Blogs.OpenStreetMap.org

Why I use my GPS for other things than navigating..

Whoever is mapping Ghana and writes unknown town or city all over the place- please stop.
If you are really keen on mapping, please help importing the GEOnet Names Server Data- much more usefull. When someone comes around adding the correct names via import one has to delete all your unknown cities.

Please stop doing this- it adds only marginal value to the map and is a pain to clean up afterwards, when the map gets more complete over time.
Please use your much appreciated enthusiasm in a more sensitive way,

Thanks, Zenfunk

Dodana nova log datoteka i uctano:
- ulica u Karajkovi lokvi-Lošo,
-spojni zemljani put u Vukovičima.

Log datoteka prikupljena sa i-gotU i biciklom.

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/happy-national-geography-week/

A New Way to Use GPS

You probably know about GPS devices—maybe you even let one guide you to new destinations. But you can also use many GPS devices to gather data for Wiki maps at OpenStreetMap.org. Have students travel around their home area, gathering map data. Help them upload their data to the Web site.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/nov/19/digital-media-aol-foursquare-local-news-patch-peer
AOL sees revenues in local: Its CEO, Tim Armstrong, announced yesterday in New York that it plans to digitize entire towns with the help of Patch, the hyperlocal network it bought last year. Armstrong clearly sees a hole in the market here and plans to cover every aspect of community life from school boards to restaurants and shops. "We're hiring reporters," Armstrong said according to the business journal Portfolio.com. "Can you imagine that?"

Patch just switched to OpenStreetMap and appears to be busy with building its own map infrastructure, including designing, rendering and hosting its own tiles, according to zdnet. But that is not all. "Patch will go into stores, photograph everything and even tell consumers how many parking spaces there are," Armstrong said. "Even though it will have only 30 local communities outside New York City initially, it will scale substantially."

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=3206875

CloudMade is gearing up to release a set of tools that will enable people to quickly and easily contribute to the OpenStreetMap project.
At the same time the company is looking to create a developer model that will enable developers to use OpenStreetMap data and databases in their websites and iPhone applications.

"There are really two sides to this, there's a community facing side called Mapzen and a developer platform," said Nick Black, Founder of CloudMade.

Закончил редактированием Березняков.

After some months of rest, today I started editing on Palawan, a island in the west of the Philippines. As I am not very keen with editing OSM I would be glad if someone could look over my changes!

I am now an international man of mapmaking! I've uploaded the data from my business trip to Gaborone. Fixed some roads, added a road name or two, added a number of buildings and actually added new roads that weren't on the map at all! There are lots more that need to be added.

I took a lot of pictures of street names that just weren't readable. Unfortunately, when you're only there for a day and have to work, there's only so much time to write down street names.

I just finished adding the Tiger 2009 area polygon shapefiles for California. The data includes most parks, national forests, cemeteries, commercial areas, some schools, colleges and universities and more. I tried to remove the larger parks and areas to not duplicate existing areas. But some of the smaller parks were repeated and need to be manually removed. Also Tiger uses a weird set of abbreviations which I documented on the [[TIGER 2009]] wiki page. I corrected some of the later ones by opening the OSM file in a text editor and then doing a find and replace for each one. I uploaded all the counties except for Santa Cruz and Los Angeles which have already had imports done in them or have already been mapped. I added the points and water files in the bay area. A lot of these repeat what is on the ground, so I am going to let others add the other ones in their counties if they want. If anyone in the U.S. would like to upload data for their counties but doesn't know how to use the java shp-to-osm, let me know and I can email you the OSM files you can upload in JOSM.

ich habe die Liste von McDos aktualisiert, die laut mcdonalds.de existieren, ich aber nicht in OSM finden konnte. Jetzt 21 weniger.
Bitte nicht einfach eintragen, sondern nur wenn man mit GPS vor Ort war. Man muss auch nicht da essen.

http://wielandpusch.de/mcdomissing2.kml

Kann man sich z.B. mit
http://maps.google.de/?q=http://wielandpusch.de/mcdomissing2.kml
ansehen.

Fehler oder Kommentare gerne an mich oder hier.

Bitte Info an mich, wenn ihr einen Fehler behebt, dann ist es für mich einfacher.

