Blogs.OpenStreetMap.org

local store coupons

2009-11-07T09:56:30+00:00

local store coupons
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free local coupons
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JOSM on the Eeepc

2009-11-07T08:58:02+00:00

Have tried using JOSM on the Eeepc 701 netbook, seems to work nicely.

I mapped West Perth using the Eeepc based on street addresses, collecting business information in a openoffice spreadsheet. You can see the results at www.mineraldata.com.au under the West Perth Business Map section.

I think for taking down street numbers JOSM and the eeepc may not be the easiest method, the old pen and paper method with a print out of building outlines is probably easier and quicker.

However for recording a lot of business names (often long), bus stops, post offices, public phones car parks etc etc JOSM, wireless internet, livegps and a usbGPS might be a good and cheap setup. I have yet to try livegps but the usbGPS and internet connection would be optional as long as building outlines & address are already in OSM.

I also see that there is a wikipage on Asus Eee http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Asus_EEE.

Would be curious to know if anyone has any success with a setup like this.

In my experience I found it do-able by cradling the eee in one arm and typing with the other!

Hard at work …

2009-11-06T16:21:45+00:00

Just a short blog post as we’ve been relatively quiet in the last few weeks!

Simon in particular has been knuckling down on some new core routing algorithm work which is set to speed up longer journeys in dense areas like London. We’ll blog on this soon, once a key bug has been squashed.

We’ve also been working to improve the backend feedback system so that it will be easier to get more local contacts on board. We’re working through quite a backlog of feedback and better management of this is a priority.

We also hope to be welcoming a few new members to our team shortly. This has highlighted the need for further improvements to the clarity of our code. We remain committed to open sourcing the code once auditing and reorganisation has been completed. With only 1.2 of us, and little funding, a larger team will be a great help.

Lastly, we’ve been putting the finishing touches for a new branded website front-end for Cambridgeshire County Council to enable members of the public to pinpoint locations where they’d like to see cycle parking created and obstructions removed, building on the Photomap code in CycleStreets. More news on this soon!

PS Great to see more Local Authorities starting to link to our journey planner, Edinburgh being the latest! We’re working on our Local Authority strategy as the routing engine matures and route quality is ramped up gradually.

Two Moors Way

2009-11-06T16:15:13+00:00

Yesterday walked the southernmost 10 miles or so of the Two Moors Way from Ivybridge upto the junction of paths just south of the old Red Lake Clay Works. This section mostly follows the path of an old disused tramway so is easy to follow.

Couldn't see any official starting point for the trail in Ivybridge, in fact the only signage I saw for the trail at all was "MW" carved into a couple of gate posts along the way.

highlighting and Marking Unnamed streets on Garmin ??

2009-11-06T11:56:35+00:00

Okay - so I have been a bit busy trying to map kaduna. The ariel imagery was great and little has needed to be added, though I am collecting all my GPX traces for upload on my return to the UK.

What I have been adding is tags, local details, banks, hotels and street names etc.

When I downloaded the Nigeria map for Garmins ( IMG format ) from Cloudmade all the unnamed streets were highlighted in red which was really useful.

This download understandably is only updated weekly and I am currently completing nightly builds of Kaduna OSM, saving that ( from JOSM ) and using MKGMAP to convert to an IMG.

My question is, does anybody have a tool that will allow me to mimic Cloudmade's OSM to IMG tool and highlight streets in Red making my life a bit easier?

cheers bri

abandoned no more

2009-11-06T10:59:25+00:00

It looks like abandoned railway lines are at long last rendered.

Anything else 'new'?

uploaded a GPX file / Ohsu, Nagoya, Japan #osmjp

2009-11-06T08:55:39+00:00

どうせにほんごはついーとされないんでしょ。ふん。

今日は野良猫ウォークで大須商店街あたりをのらのらうろうろしてきたよ。

West Perth, Western Australia

2009-11-06T08:27:18+00:00

Added some traffic signals, bus stops, rail crossings and a few other features in West Perth, Western Australia.

Car Parking seems to be the next logical addition. I will add these as polygons -- thus making it clear how much space they really take up! There is a fair amount of private parking and fee parking in West Perth. Looks like this is the scheme to use along with key=fee.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Additional_parking_types_for_amenity%3Dparking

Tarifa / Spain

2009-11-06T02:47:37+00:00

I am doing my best mapping Tarifa (the most southern city on the european continent), but now all gps tracks are used (and some are really unexact).
We need some fresh tracks (I am not there to get some) or a local balloon photographer.

