Category Archives: Geodata

This week on the OpenStreetMap list…

OpenStreetMap is growing. There are now around 2,800 users, with a Wiki, a forum, four English speaking mailing lists, a German list and as of today, a French list. With such a quickly growing community we thought it would be cool to sift through the map talk, flames and legal debates and put together a highlight of the best bits from the week on the list. So here we go.

There has been lots of talk about the new phenomena of “Mapping Parties” that is sweeping through the OSM community. Last weekend OSM people were mapping Bath, and there are planned events comming up in Reading, Brighton, Rutland and the New Forest. If you live in the North and feel left out, then don’t. Chorley doesn’t have a map, and it seems that OSM are the perfect people to make them one.

Free The Postcode, OSM’s sister project which is all about making a free database of UK postcodes, hit it’s 1000th postcode recently. With a Geocoder and now with each postcode linked to an editable discription (eg SW1A 0AA, you can leave feedback about bad postcodes, or start a thread about your favourite one.

FreeThePostcode’s not the only thing that has been updated in OSM world. OJW has written a nice web-based app that lets you upload and edit waypoints before uploading them to the OSM database. Check it out here.

Thats all from the list for this week…

OSM San Jose comparison

Interesting article from mikel: San Jose, largest city in Silicon Valley, is a rapidly sprawling suburban metropolis. This unsustainable mode of development is generally considered detrimental to open space, consumed by low density housing, energy resources, squandered on car dominated transportation, and community, split apart by satellite dishes and 6 lane roads. But what is bad for the environment is still brilliant for OpenStreetMap!

Travel Time Maps

MySociety have done some funded temporal travel maps which sort of follow on from Toms tube temporal maps. They interestingly put a veiled critique of the data access they had at the bottom:

‘Although the journey planning services and software we used were publicly accessibly, almost none of the other data is available unless you pay for it, or your work falls under an existing licencing agreement. So while we set out to demonstrate how easily we could make travel-time maps from public data, very little of this work could be cheaply reproduced or extended without assistance from a government department.

That’s unfortunate, because it means that innovative work by outsiders in this area can only go ahead if it’s explicitly sponsored by government. If all the data we’ve used had been available for free, somebody else might well have done what we’ve done years ago, with no cost to the taxpayer. We’d love it if others extend the work that we’ve done, but realistically there aren’t very many people in a position to do this cheaply.’

I guess they can’t bite the hand that feeds them too hard! 🙂

Google Maps vs Mapstraction, pt II

This was going to be part of an earlier post, but should now stand alone.

When we’re not working on free geodata creation for OpenStreetMap, we like to make the best of the current free beer commercial mapping APIs to make neat things like GPX viewers and pub maps. In the light of some of the more amazing Google Maps mashups out there (here’s a recent decent), these sites might seem underwhelming, but if you consider how quickly they could (or couldn’t) have been put together a year ago then it’s clear that thanks to Google Maps we’ve come a very long way.

Tim O’Reilly recently asked the Mapping Hacks people, and others, why Google Maps was so much more popular than all the other APIs available. Schuyler pretty much nailed it, though after my Mapstraction research I think he’s too generous towards Yahoo and Microsoft.

I note with disappointment that neither Yahoo nor MS offer polyline support, which leaves my desired cross-vendor demo of a GPX viewer dead in the water. It also means that anyone requiring that functionality for drawing routes or boundaries is stuck with Google for the time being. Ironically for Google however, their recently developed open source Explorer Canvas might offer a cross-platform way for Y! and MS to compensate for this. Further disappointment with alternatives to Google Maps comes with the realisation that Yahoo’s maps only cover North America so far (although I was pleasantly surprised to find Microsoft is the only provider to give any road or placename data outside of North America, UK and Japan).

Microsoft’s Virtual Earth SDK feels clunky to code with, shirking the fashionable javascript idioms which help make Yahoo and Google‘s offerings feel elegant, and their API is completely malnourished with regards to easily placing nice looking map pins. Sure, it might be flexible, but Google and Yahoo’s offerings look good out of the box which is really important. (The same can be said of the developer documentation, too).