Just finished a mission I set myself to clean out the UK Tagwatch (http://tagwatch.stoecker.eu) a bit. Don't panic though, I haven't been bulldozing away all the new and novel tags people are using, just going through it all carefully with a duster and having a go at the following:

*Fixing spelling mistakes. By the nature of Tagwatch, this mainly means spelling mistakes in the tags, not the values. For example, I'll definitely have caught amneity=parking, but not necessarily amenity=praking. Also I might have left a tag or two that was obviously only being used by one person as *all* instances were misspelled. ;-) This category included trailing spaces, although I think a lot of these get auto-fixed eventually even if I don't bother...

*Nonstandard -> standard tags. This was by far the biggest job, as these are trickier to spot by users outside of Tagwatch. Let's face it, we don't all remember the entire Map Features page all the time, and so sometimes we put max_speed instead of maxspeed, or think the tag for phone numbers is "telephone=" instead of "phone=". I know I do, since I've embarrassed myself by turning up plenty of my own mistakes like these as I've gone through...! Unfortunately some of the most common mistakes were made just too often to be fixed by hand by me in any sensible time: if anyone feels like finishing off "telephone=*" then go ahead, but you're in for a long job!

*Nonstandard -> nonstandard (i.e. unapproved) tags. This is the main controversial bit - I've tried to be as careful about it as I can, and I hope I haven't stood on anybody's toes too much while doing it. If I have - please do change back whatever you're annoyed about, or tell me to do it, or ask why I've done it (as a few people here and there have done already). My standard answer is that tags representing the same thing should be the same (and their exact wordings can be changed around later), so if I'm confident that Tag 1 means the same as well-used Tag 2 (and there aren't too many examples of Tag 1 to do this carefully on a case-by-case basis) then I've grouped them all under Tag 2, even if that tag doesn't have formal approval yet. Note that I'm not saying Tag 2 is good or Tag 1 is rubbish - just that there were very few examples of Tag 1 compared to lots of Tag 2. For example, one of the last things I did was take the "uk:row" tag (short for uk:right-of-way, I discovered) and merge it into the "designation" tag where all its values had corresponding values. It doesn't matter to me whether designation gets approved or replaced with something else - all I'm trying to do is make it so when the dust settles, you know where to search for the relevant nodes, ways and relations to start the conversion process.

*Grouping very minor tags. Some of these edits were a bit cheeky, but they're for the same kind of reasons as the set above. Consider them as no more than suggestions for tags you might like to use to represent a common concept...

So I know that this autumn-clean is going to be undone the very day I stop monitoring Tagwatch... but hopefully it's come in at least a bit useful and saved someone a bit of time down the line! I think I'll probably have another OSM break now though...

SbU

Edgemaster has loaded the NaPTAN data for East Yorkshire, so there's another 1622 stops to check. There's been quite a lot of muttering about data imports, much of which I agree with. I think imports should be treated as the start of a process to improve the data they bring and imports need managing by people local to the area the import covers. Imports can bring valuable data in their own right, and the process of checking them certainly gathers extra POIs and extra tracks for lightly covered areas. A few local mappers are checking their local stops.

We've been out locally checking the quality of the data. Compared to Hull's stops the ones in east Yorkshire seem to be much more accurately positioned. The biggest problem so far is that the Atco code is missing from many of the stop signs.

I know that the East Riding of Yorkshire council have some plans for assisting passengers with some new information system and I think they need to have the code on every stop so people know where they are. I hope they will benefit from our findings.

Today we checked the stops in Welton, Brough and Elloughton. There are few shelters and they are mostly old brick built ones, but a couple have been improved.

man_made:masts now seem to be rendered in Mapnik; anything else newish?

I added NearMap to the list of imagery presets in Potlatch 1.2f which'll hopefully be live soon. This makes mapping Australia slightly easier:

Unfortunately due to a Potlatch bug the full detail of NearMap isn't available in it. It's a bit harder to set up JOSM for NearMap but the resulting detail is insane, here are some people on the beach on Rottnest Island at zoom 23 in JOSM:

Jueves, día 19 de noviembre de 2009;

¡ A trazar mi ciudad !

Hiermit fang ich mal an. :-)

Dodane log datoteke i ucrtano:
-dio trase biciklističke staze Sinj3 oko Ćitluka,
-dodani si .gpx filovi biciklističkih staza oko grada Sinja,koji su skupljali biciklisti tijekom akcije TZ Sinj.

