OpenStreetMap
Isle of Man mapping party
The Isle of Man is going to be having its first OpenStreetMap mapping party on Saturday 1st September, with the main aim of mapping the Island's capital, Douglas.
(I'm not going to be around after Sunday morning unfortunately - I need to fly back to Stuttgart - but if others are then Ramsey may also be a good target if we get Douglas completed.)
Details are pretty sparse at present but I'll be fleshing out the Isle of Man mapping party information over on the OpenStreetMap wiki. If you're interested, please add yourself to the list over there.
If anyone is thinking of travelling from outside of the Island and would like advice on getting to the Island, or somewhere to stay, let me know.
Crowdsourced street maps for commercial providers
The State of the Map conference at the weekend - organised mostly by the OpenStreetMap Foundation - was a great success. It drew in a broad mix of a crowd, from OSM hackers through to academics, surveyors, cartographers and those in business who are in a position to both benefit from the project and support it in achieving its goals of mapping the world - many of them actually being sponsors of the weekend.
Ed Parsons, geospatial technologist at Google, took the opening speech on Sunday, drawing on his experience as ex-CTO of the Ordnance Survey and his new role at Google. He highlighted just how much of the world is covered by user-created content of some sort, showing hubs of activity in Britain - likely due to the Geograph project - and other places around the world, noting that there were very few gaps in the coverage. Few gaps in coverage suggests there are few places without people who have and interest in geography and the area around them. It'd be interesting to compare Ed's (Google's) map of user generated content with OpenStreetMap's map of user generated geodata and see how different or alike they are in their hotspots of activity.
The main point of this post was to point out Ed's announcement that Google is using crowdsourced map data for some of their maps of India. I don't recall the source of the data (Mumbai Free Map, perhaps?) but I am curious, at what point would Google start using OpenStreetMap's crowdsourced data?
He brought up two issues that were affecting that decision at present: licensing - a big issue in the community - and quality* - something we need to start start thinking a lot more about now that some areas are 'complete' and potentially ready for being used as such, and many others getting closer to that point every day. What issues did they have to work through to get the Indian maps into their transport layer on Google Earth (and Maps?)?
No prizes for guessing which part of the world I'd like to see covered by the major mapping providers...
The closing talk at State of the Map was given by Sean Phelan, founder of MultiMap, about the history of web mapping. He was joined by John McKerrell, senior software engineer and developer of their cool new 'slippy map', to talk about the modern age of web mapping.
Sean's personal prediction (wish) was that they'd be able to use OpenStreetMap as a layer on the MultiMap website by the end of 2007. But with the (possible though ambitious) aim of Steve Coast - OpenStreetMap founder - of finishing the map of Britain by mid 2008, it'll be interesting to see how they deal with the issue of 'completeness' of the map. How will end users feel about an incomplete map? Will it drive more people into the project to fix up the map?
Users aside (for now), there's one thing for sure and that's that MultiMap, the first British online mapping provider, will be viewed as a visionary by those of us building the maps and hopefully also by those in industry who may not be convinced right now of the value of user-created maps.
* actually, looking back through Ed's presentation I think the second point wasn't quality as such, but about the reach of the project... I should've taken notes :)
Update: See Frank Taylor's post on gearthblog.com about Google's maps in India and listen to Michael Jones' (Chief Technologist of Google Earth) presentation about it.
State of The (Manx) Map
The map of the Isle of Man is the featured image this week on OpenStreetMap so I think now is a good time for the State of The (Manx) Map post that I've been considering doing for a while. (Obviously borrowing ever so slightly from the name of the upcoming State of The Map conference in Manchester... have you registered yet?).
Overall coverage
The overall coverage of the Island is great thanks to the assistance of the Isle of Man Government, as you can see from the map below. Much of the detail from the government map has been included in the OpenStreetMap data, although I'm sure there are some features that have been overlooked to date.
The gaps in the map start to show when you zoom in to specific areas. Taking Douglas as an example, I'll show what level of detail is available and what will need local assistance (and possibly a mapping party) to get the town maps to a usable level of detail.