TopOSM-Colorado update

2009-11-06T01:04:37+00:00

While I've had less time than usual to spend on TopOSM lately (due to me, and my servers, moving), I just finished re-rendering Colorado with new, fresh data from planet.osm, as well as a few bugfixes thrown in. Among the latter are that ski lifts, aerial tramways and other "aerialways" are now rendered on the map, and that I fixed the bug with disappearing unpaved roads/tracks. As usual, you can check the update at http://toposm.com/co/ Enjoy!

Utterly depressing Flickr group

2009-11-05T21:53:00+00:00

Another collection of bad cycle lanes, from the Guardian.

The original is here

And there's a poll on cycle lanes here. Please treat it with respect.

if-modified-since for tiles

2009-11-05T19:50:57+00:00

1) Why do the OSM mapnik tiles not have timestamps via the if-modified-since HTML header?

2) I saw the question on http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Tile_usage_policy#.22If-Modified-Since.22_HTTP_header as well. Is that the right place to discuss the topic, and if not, where should I ask?

Gradovi u HR (i izmjena onih što to nisu)

2009-11-05T19:28:14+00:00

Radilo se puno toga...
Ali jedno bitno je da sam unio sve gradove u HR (place=town) i izmjeno one što to nisu u place=village.

A prema Zakoni o područjima županija, gradova i općina u Republici Hrvatskoj

http://narodne-novine.nn.hr/clanci/sluzbeni/127788.html

Cyclemap problems with waterways

2009-11-05T18:47:51+00:00

What's with most of the northern Willamette Valley appearing flooded here?

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=45.253&lon=-122.795&zoom=9&layers=00B0FTF

Cyclemap problems with waterways

2009-11-05T18:47:46+00:00

What's with most of the northern Willamette Valley appearing flooded here?

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=45.253&lon=-122.795&zoom=9&layers=00B0FTF

GPS-Articles in the current issue of german Linux Magazin

2009-11-05T18:10:05+00:00

Gebabbel Logo

The current issue 12/2009 of the german »Linux Magazin« features several GPS related articles. On page 40 there’s one about Openstreetmap on mobile devices, especially the N810.

Though I have written some papers for various conferences, it was a completely new experience to prepare a manuscript for a magazine and to read the printed transmogrification afterwards. Frankly, I learned a lot. It’s always great to write about things you think you are savvy about, as it closes gaps in your knowledge and forces you to go even more into detail.

I needed to test the latest versions of the software I’ve written about. Many things had changed, so it was essential to try out all commands and listings provided in the article to avoid misinformation.

All in all, a great experience, joy and pleasure. I will happily write another one in case I was asked.

Finally back mapping....

2009-11-05T11:52:00+00:00

After having my bike stolen, its been a while since I did some mapping. The new one is much better anyway, so am trying to get on it as much as possible in between the rubbish weather we're having.

My first attempt on Monday was rather disappointing though. The GPS data I got was completely wrong and traces showed me travelling through large buildings and rivers...

should every OSMer be an expert in Geodesy?

2009-11-05T11:50:19+00:00

Found this from a blog comment about OSM.

"I suggest that you should invite a mapping professional into your group. Mapping is not a kiddy thing. It requires knowledge on Geometric Geodesy and GPS Systematic Errors. Without the required knowledge, doing mapping is just like wearing a blindfold blindly."

http://mapping.ideacampdavao.com/2009/07/davao-mapping-party-post-party-report.html

newbie: I want to contribute to OSM
OSM "expert": Welcome! I suggest you start reading ASPRS journals on Geodesy and GPS geometric corrections.
newbie: OH OK, bye.

Avancement de Chantepie (35)

2009-11-05T11:36:33+00:00

Il ne manque plus grand chose pour que tous les bâtiments du centre de Chantepie soient tracés. Je viens d'importer le landuse=residential de CLC06 correspondant à ce centre.
Voici une liste (non exhaustive) de ce qu'il reste à faire :
- finir les bâtiments (reste 2 petits quartiers (dont un en construction)) et 2 rues ;
- vérifier sur place et éventuellement corriger les éléments sur lesquels j'ai eu des doutes au cours du tracé (notes personnelles) ;
- préciser/fignoler les commerces du centre (avenue Bonnin principalement) ;
- s'attaquer aux quartiers extérieurs au centre (dont la zone intra-rocade) ;
- importer les tuiles CLC correspondantes.

