guess where

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.