OpenStreetMap
Help map the Isle of Man
In just two weeks time, on Saturday 1st August 2009, I am going to be organising a mapping party in Douglas, Isle of Man for the OpenStreetMap project. The aim of the project is to build up a map of the world that can be used without the restrictions that are typically imposed by mapping providers such as Google Maps.
The Isle of Man already has a great amount of map data in the database - as you can see on the map at openstreetmap.org - so we have a good starting point, but it isn't yet complete, so there is plenty of information that we can still add. While the road network is very close to complete, we are missing many of the points of interest you might like to see on a map, or be able to search for (perhaps through a website, or in the future from your in-car navigation device), like pubs, cafes, restaurants, libraries, hotels, historic sites or museums, for example.
We also have some Manx names for places and streets, but this isn't yet widespread, so it would be great to capture this information from street signs around the town.
As we have a good street network already, the need for a GPS isn't as important as it was earlier on in the project, so the plan for the mapping party is to use printed maps (from the excellent Walking Papers project) onto which we can add annotations during the day. At the end of the day, we can use the paper maps for reference when entering the information into the map through the OpenStreetMap website, or scan them in and deal with them later, depending on how tired people are after a day's mapping.
If you're on the Isle of Man and interested in making or using maps (or just the underlying map data), then do come along and find out more. If you're also interested in a little exercise, come out with us and explore Douglas for the day, collecting information to add to the map. You can find out more on the OpenStreetMap wiki, or alternatively contact me if you'd like more information.
If you run an organisation on the Isle of Man which uses geographic information (e.g. business listings) and would like to find out more about including your information in the map database so they can be displayed on the map, or would like to use the maps on your website with your own information displayed on top, please get in touch.
(map from OpenStreetMap, CC-by-SA)
iPhone street maps for the Isle of Man
I was looking recently to see what applications were available for the iPhone (or iPod touch) relating to the Isle of Man, and was pleasantly surprised to see that a mapping application had been released.
The application, simply called 'Isle of Man', gives users a map of the Island for use on their iPhone while they are visiting. In addition to the map, it lets users find amenities and streetnames that have been added into the OpenStreetMap database. I decided this morning to pay the 59p to download the app and try it out, but beyond the initial excitement of seeing OpenStreetMap data being used for mobile maps of the Isle of Man, I haven't been so impressed with the execution of the idea for a number of reasons...
The Mobile-Streetmaps.com website promotes this app and hundreds of other similar ones from around the world, each just a download of OpenStreetMap data packaged into an application, for which they charge 59p. While it's not a large amount to pay, the company producing the applications is profiting off the generosity of the OpenStreetMap community (and in the case of the Isle of Man, Cloud Made as well, thanks to their donation of data) with little attribution, and no mention within the app itself of the license under which the data is available.
Hopefully the company will fix the attribution issue soon, by adding a mention to the pages in the iPhone app store that the data is from OpenStreetMap, and also by adding information about the license to at least the about page of each app, and to the side bar of the pages on their website.
The app itself could be quite useful if you're visiting the Island, but it has quite a few usability issues that hamper its use:
- Zooming in to the map, you are not shown beyond a certain level, leaving many streets in the center of towns and villages left without names.
- Navigation within the app could really be improved... there's not even a back button to get back to the map from various other screens.
- After searching for items, you're taken to the map, but you are left looking at the place you were looking at before, with no obvious indication that pins have been added to the map outside of your current view.
- There is no way of clearing the pins from previous searches from the map, leading to possible confusion when searching for other things.
- Clicking on the pins for search results doesn't give any more information to the user. It would be nice to be able to get contact details where available, what the nearest street is, etc.
If you would like to access maps offline for more than just a single place, and be able to take advantage of recent updates to the maps, you will probably be better off downloading the OffMaps app which I have yet to try, but costs just a little more at £1.19 and lets you choose the area and level of detail you wish to download, and lets you do it for as many places as you wish.
While free and open geodata from OpenStreetMap gives a great boost to these applications, it also has its downfalls in that it's likely not (yet) complete for any given area. To give an example, searching for 'cafe' amenities in the Isle of Man resulted in just the Silverdale cafe being shown on the map, where in reality there are many more cafes that aren't (yet) listed.
To help improve the amount of data in the Isle of Man that's represented in OpenStreetmap, in particular relating to points of interest (POIs), I'm planning to hold another mapping party on Saturday 1st August. I'll post more information about this soon, but put the date in your diary if you're interested in helping put some of these amenities on the map. If you'd like more information in the mean time, please get in touch.