Tout volontaire pour m'aider est le bienvenu :-)
Stéphane

I accidentally my neighborhood

2009-11-05T11:25:21+00:00

http://rax.tumblr.com/post/233811853

First edits

2009-11-05T11:08:36+00:00

Started reading the beginners guide and using JOSM (nice). Made a few edits and added the remaining post boxes in West Perth south of the railway line.

Also tried out the osm features in qgis by adding some parks in West Perth. I have all the data for the West Perth Business Map (www.mineraldta.com.au) in gis layers so qgis will make it much easier to upload this data. qgis 1.3 returned a python error when trying to upload but version 1.2 worked but the tags weren't uploaded....something to figure out...

I'm pretty impressed!

Changes on OpenTouchMap

2009-11-05T10:48:14+00:00

Hi there,

if you are using an Iphone or an Ipod touch have a look at:
http://www.opentouchmap.org/

It is now more usable as I changed from openlayers to touchMapLite (http://sourceforge.net/projects/touchmaplite/)

Por fin me decido

2009-11-05T10:44:16+00:00

Por fin me decido a empezar seriamente con esto, esoty todos los días dándole un ratito al OpenStreetMap y la verdad es que engancha. Lo que considero mi trabajo (por ahora) es dar forma a la ciudad de Granada, añadir y corregir calles, hasta completar un callejero más o menos bueno. Por supuesto yo solo no me puedo ocupar de granada, y me estoy ocupando sobre todo de mis zonas, que son el barrio de la juventud, la zona cercana a la facultad de informática y zona centro (camino ronda, arabial y gran capitán), que son las zonas que más conozco.

Todo esto hasta que nos dejen poner las fotos del SigPac de fondo a la edición de mapas, y pueda perfilar algunas que me estoy dejando por falta de detalle, y pueda meterle mano a mi pueblo, Alcalá la Real, que no se ve absolutamente nada en el fondo de la ventana de edición de OSM.

Un saludo a todos!

Mapping footpaths on WUR campus

2009-11-05T09:10:48+00:00

I'm out to map all the footpaths on WUR's new campus. (WUR is Wageningen University in Wageningen, Netherlands.) I have noticed the current OpenStreetMap this region of the Netherlands is somewhat incorrect. Hopefully in the next month or so, I can clean it up.

I'm using my trusty old Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx. The mapsource on it is the OpenStreetMap of the Netherlands.

Yesterday, I've upload some tracks, but I'm not sure if I have done it correctly. I'm waiting to see if my uploads show up on the GPS Traces page.

I'm a newbie to this project, so my contributions may not be perfect for the first few.

Shanghai

2009-11-05T02:39:36+00:00

Leaving in Shanghai, I just updated my home street, but I see Shanghai is still full of mistakes. Come on Shanghaiese, let's get to work!

Land Rover Stage n

2009-11-05T00:51:19+00:00

I’ve not been updating this site cos I’ve been working on the Land Rover so much! I’ve lost count of all the stages that it’s gone through, but I’m hoping this is the last one.

All being well, I could get the work done before the end of November and in time for a tax disc in December. However, a 2 week holiday in December makes that a little uneconomical. We’ll see… economics vs eagerness.

Things that have been done so far…
Refurbished and refitted dashboard
Custom chassis wiring management system (ie waterproof tubes)
New wiring loom front, middle and back.
New light, front and back.
New instrument panel
Refurbished front wing mounting points.
Scratch fabricated aluminium reinforcement behind front lights
Scratch fabricated aluminium reinforcement at wing mounting points
New mud shields, and snazzy drainage system between shields and footwell devised by Bill
New windscreen seals
New bulkhead
Renovated heater and blower system
Refurbished handbrake drum, brakes and mechanism
New front doors, top and bottom.
Painted front and rear doors
New and sealed fuel tank
Removal of old rear seats, refurbishment of mounting points
Fitment of rear storage compartment and gas struts on lid
Drain and replace all oils and fluids
Regrease all grease points
Removal of redundant and broken choke cable, modification of ignition barrel to accept modern choke cable.
Design and fitting of interior rear shelf.
A thorough wash and polish

Things that remain to be done for an MOT.

