EPIC FAIL from Joburg

Interesting article here:

The City of Johannesburg is closing off its GIS data in a ‘cost recovery’ move that other South African municipalities are set to follow. This, say some industry players, is not in keeping with Joburg’s plans to become ‘a world-class African city’.

Go to the City of Johannesburg’s ‘e-services’ online mapping site on a Mac or on a Firefox browser and you’ll be disappointed. In bold red letters, a notice reads: ‘PLEASE NOTE: The online map viewer is only compatible with Internet Explorer 6 or higher…’

The problems don’t end here. Further along in the process, you’ll see a ‘disclaimer’ that reads: ‘The contents may not be copied, reproduced, redistributed to third parties in any form for any purpose whatsoever, or applied to commercial use without the written consent of the Council.’

Google’s Data Liberation Front and aerial imagery

Data Liberation Front

Google have a couple of really enlightened guys called the “Data Liberation Front“. Their role is to make it easy for people to get their data out of Google – rather than it being locked in.

Usually, people are locked in by the lack of an export feature, or an obscure file format. In mapping, people are locked in by licences.

In Google Maps’ case, you can create your own work by tracing over aerial imagery. But you can’t use this work elsewhere, because of the licences and terms of use. (The phrase “derived work” usually crops up around now.)

At the Society of Cartographers’ Summer School last week, there was a great workshop on making a mashup from Google imagery – but when the question arose about taking the data out of Google and using it elsewhere… well, then things got a little hazy.

Google could fix this by saying that tracing from their imagery is ok – just like Yahoo have done. Or, alternatively, they could give us a clear “no”. Right now no-one really knows where they stand.

The Data Liberation Front ask people to vote for their favourite suggestions. We’ve added this as a suggestion and, at the time of writing, it has 585 votes – over four times the next most popular.

You can vote by going to http://url.ie/2ero. OpenStreetMap has shown the way in liberating geodata – maybe it’s time that some of these other guys caught up.

Roadee review

Check out this review at the unofficial apple weblog of Roadee, a iPhone nav app which uses OSM:

Yes, all true. I’m talking about Roadee, an iPhone nav app that depends on the open sourced openstreetmap.com. That eliminates the high fees paid to license map data, and allows a nav app for under 2 bucks.

Cakes at the 5th Anniversary Party

Remember the amazing cake made for OSMs birthday the other week? Well I somewhat rashly promised a bottle of champagne for anyone who did something similar at the London party, so of course two people brought cakes.

Check out the videos of Matt and Greg’s efforts in this youtube video (which will also show up as a podcast video if your subscribed). Topics vary away from just cakes on to broader OSM subjects, and the very fun living with dragons. YouTube is still processing the video so check back if it’s not working yet.