Prva log datoteka je prikupljena sa i-gotU i biciklom.
Ostale rute su samo dodane,jer za večinu več postoji zapis od prije.

as per http://nearmap.lefora.com/2009/11/12/edit-the-map-instructions/15826202/

If you're a NearMap (http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/JohnSmith/diary/8559) fan, you can now go to their website, have a cruise around their imagery with the "StreetMap" layer turned on, then when you see something not quite right, you can (now) click on their edit link and have a Potlatch screen (with the Nearmap imagery) come right up at the same spot. Genius!

Example URL: http://openstreetmap.org/edit?lat=-27.47223&lon=153.01384&zoom=19&tileurl=http%3A//www.nearmap.com/kh/zxy%3D%21%2C%21%2C%21

With any luck the quality of edits will snowball in the areas Nearmap have covered.

Bonjour,
Je viens de terminer le tracé de la Maine (49). Facile vous allez me dire, étant donné qu'elle ne fait que 11,5 km de long !! En effet (petit cours de géographie gratuit), la Maine naît de la jonction de la Mayenne et de la Sarthe et se jette dans la Loire peu après Angers. Par terminer le tracé, je veux dire :
- chemin 'waterway=river'
- rives 'waterway=riverbank'
- relation 'type=river'

Le bien-fondé de cette dernière est en discussion sur la page http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Rivers où son existence même est débattue. Je n'ai pas (encore) l'expérience pour participer activement mais je trouve l'argument du principal opposant à l'utilisation de cette relation convainquant. La relation apporte le tag 'tributary_of=*' afin de définir la dépendance affluent/confluent d'un cours d'eau par rapport à un autre. Le contre-argument est qu'il suffit de suivre les chemins des sources aux embouchures pour reconstituer le bassin. Information dans la base de données contre calcul à la demande, problème classique mais pour lequel je ne connais pas assez bien la structure interne d'OSM pour trancher. Qu'en pensez-vous ?

Par ailleurs, j'ai profité de ce travail pour reprendre un peu la présentation, le contenu et la traduction de la page WikiProject http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:WikiProject_France/Cours_d%27eau . Je ne suis pas seul à m'y intéressé heureusement, et les discussions avec Frodrigo avancent :-) J'y reprend en partie la discussion du paragraphe précédent.

Quand à pourquoi les cours d'eau, et pourquoi la Maine en particulier, ce sera pour un autre jour ;-)

Finally my new GPS has arrived - Garmin etrx Legend HCx. Somewhat smaller than I thought it would be but that is a good thing.
Took it out for its virgin voyage and collected a few missing streets in central Bendigo (Australia). (Definitely no chance of hitting an iceberg today with the temperature nearly touching 40C!).
Will start picking up some more detail around home when I take the kids for a walk/ride. Hopefully the Bendigo map will change often (and not just from my contributions).

Поредна редакция на алеите в западния парк. Вече добива някакъв вид. Засякох и точките на няколко кръстовища и установих със сигурност че фоновите снимки на Yahoo са изместени около 10м на запад-северозапад! Доста корекции трябва да се направят...

I've changed the tracktype of a track from grade2 to grade1 since it is paved. However, on the map (http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=47.87241&lon=11.68913&zoom=17&layers=B000FTF) still a short segment of the track is rendered like grade2. Looking at the data I can not see the reason for this, the whole track should be grade1. Can anybody tell me what's wrong here?

Meinolf

Most if not all of the west side of Joliet (still have a couple far west subdivisions to put in yet), Rockdale and Crest Hill have been corrected. A small part of Plainfield (south part) has been corrected as well. Now I'm focused on getting Romeoville covered (about 70% completed). After I get Romeoville taken care of, I'll finish up Plainfield and eventually update the Channahon - Minooka area.

A few months ago, the Sloth and I decided to recreate last year’s PCRT camp out. Various scheduling conflicts pushed the trip back a few weeks this year, and we missed the fall leaves this time.

Mrs. Sloth kindly agreed to shuttle us up to the north end of the trail. After fiddling with our panniers for a few minutes, we were under way by about 11:00.

After a few miles, we encountered a momma bear with two cubs crossing the trail. We stopped our bikes to exchange pleasantries, but she was in rather a hurry with pre-hibernation errands to run. She led her cubs off the trail before we even had time to get our cameras out.

We spent the rest of the day rolling along, taking in the sights, shooting the breeze about various things, and taking numerous snack breaks.