Fitting of new seats
Replace N/S rear axle stub
Replace all drive flange bolts and gaskets

Things that I’d like to get done very soon
Fitment of LaSalle door interiors
Fitment of radio gear
Fitment of rear floodlight, reversing lights, and fog lights

Falcon View Opensource

2009-11-04T23:50:54+00:00

A good gis viewer is coming to stable version for win http://www.falconview.org/trac/FalconView/wiki/OpenSourceFeatures

Sponsoring von OSM

2009-11-04T20:02:20+00:00

Moin, mein erste Blogbeitrag handelt von Sachspenden für unser freies Projekt.

Wer die Tage mal aufmerksam die Hauptseite durchgelesen hat, dem ist sicherlich "FOSSGIS betreibt drei gesponsorte Server für OSM" aufgefallen.
Auf dem Artikel http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/FOSSGIS/Server stehts ja Schwarz auf Weiß, www.strato.de Webhosting sponsort uns 3 sehr gut ausgestattete Server. Ich kenne die Firma leider nur vom Hörensagen und durch die Anzeigen in der c't natürlich.

Wieso mir gerade das Thema am Herzen liegt? Nun bei der 2.MV Mapping Party wollten wir ein paar Zusatzgeräte für Neulinge haben aber leider waren die Leihgeräte bereits alle ausgeliehen :(
Naja und seitdem bin ich auf der Suche nach Hardwaresponsoren
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Sponsoring

Da ich "Klinkenputzen" durch diverse andere Projekte bereits kenne und weiß, dass mir Kommunikation Spass macht bin ichs einfach mal angegangen und mittlerweile sogar mit Erfolg!

Der Distributor des GPS Herstellers Holux www.holux-gps-vertrieb.de sponsert uns zwei qualtativ hochwertige GPS Empfänger/Datenlogger. Das ist denke ich eine super Ergänzung zu den bestehenden Geräten des GPS Verleihs http://www.openstreetmap.de/gps-verleih/ .

Vielen Dank also den beiden Firmen :-)

Car mapping

2009-11-04T19:41:10+00:00

I had such fun doing bike mapping over the weekend, that I figured I'd go a bit further out this afternoon in the car. Eish.

1) Mapping alone in a car is silly. Dangerous and inefficient.
2) Mapping by bike is more fun. Easy to stop and take photos
3) Geotagged photos absolutely rock for remembering what goes where on the map. Faster than voice or typing, and easy to interpret afterwards.

I'm quite happy with TrekBuddy as a track and waypoint recorder for my phone. It seems to be relatively stable and it has the features I need. I especially like the snapshot waypoint feature. The brilliant part is that it's written in proper gpx which is understandable to JOSM: if I just dump the waypoints directory onto my computer, and then import the waypoints file into JOSM, it puts clickable photo icons on the right places on the map.

1 year later, different Country

2009-11-04T18:29:31+00:00

I am back, more than one year later, I just added all the hiking trails I did during the summer, with new huts and new trails in the Brenta, over Trento and over Val Gardena.

I really hope that more will come during the winter and that I won't be away for a full year again.

I still have to perfect the tagging of mountain hiking tracks though... How do you mark laders, hard paths, etc. etc.

AT&T Sues Verizon Over “Map For That” Ads

2009-11-04T17:57:58+00:00

These great commercials have got Verizon in a bit of trouble

Read the slashdot story.

iPhone Little OSM Editor (I guess that's what it stands for)

2009-11-04T17:23:49+00:00

I did leave a three-star review of iLOE on the App Store; I'd only tried to edit nodes (by which I mean nodes) when you can only really edit POIs (wayless nodes; by which they mean nodes). Found a bench on my commute, and I though: huh; could map this. Launched the application and it is just hideously complicated. Not even that: you can't add tags to new nodes. That renders it completely pointless; do hope another developer gets it together. Either that or I hope Cloudmade hurry up with Mapzen.

Gobiz Mobile

2009-11-04T14:04:17+00:00

Check out the all new Gobiz mobile client for Windows Mobile
www.gomogi.com/products/index.html

me gustaria participar

2009-11-04T11:39:06+00:00

He leido el acta de la reunión en valencia y he visto que no hay nadie en educación, me gustaría participar cubriendo esa parte. Si alguien lee mi mensaje y se puede poner en contacto conmigo, sería genial poder hacer algo por el proyecto
gracias
maría

Overlap

2009-11-04T11:26:58+00:00

I know this is probably an easy edit to make, but I have one overpass that should be an underpass and vice versa. It is driving me nuts and I know this is not the place to post this, but does anyone have the answer to placing one existing way over or under another?