Update: having contacted the author of the apps, he's already been working with the OpenStreetMap community and has agreed to improve on the attribution, which is good. I also tried out OffMaps and liked it, but one thing it doesn't give you that the individual place-based apps do, is the access to find the location of POIs and streets while you're offline (though it does work when online).
Back the Burgess Park bid
Burgess Park in Southwark, South East London is fighting for a chance to get £2 million of London tax payers' money to help regenerate the park. Created on land which was heavily built up before the war, the park has never really been completed, and could benefit greatly from a boost to bring it closer to completion.
In true web 2.0 fashion, Southwark Council are promoting this bid through YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
If you're in support of improving the area, you can back the Burgess Park bid by signing up to the Facebook group the council have set up.
Map of Burgess Park based on data from OpenStreetMap, CC-by-SA.
Making maps from OpenStreetMap geodata
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I spent some time last year making some maps of the Snaefell Mountain Course (and other roads) on the Isle of Man so that I could add an overview map to the Wikipedia entry for the course.
Last night I was trying out some of the options in the OpenStreetMap 'export' tab, and since it can now export SVG (scalable vector graphics) files, I thought I'd have a try at redoing the maps from last year in a more re-usable and editable form using vector graphics instead of bitmaps.
To make the SVG map using data from OpenStreetMap (as shown in the preview), I just followed some relatively simple steps and a little trial and error while using the graphics editor.
I thought I'd share some of the steps below, in case anybody else was interested in making maps from the great data becoming available in the OpenStreetMap project.
So, what's needed to make your own custom maps?
- An area of OpenStreetMap that's got enough information in it to be useful for your purpose.
If the data you want is not all there, or you want to add more, see the beginners' guide and the map making guide to get you started off adding or improving data in the project. - An SVG image generated from OpenStreetMap using the export tab.
To export your vector graphic file, zoom the main map into the area you want to export, click on the export tab, tweak the area you're interested in (if necessary), select 'Mapnik image' and 'SVG' from the options and click Export. Experiment with the scale to see what the results are, but initially the default scale will probably suffice. - A vector graphics editor such as Adobe Illustrator or, even better, an open source editor such as Inkscape.
Open the downloaded SVG file in your editor and you should see a nice pretty OpenStreetMap image there. To start to work on it, it's a good idea to 'ungroup' the items so that you can edit them individually (I had to do this twice to fully separate out all the objects). You'll notice that the map is made up of many objects, one for each node and way you'd normally see rendered on the maps at openstreetmap.org. You'll also notice that text annotations (names, road references, etc.) are all broken down to their constituent characters too. - Some time to do some (at times quite fiddly) image editing and map making.
You can get some results out in a relatively short timeframe, but you'll likely want to improve the map over time as you become more familiar with the data and tools available.
What steps were needed to create the TT map?
- Select all the items and fade them (I lowered the level of transparency, but there are probably better ways of doing it).
- Select the text items, group each the characters of each name together to make it easier to edit them, re-emphasise them, and change their size if desired.
- Select any other items that should be re-emphasised and do that (I did the sea and the land).
- Select each element of the subject that you'd like to highlight (for me, this was each way that makes up the course) and change the styling of it (I increased the size, and re-emphasised the original colours). I also combined them all into a single 'path' and joined the end of each one to the end of the next (using the 'Edit paths by nodes' ad 'Join selected end nodes' tools) to make it fill in the gaps that appear between them.
Hopefully this short tutorial (well, documentation of my first steps) was helpful for other budding neo-cartographers out there. If you've made your own maps from OpenStreetMap data and have any hints and tips that may be useful, please feel free to add a comment to this post.
OpenStreetMap change monitoring: OSM Mapper
Change monitoring software has something that's long been desired in the OpenStreetMap community - the ability to easily see what changes have been made in your areas, and by who. I've been excited to see this week that it's finally come to fruition in the form of OSM Mapper from ITO World.
Their blog post gives some more information about what it can do:
Using this product you can set up one or more areas to monitor and analyse in a variety of ways. You can even establish RSS feeds to get alerts when other people make changes within areas of interest. You can also generate beautiful images to download and post anywhere as (CC-by-SA).
... plus all sorts of mapping products that highlight changes over time, changes by contributor, etc.
I've been trying it out this morning to try and identify people who have recently contributed to the OpenStreetMap dataset of the Isle of Man, to try and make sure I don't give anyone a big shock when importing the new dataset from CloudMade, and hopefully to encourage others to help out once it's imported, to identify if anything is still missing.
I have to say I've been pretty impressed at how well it works, and how quickly I've identified the major recent contributors and where they've been editing.