Before long, it became obvious that darkness would find us before we found out camp site. We did not figure into our calculations that last year’s ride occurred before the daylight saving time change. Not that it was anything to be concerned about, since we were both rocking dynohubs. Along the way, the Sloth’s headlight cable got tangled in his spokes, which rendered his headlight unusable. We were able to find our way into camp by the light from my headlight without incident.

After we set up camp, we sat down to some fine Esbit-warmed cuisine.

With full bellies and many hours of darkness to while away before bedtime, we scavenged about for some firewood. The area around the camp site was picked pretty clean by previous campers, but we found enough to keep a small fire going until about 9:00. When the fire went out, we went to bed.

The morning sunlight revealed a huge pile of firewood in an unoccupied camp site a few yards from ours. We muttered curses under our breaths and made some breakfast and coffee. I made a pot from some Java Juice packets I brought along in an effort to save weight.

The Sloth is thankfully a bit more picky about his caffeine than I am, and produced from his panniers a french press and some freshly ground fancy-pants coffee from India. It put my java juice to shame.

We got rolling again, and passed a lot more cyclists than we had the day before. We passed a fellow heading the opposite direction, and a few seconds later, came across what appeared to be a blowdown.

Closer inspection revealed the truth. We were under attack by crazed beavers.

We moved the tree off the trail, and continued on our way.

Near the end of the trail, I was starting to have some problems with my hands and my butt. I looked down at the GPS on my handlebars (I was getting a trace for OpenStreetMap), and noticed that our moving average speed was somewhere around 10mph. It occurred to me that maybe drop-handebar touring bicycles are not the optimal equipment for a leisurely ride like this. Maybe there is a better piece of equipment for this.

I have long been of the opinion that bicycle technology was essentially perfected in the late 1970’s. I’m now hypothesising that it may, in fact, have been perfected fifty years earlier.

I’ll find out shortly.

I added a river to the waterfalls and some of the walking paths to get there. I'll have to go back to check it with my GPS.

I renamed Waterfalls to Upper Waterfalls and tried adding a point for Lower Waterfalls (right next to it) but that point isn't showing up (so I added another). And sometimes the upper falls still just say Waterfalls (or maybe that's a cache problem) at least on the edit screen it does sometimes.

Are there some kinds of layers with this editor for when to have things show up?

Gary
http://GarySaid.com/tags/montezuma/

Modified the map of the city a little bit. Added phones, church, school, football (soccer) field, pay phones, bus stop, Chico's bar and the two supermarkets.

Added the other road that goes through town, but people don't really drive though it, more to get to places. Added my favorite hotel (Montezuma Pacific) and tried to add a park but couldn't get it to show properly (it's on the edit screen).

Gary
http://GarySaid.com/tags/montezuma/

Dodane 4 log datoteke i ucrtano:
-cesta u gradu Trilju prema crpnoj stanici;dijelovi cikloturističke staze Zagora7,
-dio D220 od Čaporica do čvora u Bisku,
-ispravljena i dodan tag županijska cesta 6263 u Blatu na cetini,
-ispravljena kategorizacija i tag za državnu cestu D70 od čvora Blato na cetini do Omiša,
-županijska cesta 6166 od Omiša do Zadvarja,
-lokalna cesta L67123 preko Svinišča.

Log datoteke prikupljene i-gotu i automobilom.

Decided to sign up to Open Street Map. I plan to do some editting of Copamnthorpe, York. I live and work here, so I should be able to add some useful information.

Hi Folks,

ich habe mir mal die Uniwildnis und den Stadtwald in Bremen zu Herzen genommen und angefangen, die ganzen kleinen Pfade durch dieses Gebiet aufzuzeichnen und einzutragen.
Dazu benutze ich mein neues (besseres) GPS-Gerät, das auch im Wald recht genaue Ergebnisse erzielen soll.
Es fehlen noch ein paar wenige Pfade; das kommt aber noch.
Für die OSM-Cracks unter Euch habe ich ein paar Unklarheiten, bei deren Erhellung Ihr mir vielleicht helfen könnt:

- Ein großer Teil des Gebietes ist im Besitz des Vereins „Freunde der Uniwildnis e.V.“, welcher der Öffentlichkeit das Betreten erlaubt. Deren Gebiet ist hier eingezeichnet: http://www.uniwildnis.de/Plan_Uniwildnis_2004-4.jpg
Sollten wir das auch in der Karte kenntlich machen? Ich meine: eher nicht, da wir ja auch sonst keine Besitzverhältnisse einzeichnen.
Bislang ist „Uniwildnis“ nur als POI eingezeichnet.

