads off satellite or other aerial photography or using maps on which the copyright had already expired (dating back to the 1950s). Steve Coast, the guy presenting, had begun to develop OpenStreetMap and was actually another UCL student, although on a different course to the one that I am on.
The second was by Gesche Schmid, a local government manager of ICT at Medway Council who highlighted the uses of geographic data in local government using a couple of different examples from across the board. It was interesting to hear, although hardly suprising, that 75% of data within local government is considered geographic. Medway are one of the councils that has their own online GIS system, Medway Map Service, from which they apparently had to pull their electoral ward boundary data because of inaccuracies. A point which Chris Lightfoot of MySociety later mentioned as well, having worked closely with election data over recent years as a key part of a number of their projects.
Giles Lane of Urban Tapestries, a geo annotation tool, then talked about location based services and their potential social uses without the expense of embedding expensive GPS chips in every mobile device.
By this point in the presentations I'd started to get a nasty headache from looking at the projection screen so I wasn't able to concentrate as much as I wanted.
Jo Walsh was next on stage. An open source developer and co-author of the Mapping Hacks book, she talked for a short time about the ways she'd like to see the open geodata movement progress before introducing Roger Longhorn, a geodata policy expert who was heavily involved in Euopean Union geodata policy for 7 years.
Chris Lightfoot of MySociety then gave a short talk about electoral data and its quirks, pointing out just how difficult a task it is to ensure the data is all accurate and up to date. Nick Whitelegg then gave a quick introduction to his countryside mapping project, Free-Map.
All in all I'm glad I attended. It was good to hear a range of different perspectives - including a director of the Ordnance Survey in the audience answering some of the questions people had about government funding of the OS. I just wish my head wasn't hurting quite so much by the end.