Kaduna November 09

2009-11-04T10:31:11+00:00

I had mapped most of k Kaduna with a lot of help of OSMers out there in July after it came up in high res on yahoo. 3 months later and I am here in person for the FIFA World Cup U17, so a nice opportunity to update street names. That basically means hanging off the back of a motorbike, Garmin HCX in one hand Mobile in the other
screaming around town trying to take the best interpretation of street sign spellings, often only on shop windows and placards.

Updating this data means that I can take the Texas copyright / accreditation of some of the tags, also, some of the street names have been changed since that map was compiled ( usually to ex political leaders! ) . Anyway, might grab an hour now while it is sunny, kickoff at 4pm

bri

Openstreetmap in the news 04 November 2009

2009-11-04T10:10:09+00:00

OSM peeps at LUGRADIO :
http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Happenings-LugRadio-Live-2009-846208.html
While at LugRadio Live The H attended a number of talks and met with people and groups in the exhibition area. This year's exhibition area included, for example, members of the OpenStreetMap project, who were recruiting more volunteers, members of Manchester Free Software and members of the Open Rights Group

Openstreetmap being used to map Kenyan Slum :
http://appfrica.net/blog/2009/11/03/openstreetmaps-to-map-kenyan-slum/

French Article in Major Newspaper : le monde Openstreetmap
http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2009/11/03/quand-les-internautes-jouent-aux-cartographes_1262139_651865.html

West Perth Business Map now CC-by-sa

2009-11-04T07:20:04+00:00

Today Mineral Data Services (owned by me) released the West Perth Business Map under the CC-by-sa License - see announcement below.

The map is located at www.mineraldata.com.au

***Announcement
Mineral Data Services would like to announce that today it has released the West Perth Business Map under the Creative Commons attribution share-alike License (CC-by-sa). This allows sharing and remixing of the work provided that attribution is given and derivative works are shared alike. See the link below or visit www.creativecommons.org for details.

Releasing the West Perth Business Map under creative commons is in line with Mineral Data Services motto of "liberating information".

The intention is to share the data contained in the West Perth Business Map with OpenStreetMap to give it a broader context.

Creative Commons License
West Perth Business Map by Mineral Data Services is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.

Google MapMaker: What now?

2009-11-04T03:11:04+00:00

There has been some buzz about Google now supplying their own data for Google Maps. Maybe now we see why they were doing all of the "Street View" stuff.

Anyway, this brings a big opportunity for OSM. New neighborhoods (that I am familiar with) seem to have a ton of mistakes: alleys are streets, names are wrong, etc. It sounds like Google is more responsive about getting these things fixed. Maybe if I'd started mapping about now, I'd have been content letting them know about their mistakes. But the opportunity is to get people making the changes to OSM instead of the GOOG. Why get their approval when you know you're correct? And who benefits anyway?

Ditto with their Map Maker tool (which doesn't work in the USA). Why are people spending time creating data where they relinquish the rights? Maybe Google Maps is the big thing, but what else is gained other than advertising all over your map? I mean, if there is no data in, say, Mozambique (and I have no idea whether there is or not), why give it away to a proprietary provider?

Plus, OSM allows for a much richer view of the world, particularly if you're not in a car.

The consensus is Google won search because they have the best results. Look at your favorite area and ask yourself whether that is true for maps.

Open Data from Toronto

2009-11-04T01:46:10+00:00

Mark Kuznicki hosted the Toronto Open Data Lab at the Toronto Innovations Showcase this week. This was the official launch of dataTO.org, Toronto.ca/open and the release of several open data sets.

I was pleased to meet so many folks working at the city of Toronto and at the province of Ontario who showed so much interest in Open Data. There were many great conversations going on, from the exhibition floor at the city hall rotunda to the mixer at a local pub later. All of these are great signs of a new open-awareness at the city and I see it as overwhelmingly positive.

Being new to the world of Open, the city wanted some feedback regarding for what applications people would use this newly available data. As Toronto Transit Commission data, addressing data and road centrelines were all released I though immediately of the travel planner Tom Carden did for London.

