Monthly Archives: October 2006

Mapstraction progress

Mapstraction has been making good progress with integration from geopress (awsome plugin for embedding maps in wordpress) to Nestoria (awsome map for finding somewhere to live) (Other sites can be found here). One of the more interesting things to note from mapstraction’s evolution is the clear but unnoticed disparity in APIs. Microsoft Virtual Earth has by far the best aerial imagery of the UK, they have complete high resolution coverage! See an example here. But the API is perhaps the worst thing on the planet. Little documentation and many ‘basic’ features missing. The good thing for you, of course, is that mapstraction abstracts this all away and you need not worry because we’re spending the time to make it work. A hidden feature of Yahoo Maps is their high res data (see here) for lots of cities. It’s not obvious as they don’t hide good imagery behind brown goo of death.

Month of OSM

The progress of the month of OSM pledge is phenomenal, having reached almost 80% in under a week. This is really good news and suggests that at least some full-time development of OSM can happen, which benefits everybody. I can’t wait to get started! 🙂

Podcast: BCS

I spoke at the BCS a few weeks ago about OSM and open data. Ian made the good point afterward that you can get around the database directive by requiring your license contractually in order to access the data in the first place. More investigation needed. Anyway, here’s the pdf and mp3. The questions at the end are hard to heard, if you have time to process it and make them audible then I’ll happily update the mp3. Update: links fixed.

Bugtracker for JOSM has moved (again)

The tracker for JOSM bugs in http://trac.openstreetmap.org has moved and merged into the one at ..

In the past, two trackers existed and both are now merged to reduce the number of places to look for new bugs ;). Unfortunatly I cannot close the existing bugs at trac.openstreetmap.org – there is a (temporary?) problem with the server and I am not able to login.

So for future bug reporting, use josm.eigenheimstrasse.de

Ciao, Imi.