Ubiquitous Geocontext

Watch the talk of the century, Ubiquitous Geocontext from Where 2.0:

As Google translates this article by Luc Vaillancourt:

Who among all these people, representatives of companies, organizations, movements and products, is currently the “hot”?

This is Steve Coast (aka Stave C.).

He initiated the movement of mass collaboration in producing voluntary (professional or amateur) Geographic Information mainly road OpenStreetMap.

It is now serious business with startup CloudMade. CloudMade offer aims to provide an alternative to Google Maps API, but operating a software stack open source and data from OpenStreetMap.

He gave a good conference (see here) where I particularly liked his last 2 minutes (minute 14:40) when he starts sentences like:

– Think of what Openness means to you.
– Google Map Maker is open but there’re restrictions on the license.
– GeoPlanet is amazing but there is still dependency on Yahoo! Itself.
– TomTom think they have a community because you can fix a street. They do not. They have a set of data to customers giving them.
And the last slide of his presentation, a wink of a second Google Pardons and Ed:
– As open as my Clenched Fist – FakeEdParsons

… I suspect Steve C. to personify FakeEdParsons (http://twitter.com/FakeEdParsons). It denies the real Ed and swear not to know who it is. Ed is a false be virtual funniest of the community with a sentence like the following:

“Come and learn how lat49 GeoCommons and no longer have business models at the Google Booth” (in reference to the announcement of Google Maps API Data and Maps Ad Unit).

Walking Papers

Want to get involved in OpenStreetMap but don’t have a GPS or even computer? Now there’s walking papers.

Walking papers lets you print out a OSM map and then write on it. Get home, scan it in and then that map can be drawn on top of using familiar OSM tools. To do this, it prints magic codes on the edge of the map that can be recognised when scanned back in to geolocate the image. If you don’t even have a printer or scanner, they’ll print and scan for you via the postal service. You can meet the author of walking maps, Mike Migurski, and try it out this weekend at the San Francisco Mapping Party.

Tiles@Home complexity heatmap

Check out this heatmap of Tiles@Home data. It shows the size, and thus an approximate complexity, of T@H tiles uploaded to the server. A blank tile of the middle of the sea is much smaller than tiles with complex map data on them. Click for the original image an read more here

OSM children’s toys – the next frontier

Check out the cuteness-o-meter in this picture from ikiya on twitter. Thanks to Sarah for the link.

OSM on Yahoo! Developer Network Blog

Check out this video and blog post made by Gary Gale of the Y! Geo Blog interviewing various people at Where 2.0. Of course OSM has a presence 🙂

Skip to about half way through to get straight to the OSM bit, but the first 5 minutes are also worth a watch.

Note: Thea, Dirk and Sarah work for CloudMade running events like mapping parties (see here for the blog and events), the video erroneously attributes them to OSM. Of course they contribute a huge amount to OSM, but we have to be clear to avoid flames 🙂

OSM Android routing app

Check out this Google Summer of Code project outlined by Lulian Banaga:

OpenStreetMap now in your language

Thanks to the hack weekend we now have translations in German and partially French on the main OpenStreetMap site. It figures out your language from your browser string preference.

Want to help get OSM in more languages? Get involved on the dev@ mailing list.

Volunteer mapper flies out to Antigua

OpenStreetMap, the Wikipedia-like website which is mapping the world, is sponsoring one of its volunteers to go mapping for a week on the idyllic Caribbean island of Antigua – an idea sparked by Ed Parsons of rival Google Maps.

At last year’s State of the Map conference in Limerick, Ireland, Ed spoke about the recently-launched Google Map Maker, Google’s process for getting the public to supply map data for them. The countries initially covered by Map Maker included many Caribbean islands, leading Ed to express sadness that fieldwork was not involved.
This off-the-cuff suggestion, and a spirit of friendly competition, caused Gervase Markham, an OpenStreetMap contributor, to set up a pledge on the PledgeBank website. People pledged to improve OpenStreetMap’s coverage in the Caribbean themselves by tracing over available aerial imagery, and to donate £10 each towards sending one lucky mapper on just such a field trip.

74 people, including Ed Parsons himself, signed the pledge, raising £740 to fund the expedition in order to significantly improve the OpenStreetMap data. One name from the pledgelist was chosen by a verifiable random process – Steve Chilton from Middlesex University, UK (who happens to be a professional cartographer, and is the driving force behind the look of the default cartographic styling for OpenStreetMap). The OpenStreetMap Foundation will be sponsoring him to travel to Antigua from 5th to 12th of June to add GPS traces, classify roads, and to add road names and points of interest, building on the work already done from aerial photos by the pledgers. He expects the weather to be marvellous.

“I am really looking forward to this fieldwork trip”, said Steve. “I have contributed data to the map in many parts of the UK, and it will be great to contribute data in the Caribbean and add another little bit to this fantastic global project.”

This year’s State of the Map conference is in Amsterdam from 10th – 12th July 2009, and is open to all. Steve will be there, reporting back with details of his trip and, no doubt, making the attendees jealous of his tan.
OpenStreetMap was founded in 2004 out of exasperation that the Ordnance Survey, Britain’s national mapping agency, charged such high fees for its map data of the UK. The project now has 30,000+ active volunteers worldwide who, between them, have mapped over 33 million kilometres of roads, footpaths and cycleways. They do this by tracing over aerial photos, or more often by using GPS devices to track their footsteps. The resulting data and maps are free for anyone to use in creative, productive and innovative ways.

If your local street, town or idyllic Caribbean island is missing from OpenStreetMap, the easy-to-use map editor means you can add it yourself immediately. To find out more, visit openstreetmap.org and read the full press release.

osm.org !

Thanks to a kind donation and work from Grant Slater, you can now get to OpenStreetMap via osm.org!

State of the Map Scholarship Winners

Congratulations to the 15 scholarship recipients. We had 35 nominations, from 19 countries, so no easy choice. Thanks to all the nominations .. we hope you can all attend as well.

Will be extremely great to have all these mappers together in Amsterdam!