- Der von mir „Naturcampingplatz“ genannte Campingplatz bezeichnet sich laut ein paar Zeitungsartikeln selbst so. Ist das aber wirklich der offizielle Name?
Dazu noch: ich werde die Wege auf diesem Campingplatz in nächster Zeit nicht aufzeichnen. Könnte das jemand Anderes machen? Ihr Studis habt doch öfter mal Freistunden!

- „Uniwildnis“ ist der bekanntere Name für das Gebiet zwischen Strand und Naturcampingplatz (siehe URL zum JPG oben). Der offizielle ist „Naturschutzgebiet am Stadtwaldsee“, wobei ich mir nicht sicher bin, ob das NSG sich nicht auch auf das Betreten-Verboten-Gebiet erstreckt, in dem es gar keine Pfade gibt. Sollte das NSG also auch eingezeichnet werden? Wenn ja: mit welchen Grenzen?

- Der Hundeplatz wurde von mir das „Playground“ mit Beschaffenheit „Sand“ getagged. Das ist eher falsch, da darunter ja eher Kinderspielplatz als Hundespielplatz verstanden wird, oder? Allerdings fiel mir einfach kein besser Tag dafür ein.

Dankbar für Hilfe,
Lew

I have been busy mapping along the Petite Cote in Senegal. I have found numerous occurrences of Yahoo sourced roads with multiple concurring GPS tracks lying some distance away - clearly showing that the road is not following the correct path. I corrected them with the more precise path. That shows that when multiple GPS tracks are available and concur, they should be relied upon more than third party sources.

Благодаря неоценимой помощи товарища DR с использованием данных Vmap0 и сервера WMS была обновлена граница края.
На подходе населенные пункты.
После обкатки технологии её можно будет применять повсеместно.
Подробности позже.

This will make a big change.
see http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/17/ordnance-survey-maps-online

How about that, then? Or as the Map Room succinctly put it, “Holy shit.”

Good news for:

• Google, Yahoo, Microsoft. Free maps, and unlike the US, good-quality free maps which they can start using right out the box.
• Ordnance Survey. I wrote here previously that OS’s best chance of surviving was to open up street name/geometries, boundaries, postcodes, peaks, rivers and PROWs, and to keep charging for the large-scale stuff. This seems to be pretty much what’s promised. I still believe that it’s absolutely the right decision for them. (Also, I am rather smug.)
• The Guardian. Launching a campaign is a risky business for any publication, especially a fairly obscure and, at times, seemingly fruitless campaign like ‘Free Our Data’. It has paid off – and of all the organisations campaigning for this, the Guardian is the only one that anyone has ever heard of.
• Apple et al. Insofar as Apple ever gives a shit about anything that happens outside the US, they no longer have to depend on anyone for UK iPhone maps. Not Google, not Tele Atlas. No-one. (Incidentally, if UK mobile carriers had any brains, they would now write their own mapping app and bundle it with their iPhone contracts. Fortunately they don’t.)
• Cartographers. Maps will now compete on cartography, not on data. This is an absolute shot in the arm for skilled cartographers and could go a long way to reviving the craft in the UK. With my Waterways World hat on, I’m delighted: our cruising guide maps can get better than they are now, yet anyone wanting to compete still has to learn how to produce lovely maps.
• Developers. Same applies. I am really looking forward to what people come up with. If I were an iPhone dev I would start writing that killer app now, ready to release when the data arrives.
• Wider Government. Full release instantly becomes the standard for public data. There is now absolutely no excuse for, say, the Environment Agency to withhold its fisheries data. That means more third-party sites that do funky things with public data. I suspect that will help in breaking the stranglehold of evil big outsourcers on Government IT projects.
• This blog because I can stop writing about boring map copyright law and start writing about fun things, like canals, organs and the new William Orbit album.

Possibly good news for:

• OpenStreetMap. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this wouldn’t have happened without OSM. The inevitability that OSM would, in time, catch up with OS small-scale mapping absolutely vindicates the project. And, hey, complete data for the whole UK – what could be cooler?
      But on the other hand, everyone else has it, too. How do ongoing changes get integrated into the OSM database? Will the UK community survive a sudden change in tack from surveying the basemap to becoming a provider of ‘added value’? Will smaller public domain mapping projects create an informal, developer-led community without OSM’s harsh share-alike restriction? Will UK OSM developers (who lead the project) get bored of it now there’s not such a unique need? How many questions can I get in one paragraph?
      Oh, and there’s the licence. I dread to think what would happen if the chosen licence wasn’t compatible with OSM.

