Category Archives: Pretty

LinuxTAG

One of the best things about openstreetmap is that I havn’t got a clue what everyone does any more. Once upon a time I knew everyone involved but now with over 1800 users things are just too big. Sxpert put an underground OSM demo at the X.org stand at LinuxTAG, you can see pictures here. I wonder if Matt realised his logo would show up all over the place. The tag line is very nice ‘free map data for a free world’.

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.

OpenStreetMap SVG Output

80n's Weybridge Map

OpenStreetMap contributor Etienne Cherdlu (aka 80n) has been working on converting the OpenStreetMap API output into SVG using XSL tranforms. So far so good!

The projection on this example is only really suitable for Etienne’s area of interest, but this gives a good example of where we’ll be headed for the Isle of Wight workshop, and shows what is possible right now using OpenStreetMap tools and a little bit of hard work. Thanks Etienne!

London GPS Animation

OpenStreetMap has contributors all over the world, and our biggest UK contributor is London-based courier firm eCourier. They kindly provide us with GPS data collected by their couriers, and when you edit a part of London it’s almost certainly thanks to them that the roads are so clear and easy to trace.

We made a short animation to illustrate a sample of their data which they are hosting here, and you can check out their site and read more about our collaboration on their news page.