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!
The Guardian campaign has hit liftoff rather quickly with a site and blog. I wrote a response which turned in to a bit of commentary to the OSM mailing list:
FAQ entry:
‘Wouldn’t it be better to create an open-source database of geographic and other data?
Much though we admire the stoicism of the people at XXX, when you compare it to the Post Office’s thousands of postcodes – which it has to verify – and the Ordnance Survey’s billion-odd bits of data, which would cost perhaps £200m in taxes to keep updated to their present quality – that is, about £4 per taxpayer per year – you have to say that it makes more sense to free the existing data than to reinvent the wheel. It’s a very large wheel.’
This misses the point of what’s useful. We don’t have to have millions of postcodes to be useful. We don’t need to know where trees are to the milimeter to create a map that’s 99% useful. Even Ed was saying this, I think, when he was saying that what OSM is doing is not the same as what the OS is. To the best of my knowledge the OS leaves streetmap work to mastermap derivation by third parties. They do mastermap.
It also misses that OSM and FTP are collaborative efforts with social and innovative technological angles.
If the campaign is about money then as a friend said the other day, let an economist decide IP law. There is no ‘right way’ to do government IP policy. The US has public domain, we have crown copyright, others have others. public domain is not magically better, it’s worse in lots of ways than, say, viral licenses like CC. I’ll leave the BSD vs. GPL argument.
But again, some economists should decide the IP law. Not the rightsholders (the OS) or us as consumers because we’re equally biased. What’s the overall benefit to the UK economy? That’s the question.
Personally, having been involved in campaigns, I think it’s going to take *ages* to have any effect. This will stir up a hornets nest. The OS may be big and evil, but as people said on Ed’s blog (I think): the treasury isn’t going to pay for this. They’ll privatise the OS if anything. Then what? Then we’re all suddenly competing with someone who has all the data, most of the expertise, and no need to play nice. Because I think at the moment they _do_ play nice with some people, compared to their options should they be privatised.
This is not an argument that the debate is pointless or that the ‘campaign’ should not be supported, but that we should be careful what we wish for. Oh, and that we shouldn’t dismiss the people at XXX.
So personally, I’d avoid polarising this issue about public domain vs. crown copyright. My personal judgment is that I will have more effect on the availability of free mapping data by working on and promoting OSM than lobbying europarl or within Westminster.
OpenStreetMap is way bigger than me though. I could spend time lobbying. What does everyone think? Are these seperate parallel inititives or more closely intertwined?
Part two of taggable gps trace support is now live in openstreetmap. There’s still quite some work to do: RSS is missing, you can’t search by bounding box yet but it’s functional.
Richard posts an interesting set of thoughts on geodata licensing, specifically CC-SA which is what openstreetmap uses. Recent threads on the OSM mailing list mirror some of the age-old BSD vs. GPL debates and unsurprisingly fail to reach a consensus. I’m hoping that debate before or during the workshop will settle down to something we can work with.
Lots of updates went through today like the API now supports things like streets, tags (keys and values) are a more realistically handled. This brings the API to version 0.3
I spent the rest of the day fixing up the gps trace pane so you can add descriptions to your traces, tag them, and make them available for public download. Still some work to do, pending input from the mailing list.
Ed notes (and dislikes) this piece in the Guardian about how taxpayer funded map data should be Free. The article isn’t limited to geodata and fails to mention openstreetmap like previous articles so perhaps it has an industry source. They make good work of the juicy target – the OS – and mention the Peter Weiss article.
More interestingly they bring up other examples like the Hydrographic Office’s somewhat mad scheme of copyrighting tide tables.
Mikel notes that geonames.org have combined a bunch of free data to make an aggregated geocoder for cities and postcodes. I’m not confident their UK postcode data is free, but it’s a fantastic idea and one worth charging for.
Lots of people seem to want updates to freethepostcode like different countries supported, different coordinate systems. I’ve created a pledge which reads
“I will upgrade freethepostcode.org to allow postcodes from other countries, allow other coordinate systems (like National Grid) and write a europe-wide geocoder based on this Free data but only if 15 other people will enter 40 postcodes over the next year OR do the translations OR give 10 pounds.”
— Steve Coast, agitator
This is basically to ensure I’m not wasting my time doing the work.
Most of OSM’s computers are hosted at UCL, including dev the devloper machine. The other night Mikel noticed that dev was down. I called to make sure nobody had touched it and then called network operations to see if it was blocked for some reason. Neither was the case.
I asked someone to power cycle it but they said it was hot to the touch and smelt of burning plastic. I told them to leave it unplugged.
Went to the machine today, took the case off and found that the PSU fan had died. Took the PSU to various electronics shops but it turned out to be some strange mini atx PSU and nobody stocked them. So had to buy new case, PSU and a backing fan.
Then transplanted the machine from the old to new case (which took a while) and now the dev machine is back, alive and well.
Interesting INSPIRE centric article about how all the National Mapping Agencies will consolidate their holdings through EU Directive(s). I’m really still puzzling over why this is important. I think creating our own data is going to be better than political engagement on this, the NMAs are very well entrenched and we already hold the moral high ground.