Bad news for:

• Tele Atlas and Navteq. See G-Y-M above. On the up side, their parent companies no longer have to bother collecting UK data for their satnavs/mobile phones. But that’s like saying Tesco giving free food away is good news for Sainsbury’s, which can now take it and resell it for 1p.

Where’s yours? Get one here!

Sorry to all who tried my map program which shows individual POIs on http://www.lenz-online.de/osm.
I just found out that the xapi call had to be adapted to a new revision. :(

Paul Lenz

Hopefully a good start....with the impetus being the NY Times article of today.

I was rightly picked up on an errant Post Box reference recently, the post Box outside Bayswater Tube central London. I Cycle past it near every day, I am usually late so have little time to re check my post boxes, so today I did.

Anyway... that is not the point. Looking at the area in JOSM we have examples of recreational parks glued to streets, masking the roads - see Prince's Square just west of Bayswater ( I have not corrected it so it can serve as an example. )
To the West side of this square in the map data we have two roads overlayed over one another with different names.

Again, this is not a big deal and i have not corrected so that it can servce as an example. A street usually does not have two names ( unless there is a former and new name ).

I am not at ease with things glued to other things ( ie streets glued to parks, or rivers glued to boundaries etc ), it doesn't make sense, not in a CAD world or real world for that matter, and i usually unglue them in JOSM . A Boundary would run down the middle of a street, a park neither in a real world or any other is glued to or overlaps a street, they are distinct objects, and thus should be represented as such, especially in an electronic map / representation which has in theory an infinite degree of resolution and detail.

Hopefully i am not being a desperate pedant here, I would be glad if someone could put me straight before I run amok and start 'correcting' things in my style rather than accepted OSM style

cheers bri

I went on a circular ride around the Butterleigh area. Many steep hills and quite a few tracks to map. I did one complete track and a few parts of others. Other people seem to have mapped here with very little GPS data, so I corrected some roads which were not in the right place.

existing lompoc tuesday

I'm a map lover intrigued with this new (to me) application. I bicycle everywhere so am acutely aware of minor errors in maps. Today I removed a non-existent street near my home.

ich habe eine Liste von McDos erzeugt, die laut mcdonalds.de existieren, ich aber nicht in OSM finden konnte.
Bitte nicht einfach eintragen, sondern nur wenn man mit GPS vor Ort war. Man muss auch nicht da essen.

http://wielandpusch.de/mcdomissing.kml

Kann man sich z.B. mit
http://maps.google.de/?q=http://wielandpusch.de/mcdomissing.kml
ansehen.

Fehler oder Kommentare gerne an mich oder hier.

Ipsos Mori on trust. Less than half of us trust pollsters.

Another quick WebGL update. I’ve now got working the last WebGL feature that I wanted to before starting to develop the OSM viewer, namely lighting. Thanks once again to Giles at learningwebgl.com, without whom this would have been very much more difficult. The lighting example is available here; the lighting consists of a dim white ambient light and a red directional light shining towards negative z. I haven’t explained how it works in great detail – you might want to look at Lesson 7 of learningwebgl.com for that – but one extra feature it does have is that the light shines in a defined direction in world, rather than eye space. This explanation requires at least a little understanding of OpenGL and the difference between world and eye coordinates, so please bear with me. We want the light to always shine towards negative z in world space, but not necessarily in eye space, otherwise the light would always shine towards the point the camera is looking at, which we do not want. To do this, it is necessary in the vertex shader to transform not only the normals by the normal matrix, but also to transform the lighting direction by the modelview matrix, so that it shines in an appropriate direction in eye space. If you look at example 5, you can see this happening.

The other change I’ve made to all the examples is how buffers are handled. Following Giles’ change I have followed suit: I understand buffers a bit better now (the whole buffer thing was definitely the most complex aspect of my experience of learning WebGL so far…); the idea seems to be that we create the buffers once when we start the application, fill them with vertex (or colour or normal if applicable) data, and then keep a handle on each buffer for later use when we actually want to do some drawing. All this code is wrapped up in a ShaderInterface class, a code extract from that class to set up and return a buffer follows:

sendDataToShader: function(data)
{
var buffer1= this.gl.createBuffer();
this.gl.bindBuffer(this.gl.ARRAY_BUFFER,buffer1);
this.gl.bufferData
(this.gl.ARRAY_BUFFER,new CanvasFloatArray(data),
this.gl.STATIC_DRAW);
return buffer1;
},

Hopefully you can see that what this code is doing is reading in our data (vertex, colour or normal data), creating a buffer, and then filling the buffer with the data and returning the buffer to the outside world.

