Mapping Parties, Demos Talks – Its all happening in Victoria, Canada

by Nick Black

OpenStreetMap is coming to Victoria, Canada. There’s going to be a load of OSM related activities in the city that boasts Canada’s mildest winter temperatures.

OpenStreetMap Mapping Party Sat 22nd – Mon 24th September
OSM mapping around the conference area Monday 24th September
OSM talk at FOSS4G Tuesday 25th September
OSM demo session Wednesday 26th September
Post FOSS4G Code Sprint Friday 28th September

So if you are in the area, come along and join in the mapping fun. The usual stuff applies – its open to anyone, we have GPS units, its fun, sign up here

OpenAerialMap – Community contributed aerial imagery

By Nick Black

The recently back-from-the-brink-of-death Slashgeo, links this morning to an interesting open geodata initiative – OpenAerialMap. As the name suggests, OpenAerialMap is an attempt to aggregate as much free aerial imagery as possible. This makes a lot of sense. In the same way that I can go out with a GPS and map my street, I can fly my UAV over my street and gather imagery, safe in the knowledge that my neighbour a few streets away is doing the same thing. We join it all up and get a free image map of the world.

A technical problem to solve will be to rectify images to make them usable with other mapping/GI systems. This requires the use of ground control points, either gathered from existing maps or imagery (as seen in the MetaCarta rectifier) or based on GPS positions. Right now, OpenAerialMap have opted for a one at a time approach – with users uploading an image and manually rectifying it – presumably against public domain, or maybe even OpenStreetMap maps. None of this is actually up and running yet – the project is still in the planning stage.

The licensing of the project is unclear – there’s a lot of talk about freedom and open source, but nothing concrete about what the license actually is. Aa OAM haven’t started accepting uploads yet, there’s still time to choose a license that will maximise the usefulness of the tool they are creating.

As you would expect, OpenAerialMap talk a lot about community on their wiki. Unfortunately, as of this morning editing the wiki has been frozen temporarily until we clearly define appropriate use. So in the mean time, you can subscribe to the mailing list to find out more.

JOSM goes multi data layer

The latest JOSM now supports multiple data layers again. This was requested since about the day after I removed the feature over a year ago ;-).

As another big data source hits the main database (AND’s netherland-parts-of-china-and-india map) the feature got more urgent. I think it is especally cool for people who want to compare two unrelated datasets ;-).

Every file open and every download opens the data into a new, seperate layer now. You can merge these layers using the merge button in the layer dialog. By selecting an layer in the layer dialog, you can switch the current editing dataset as needed.

Now for the bad news:

As the feature is a ground shaking one for the whole JOSM data holding structure, I expect many new bugs introduced :-(. If you run into problems that block you from mapping, please revert to the latest release from last week.

For Plugin writers:

Plugins, that used Main.ds could be affected as well. Main.ds now holds the dataset of the current editing layer rather than all the data together. If you are a plugin writer and your plugin is broken and you cannot fix it to work with josm-latest *and* the josm-1.5 release, please link a version which is working with the latest release at http://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Plugins/LatestRelease.

New Release: JOSM 1.5 “Hits The Road”

Hi,

after almost 9 months of more or less JOSM-coding, I finally announce a new JOSM release. In shortage of a better name and in spirit of the good old Sam & Max adventure game (which I finished yesterday.. Hurray!), I hereby call this release: “Hit The Road”. 😀

Before I get to the new features, I want to Frederick Ramm, Christof Dallermassl, Francisco R. Santos, Bruce Cowan, Thomas Walraet, Martijn van Oosterhout and all the other guys I forgot who send in patches, bug reports and ideas and who wrote plugins for the community. 🙂

Ok, now to the facts:

download: http://josm.openstreetmap.de/download/josm.jar
mirrors: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/JOSM#Requirements.2C_download_.26_installation
online-help: F1 (or http://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Help)
bugs: http://josm.openstreetmap.de/newticket

Some new features since the last release

  • 0.4 complaint. I bet you already noticed that in the latest beta 😉
  • Tons of new modes and tools as split / combine ways, reorder nodes in
    a line, reorder segments in a way, (un)select all…
  • Better support for plugins. There are over a dozen plugins
    already available. A basic plugin downloader has been integrated into
    JOSM to ease the plugin installation process. See
    http://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Plugins for more
  • The MarkerLayer displaying annotations from gpx tracks.
  • More visualization options, e.g. drawing the segment ordering number
    or drawing boundary rectangles of all downloaded areas.
  • HCI improvements as one-time warnings, customization support for the
    toolbar on top (including annotation presets), detach the dialogs
    on the right, welcome screen, cuter images…
  • And of course: fixed tons of bugs.

I hope you enjoy the new release and good mapping.

Ciao, Imi.

AND donate entire Netherlands to OpenStreetMap

“Automotive Navigation Data” (AND) [since renamed GeoJunxion] is a leading provider of location, routing, mapping and address management are donating a street network of the entire Netherlands. Yes, an entire country.

This is basically phenomenal.

We’ll have our first country complete from this data, which AND and I want to work with the community to import. This is not least because fantastic work has already been done in Amsterdam and elsewhere by the Digital Pioneers supported openstreetmap netherlands community. AND will be at the State of the Map, and you should be too 🙂

Here’s the press release:

AND and OpenStreetMap join forces to create digital maps
Rotterdam – AND Automotive Navigation Data has agreed with the OpenStreetMap Foundation to donate digital maps of the Netherlands, China and India to the OpenStreetMap community. The aim is to create the most up-to-date map in the market. With this partnership AND recognizes the power of a community and the Web 2.0 developments.

OpenStreetMap gives the community the opportunity to create maps with up-to-date geo-data and shows the results immediately. Pure community collaboration at its best. “Overall we want to enable users of mapping data to also be contributors, from reporting errors to doing full surveys.” According to Steve Coast, one of the founders of the OpenStreetMap project.

“It is known that a small percentage of a map is not representing the present situation. With the help of the community AND aims to close this gap and be able to a deliver a map that is 100 % correct.” According to Maarten Oldenhof, CEO AND Automotive Navigation Data.

According to Wikipedia Web 2.0 refers to “a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services – such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies – which facilitate collaboration and sharing between users.” AND is busy today with the process of bringing maps online with the possibility of online user generated updating. “We think Web 2.0 will be the ultimate tool for map updates. With this partnership we work with the people that have a keen insight into how a community works around maps” according to Maarten Oldenhof.

Initially, AND will make its street level data of the Netherlands and the major road networks of China and India available to the OpenStreetMap community. “We are very happy with the map donation of AND. With this additional map data we hope to create a bigger mapping community and be able to cover more and more areas” according to Steve Coast.

[AND was since renamed GeoJunxion in 2020]