Early bird booking for State of the Map Europe 2011 conference ends
15th May. Hurry up to catch a EUR 60,-*) ticket this week! Pricing
will be EUR 90,-*) afterwards.

Get your SotM-EU ticket now!

* additional charge for paypal payment is applied

Many people are wondering how they can get directions with OpenStreetMap. Currently, there is no ‘directions feature’ on the website, OSM.org. However, there are methods to get directions based on OpenStreetMap data. Probably the most sophisticated web solution is open.mapquest.com.

You can enter a starting point and a destination, either as an address or POI. Alternatively, you can right-click on the map and select a location as a starting point, and a destination respectively. Directions can be optimised for cars, bicycles or pedestrians.

If you want to report a problem with the directions you can do this in MapDust.com or directly in open.mapquest.com. Also, if you want to work on routing problems, MapDust shows you all the reported problems and gives you the opportunity to adjust a route around a problem to see how the map redirects the engine functions around the problem in real-time. More information can be found in the wiki resource.

Update:

There are other tools that might be wortg trying e.g. http://maps.cloudmade.com/ or http://www.openrouteservice.org/

May is sport and activity month. We’ll be adding various sport and
activity locations to the map. The Project of the Month: Sport fields continues through May. Each Project of
the Week during May will focus on another type of sport or activity
facility.

Gyms and Dojos

Gyms and dojos are similar in structure and purpose. Both tend to
include an open activity area for classes and exercise stations with
exercise equipment and free weights for strength and flexibility
training. While the activities and locations are very similar, a dojo
may distinguish itself with a focus on a particular martial art, or
group of martial arts.
The Project of the Week is to add local gyms and dojos to the map.

This is your Project of the Month. Make suggestions. Inspire other
mappers. What is it about contributing to OpenStreetMap that
interests you? Postboxes? Bowing alleys? Share your OpenStreetMap
interests by suggesting a Project of the Week or Project of the Month.

Gym photo by Neeta Lind is licensed CC-By

When I first was reflecting on the Where2.0 2011 conference, I had the impression that there were no real highlights and hardly any new trends. Navteq was announcing their 3D cities in an attempt to catch up with Google. Microsoft are advancing their map technology and announcing some major players are to switch from Google to Bing maps. Google launched Earth Builder – a tool to bring geographic data from non-profit organizations into the cloud, directly competing with ESRI’s ArcGIS online. Hardly any breaking news here.

However, there is one trend that becomes clear: all players are entering or strengthening their crowdsourcing initiatives for building maps. Often this approach was just mentioned as incidental or sold differently to audience: Google has extended Map Maker from the remote countries to the US. Similarly,  Navteq has launched a Wiki-map approach in Ethiopia, following the path taken by Google and trying this approach in remote countries first.

Microsoft launched Photosynth, a free tool on the iPhone to generate geocoded panorama images. It was not mentioned explicit but it seems it is intended to advance the Google ‘StreetView’ approach to places that cannot be covered by cars; especially indoors.

I wonder if the users are willing to do mapping efforts for the big corporations that keep the map data under a commercial license. Google is trying to shift respectively, extending the mapping efforts from India, where costs are low,  to volunteers that work for free. The question is if people (and organizations) will just make sure that their home place is shown correctly or if people are indeed willing to bring the commercial maps to a new level of detail as it is seen in OpenStreetMap.

May is sport and activity month at Project of the Week.

The joyous sounds of children playing. The roar of the crowd at a
well executed play. The Project of the Month is to map your local sport fields. Put
your local sport fields on the map.

This is your Project of the Month. Make suggestions. Inspire other
mappers. What is it about contributing to OpenStreetMap that
interests you? Postboxes? Bowing alleys? Share your OpenStreetMap
interests by suggesting a Project of the Week or Project of the Month.

OpenStreetMap contributor, Firefishy, created OpenWhateverMap.org to
demonstrate a variety of map themes all at the same time.

OpenWhateverMap was launched on 01 April 2011.

This is a Featured image, which means that it has been identified as
one of the best examples of OpenStreetMap mapping, or that it provides
a useful illustration of the OpenStreetMap project.

If you know another image of similar quality, you can nominate it on
Featured image proposals.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Featured_image_proposals

The United Nations Foundation, the United Nations Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and others have recognized the
crucial role played by OpenStreetMap in relief efforts in Haiti and
elsewhere.

Quoting from the UN Foundation Disaster Relief 2.0 Fast Facts

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a community of approximately
150,000 mappers dedicated to building a free and open map of the
world. OSM mobilized more than 640 volunteers around the world, who
scanned and rectified old atlases and maps and traced Haitian roads,
bridges, and buildings into the OpenStreetMap geospatial wiki using
tools that only required a simple web browser and time. In the
process, this community turned a blank spot on the map into one of the
most accurately mapped countries in the world—creating a map far
better than any available to the UN. By mid-March, OpenStreetMap had
become the de facto source for Haiti map data within most UN agencies
and the EC Humanitarian Unit. MapAction credits OpenStreetMap with
providing an essential service and for building a street map of Haiti
from scratch in about two weeks, a project that should have taken
about a year.

April is food month. We’ll be tagging various portions of the food
supply system in and around our homes. We’ll look at Farmers’ Markets
for the full month; venues for many vendors of food directly from the
source. Through the month we’ll look at individual vendors of various
foods. As always, Project of the Week and Project of the Month exist
only to encourage your mapping. You don’t need to wait for a project
to add a cheese shop to the map! Unless, of course, you waited for
this week! This week, prepared foods.

Delicatessen, convenience stores and prepared food

Prepared foods occupy that middle ground between groceries and a
restaurant. Some delicatessens have seating and table service, and
might be correctly tagged as {{tag|amenity|restaurant}}. But the
stock in trade of the deli is prepared food. Cured meat, or potato
salad, or caviar, or herbed olive oil for inclusion in your family
meals. The convenience store might provide you with a pre-made
sandwich and a carton of milk, but table service is unlikely. So is a
chair. Recent studies have found that urban areas with financial
challenges often lack the markets and grocery stores from earlier in
this project of the month.

This week we look at those not-quite-restaurants that are not quite
food vendors. The prepared food vendors such as delis and convenience
stores are the focus of this Project of the Week. Let’s put our local delis and convenience stores and other prepared food vendors on the map.

This is your Project of the Month. Make suggestions. Inspire other
mappers. What is it about contributing to OpenStreetMap that
interests you? Postboxes? Bowing alleys? Share your OpenStreetMap
interests by suggesting a Project of the Week or Project of the Month.

Deli photo by Liz Henry is licensed CC-By-ND