Then, when we want to draw one of our shapes, we select the buffer(s) we want to use, i.e. the buffer containing the vertices for that shape, and optionally, the buffer containing the vertex colours for that shape and/or the buffer containing the vertex normals for that shape. So, if we had three cubes of differing sizes, we might have three buffers containing the vertices for each cube, three buffers containing the colours for each cube, but just one buffer for the normals (because normals for cubes aligned with the x,y and z axes are always going to be the same). Before we draw each cube, we’d select the appropriate vertex and colour buffers for that cube – but we’d only need to select the normal buffer once, as once you select a given buffer, that buffer remains as the current buffer until we select another.

A code extract for selecting a buffer follows:

selectBuffer: function(bufferIn,shadervarIn)
{
this.gl.bindBuffer(this.gl.ARRAY_BUFFER,bufferIn);
this.gl.vertexAttribPointer(shadervarIn,3,this.gl.FLOAT,false,0,0);
},

Note how we specify the buffer and also the shader attribute it’s associated with (shadervarIn) e.g. a normal buffer would be associated with the shader attribute for normals.

Anyway, hope that explanation was some use if you’re grappling with buffers, you might also want to look at the code in all 5 examples. Next stop – first development phase of the OpenStreetMap viewer!

I noticed that only one of the islands of the Johnston Atoll, to the southeast of the Hawaiian Islands, had a name tag, so I added names to all the islands, as well as a name tag for the entire atoll.

I'm looking for a routable map of London. Any idea?

I have made some smaller additions to the eastern part of the bicycle route named Emscher-Weg. But it is still not complete.

I got a map with a diversion route in Holzwickede from Emschergenossenschaft. This is the organisation which has created the bicycle route and is in charge of it. It might be that OpenStreetMap currently is the only map including that diversion route.

The entry for Emscher-Weg ("EW") on this Wiki page contains helpful links for further work on that route.

Good news: Got sent for 1 day to Gabarone on business.

Bad news: OSM coverage is patchy at best, and one rushed day didn't allow me to get that much.

Good news: OSM coverage is patchy at best, so even one rushed day allowed me to add new roads (coming soon. Need sleep first!)

Bad news: Lost my Nokia GPS unit.

Good news: Only lost it at the airport on the way out.

Bad news: Lost property can't find it.

Good news: At least the traces were safely on my phone.

Bad news: Have to buy a new GPS unit.

Good news: At least this time I remembered to use the OSM Amazon.com merchandise link!

trip with VW

This is the Livingston Parish Council on Aging
It is located in at 949 Government Street in Denham springs Louisiana
Phone Number is 225-664-9343

There is a new OpenStreetBugs JavaScript client that makes it possible to easily include OpenStreetBugs into an OpenLayers map. See the announcement on http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2009-November/044206.html and the Wiki page on http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetBugs/New_Client.

There are 16 labels to be translated, currently an English and a German translation are available. If you have some time left over, help translating it on http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetBugs/New_Client/Translation.

See the article here.

This week is National Geography Awareness Week. Hopefully you’re celebrating it your own way by enjoying a map, thanking a cartographer, or even doing some mapping yourself! It’s clear that mapping and geo have entered the mainstream – everyone is engaging with maps through navigation systems, friend location finders, and virtual globes. The next step is to make people aware of the potential for them to personally engage with place and location for personal interests, business uses, and community building.

This Wednesday, I will be giving the GISDay plenary talk at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. My talk, “Neogeography: from Tower to Town Hall” will discuss how the movement to broad, public engagement and collaboration, particularly around geographic contexts through web maps, mobile devices, and open data can build stronger communities, improved research, representative government and better livelihoods of people. (link to the UVA Calendar)

Around Washington, DC you can join the OpenStreetMapping party in Bethesda, MD on Saturday, or you can check out the large list other activities at GISVirginia. Whatever you do, spread the word and encourage people to go out and map something.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” – Gandhi.

See story here.