Douglas in detail
Douglas has the majority of its major routes mapped already, but it's missing a lot of the detail in between, like smaller roads, housing estates, pathways and the like. Where these do exist in the map already, they usually do not have a name associated with them, and almost never have all of the cul-de-sacs and such mapped out.
The likes of Castletown have more of their roads covered (it's smaller, and much easier to cover them) but likewise doesn't have the names of many of the smaller streets. Port St Mary is covered pretty well, including names, thanks to the support of one guy and his bike.
If you live in a place that's missing detail, you have an opportunity to help... Let's try and beat Google Maps to coverage of the Island!
Mapping party
If anybody from the Island is interested in doing some mapping (taking a GPS unit out and writing down street names as you go), especially around Douglas and Ramsey, then let me know. I'm likely to be back on the Island for most of the last week in August, so perhaps a little mapping party is in order then...
On a related note, it's great to see as well that some other free maps of the Isle of Man are surfacing on Wikipedia, licensed under a Creative Commons license.
Best of all, the image is in vector format and so can easily be altered to illustrate things with ease (it's perhaps a good starting point for the TT Course map I started last month).
Track OpenStreetMap diaries through RSS
A year ago I was really interested in seeing the community aspect of the OpenStreetMap website improve, and the recent update to Rails brought a lot of the functionality that I was looking for, with space to be tweaked and improved upon. Since I started to learn Ruby on Rails recently, what better way was there to help, but build on the functionality that others have put in already.
I outlined some ideas on the wiki and decided that some of my first priorities would be adding RSS to the diaries, making them easier to post to, improving the user profiles and also the messaging interface. I've added a few small changes over the past few days, but today saw the release of the biggest one so far: an RSS feed for all diary entries, so you can now subscribe to updates of everyone mapping on OpenStreetMap. Over time I'm also hoping to add other feeds for individual diaries, for your friends and also for those mapping nearby.
If you haven't used OpenStreetMap's diary feature, now is the time to give it a try and let people know what you're working on mapping at the moment. Right now, you can post to it by viewing your own diary (through your account page) and clicking on 'new post', but I'll be looking to make it easier for users to post as well.
Update: looks like it needs a little tweaking still, but the basics are there.
The State of the Map
This year will see the third anniversary of the OpenStreetMap project. It started as a rather ambitious undertaking, something which many didn't believe in, yet three years on it's thriving (as I may have alluded to previously).
Coverage has been steadily spreading outside the project's roots in Britain, through Europe, to a number of other corners of the world, and hopefully will continue to spread as word gets out about the advantages of open geodata.
The project has grown considerably in size, from just a few people back in the day, to over 6000 contributors today. Last year saw an anniversary party to celebrate the project's second year, with around 30 people turning up to celebrate.
Meanwhile, the first official OpenStreetMap conference, aptly named The State of the Map, will be upon us in just a short time and has a great lineup of speakers from academia and the geographic information industry as well as people from all sorts of other walks of life.
The State of the Map conference in July will be keynoted by Ed Parsons, ex-CTO of the Ordnance Survey and now Geospatial Technologist at Google. Other speakers will include the founder of Multimap, the chair of the Society of Cartographers, the architects of the current map visualisations, those coordinating the Dutch and Spanish mapping efforts, and still many others.
From a personal point of view, it's great to see that Muki Haklay - my old MSc in GIS course tutor from the Department of Geomatic Engineering at UCL - will be presenting, and that the conference is being hosted by the University of Manchester's School of Environment and Development, where I did half of my BSc in Computing and Geography.
Anyway, enough of my waffling.
14-15 July in Manchester is shaping up to be a great weekend, showcasing the bleeding edge of geographic information creation (and I don't just mean from the blisters you can get from walking around a city with your GPS).
If you haven't reserved your place already, admission is cheap, so register today for your chance to see the future of mapping you'll actually be able to use. See you there!