Whilst looking at all of this I took a look at OpenStreetMap’s slippy maps interface to see if I could allow plotting of pins. Unfortunately, although the Civicmaps code base we started with supports plotting GeoRSS, it looks like in the process of adding in support for Mercator projection that the marker features were broken. This means that for an OpenStreetMap-powered javascript maps implementation you can put on any website, there is still lots of work to do. However, following this exercise I’ve discovered that if anyone wants to seriously compete with Google in this space, then we all have a lot of catching up to do too!

— Tom

Podcast: Ed Parsons

One of the cool things about wordpress 2.0 is that you can drop an mp3 in to it and it magically becomes a podcast, including the RSS feed bits (so yes, you can subscribe to this feed in iTunes). I thought it would be useful to talk to people within openstreetmap and slightly further afield in the geo community as openstreetmap grows beyond everyone knowing each other. If you have a story to tell please get in touch, it’s likely I might ask to talk to you anyway 🙂 You can discuss this cast, and maybe help transcribe it if that’s useful here. The first cast is me speaking to Ed Parsons who is CTO of the OS and says some pretty interesting things, but has detractors. You can find the 21Mb mp3 here. Enjoy.

Now with pictures

An idea discussed by a few bright people like tom, mikel and ben is that of getting people to map as fallout from some other process like sharing their GPS traces. Or manipulating those traces, getting statistics or commenting/organising them. As tom calls it ‘the flickr of maps’, rather than ‘the wikipedia of maps’ which would be, from one angle, mapping for mappings sake. To this end I’ve been hacking away at nice sharing features for your GPX / GPS traces. You can have a look. RSS feeds, tags, descriptions and little pictures of your trace are now available. There’s some work left yet to be sure. It’s not super polished, but it is getting better and better.

freeourdata gets wings

The Guardian campaign has hit liftoff rather quickly with a site and blog. I wrote a response which turned in to a bit of commentary to the OSM mailing list:

FAQ entry:

‘Wouldn’t it be better to create an open-source database of geographic and other data?

Much though we admire the stoicism of the people at XXX, when you compare it to the Post Office’s thousands of postcodes – which it has to verify – and the Ordnance Survey’s billion-odd bits of data, which would cost perhaps £200m in taxes to keep updated to their present quality – that is, about £4 per taxpayer per year – you have to say that it makes more sense to free the existing data than to reinvent the wheel. It’s a very large wheel.’

This misses the point of what’s useful. We don’t have to have millions of postcodes to be useful. We don’t need to know where trees are to the milimeter to create a map that’s 99% useful. Even Ed was saying this, I think, when he was saying that what OSM is doing is not the same as what the OS is. To the best of my knowledge the OS leaves streetmap work to mastermap derivation by third parties. They do mastermap.

It also misses that OSM and FTP are collaborative efforts with social and innovative technological angles.

If the campaign is about money then as a friend said the other day, let an economist decide IP law. There is no ‘right way’ to do government IP policy. The US has public domain, we have crown copyright, others have others. public domain is not magically better, it’s worse in lots of ways than, say, viral licenses like CC. I’ll leave the BSD vs. GPL argument.

But again, some economists should decide the IP law. Not the rightsholders (the OS) or us as consumers because we’re equally biased. What’s the overall benefit to the UK economy? That’s the question.

Personally, having been involved in campaigns, I think it’s going to take *ages* to have any effect. This will stir up a hornets nest. The OS may be big and evil, but as people said on Ed’s blog (I think): the treasury isn’t going to pay for this. They’ll privatise the OS if anything. Then what? Then we’re all suddenly competing with someone who has all the data, most of the expertise, and no need to play nice. Because I think at the moment they _do_ play nice with some people, compared to their options should they be privatised.

This is not an argument that the debate is pointless or that the ‘campaign’ should not be supported, but that we should be careful what we wish for. Oh, and that we shouldn’t dismiss the people at XXX.

So personally, I’d avoid polarising this issue about public domain vs. crown copyright. My personal judgment is that I will have more effect on the availability of free mapping data by working on and promoting OSM than lobbying europarl or within Westminster.

OpenStreetMap is way bigger than me though. I could spend time lobbying. What does everyone think? Are these seperate parallel inititives or more closely intertwined?