The Prime Minister and Communities Secretary John Denham will today announce that the public will have more access to Ordnance Survey maps from next year, as part of a Government drive to open up data to improve transparency.

Speaking at a seminar on Smarter Government in Downing Street later today, attended by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, the Prime Minister will set out how the Government and Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping agency, will open up its data relating to electoral and local authority boundaries, postcode areas and mid scale mapping information.

Dodana log datoteka i ucrtano:
-dionice biciklističke staze Sinj2 i 3 na predjelu Vučići-Han.

Log datoteka prikupljena sa i-gotU i biciklom.

Today I found this OpenStreetMap site and joined in so I could update the Bridford Downs townhome complex in Greensboro.

We had a nice long merry drinking session last night for our London pub meet-up.

We arrived a bit late because Andy was on a mission to map bicycle parking. I usually drop in a few of these while I'm out mapping, but when you're actually deliberately looking out for them (and nothing else), there's quite a few of them. Andy's knocked up a wee heat map:

But there's plenty more to map in central London. You can add the capacity too (tag docs)

But enough of this mapping. This was supposed to be a pub meet-up. Again the Blue Posts near Oxford Street provided plenty of space and a good venue for map-chat despite upstairs being closed on a Monday. The pub grub was pretty reasonable too. Shaun ordered lasagne in his Scottish accent and got steak'n'ale pie, and Matt dropped half his macaroni cheese on the floor. All adds to the entertainment.

A wide a array of topics were covered, and topics became more random as the cheap sam smiths booze flowed.

There is a plan to add ventilation holes to the metal server cabinet door. This is necessary. It's not just because Andy wants to use his new power drill :-) Also on the servers topic, there is a plan to install a new one hosted at a different London university. That might actually go ahead this evening, but maybe I shouldn't speak too soon. Anyway this prompted increasingly less serious conversations about universities, including Matt's story of how to clog up a super-fancy new uni printer by sending it a little ray-tracing job. We even got onto talking about ADFS and other outrageously geeky topics.

It was nice to relax with much beer and friends after an intense couple of weeks giving talks to GIS people and trying to piece together a new career plan. In fact with all that going on, I forgot to write a diary entry about the last meet-up in at McGlynns in Kings Cross. Ah well. Here's photos from McGlynns. As for last night, I forgot to take photos apart from this masterpiece:

Not very much blood in my alcohol stream at the moment, but Steve's visiting from U.S. at the moment, so the situation is unlikely to improve.

Fixed Elizabeth St - doesn't connect to Canning Hwy near Douglas Avenue.
Corrected Willow Tree Drive name in Kewdale, bike paths for Tomato Lake.

Whether we should tag streets indicating whether it has an associated footway/cycleway is a discussion that comes up again and again on OpenStreetMap forums. Currently there's an ongoing discussion on the mailing list for Denmark discussing whether or not the cycleways in Copenhagen should be represented as cycleway=lane tags on the streets or as separate highway=cycleway ways alongside the street.

Rather than discuss that specific issue I think it's worth stepping back and thinking about it makes sense to represent the sort of complex map data we're likely to get in the future where we want to accurately represent highways, pedestrian areas, intersections and other things like that.

Right now most intersections in OSM look like this:

These ways may or may not have an associated pedestrian pavement.

Here's the same intersection with added pedestrian ways & crossings:

No tags on the way (within reason) are going to intuitively represent where I should cross the street without making separate ways. It's also easy to add to the map where e.g. a button I can press to activate the pedestrian crossing is.

And this is what I think OSM should look like in The Future:

Here we have an intersection with pedestrian ways alongside the road & areas for both the road and the pedestrian areas (if this was accurate enough you could automatically drive an RC car with OSM data). There's a cycleway on the street that has been mapped separately, although not as an area because I was lazy when making this example.

Someone who doesn't want to do intelligent routing can just ignore all these fancy areas and just use highway=* ways which aren't areas. This is the case with rivers/riverbanks at the moment where we support both:

But would anyone be crazy enough to map everything as areas? Yes, this is how traditional GIS databases have been maintained for decades, here's an example of an intersection from Reykjavík, Iceland in LUKR:

Entered a few public establishments in the Taylor Road Vaughn Road area of Montgomery. Gained some basic familiarity with the mapping rules, and visited some ancillary sites to see about tags for banks and other types of businesses not already identified on the map with tags already.

Editing NTNU campuses