I had that chance to talk to many folks about OpenStreetMap through the course of the day and I was pleased to share my enthusiasm for a travel planner like this using the Toronto data.

Travel planner using Toronto Open Data

The data we have now is imperfect but rather than critiquing the quality of the dance steps of this bear, let’s marvel that Toronto released open data at all. Most of the data sets grew up in separate silos in Toronto departments. The folks at the city are as new to these data sets from other departments as we are. They’ll get used to working with each other in an open environment and that will move them to more of the open tools, standards and practices that we take for granted. I’m sure we’ll see a bug tracker soon. We’ll see increased use of open formats rather than proprietary lowest-common-denominators.

Bravo, Mayor Miller, for recognizing the benefits of Open. Bravo, Mark Surman for challenging Toronto to become a city that thinks like the web, This is an important step along that way.

Toronto City Hall Photo is licensed cc-by-nc-sa by Vlastula on Flickr

London Travel time map is licensed cc-by-sa by Tom Carden.

First edit uploaded!

2009-11-03T23:38:36+00:00

As I promised myself and the world, the first edit would be my home street. Now it has been done :-)

I decided I would try Merkaartor, and it did not take too much fiddling to create a new (and correct) representation of my home street. I suppose the other streets in the neighbourhood are up next since they are currently either non-existing or incorrect (incorrect name, incorrect path). I suppose they have been created by converting freely available map data at one point in time.

The mysterious data mines of Argleton-on-Google

2009-11-03T23:18:58+00:00

There’s been a bunch of online chatter today about Argleton, the mystery town on Google Maps that has never really existed.

“Maybe it’s a trap street,” people have speculated. Google itself appears to be pinning the blame on Tele Atlas, telling the Telegraph: “People can report an issue to the data provider directly and this will be updated at a later date.”

The Telegraph goes on to say: “The data for the programme was provided by Dutch company Tele Atlas. A spokesman said it would now wipe the non-existent town from the map.”

I think they’re going to have a hard time finding it. It’s not in any other Tele Atlas dataset I can find. Multimap, for example, shows no sign of Argleton on its Tele Atlas-derived mapping.

No, I don’t think this is a Tele Atlas trap town. This, to me, looks like a prima facie case of Google data mining.

The canary starts to wobble

We know that, even before their recent go-it-alone expedition in the States, Google was mining the web and integrating the results into its map data. Wikipedia is the best-known example; Wikipedia articles with co-ordinates have long appeared as ‘active POIs’ on Google Maps. But as time goes on, Google has mined more and more directories, and other web content, to make the maps richer than the raw Tele Atlas data can offer.

It’s a really clever idea.

But sometimes, the parsing fails. Google Maps FAIL has a good example. Google has found a source of addresses somewhere on the web, and pulled out various data from it. But either the source data is dodgy, or more likely, it’s not formatted quite as consistently as Google’s algorithms would like.

So in Google Maps FAIL’s example, the sizeable town of Cirencester has moved to a little village halfway towards Northleach “inhabited by two sheep and a squirrel”, and the historic city of Gloucester has navigated upriver 20 miles and is sitting in a watermeadow outside Tewkesbury.

This is my guess as to what’s happened at Argleton: dodgy data mining. If you squint at the map of Argleton, you’ll see that the label is in a slightly different weight from Aughton and Aughton Park, suggesting that maybe this isn’t coming from the same “towns” table. (Same goes for Cirencester and Gloucester.)

My guess is that the mined data was in fact a badly OCRed address, meant to be “Aughton” but transcribed as “Argleton”. We already know that Google is OCRing PDFs as it crawls them; or maybe it was OCRed before being uploaded to the web. No matter.

If we need any more proof that they’re mining some fairly imperfect sources, then three miles to the west we find “Downhollnad”. A couple of months ago I was drawing a map of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal there, and I’m pretty sure that it’s called Downholland. (And yes, it’s spelled correctly on Multimap’s Tele Atlas-derived mapping, too.)

The canary falls over

How endemic is this faulty mining?

My home-town of Charlbury is well-known as the world centre of innovation in collaborative mapping, especially as performed by ninjas. I was just coming back from church the other day and I met that Artem ‘Mapnik’ Pavlenko walking down the street. So let’s have a look at the data Google has mined for Charlbury.

This is a good start. St Mary’s, where I play the organ (badly), is labelled as ‘Charlbury RC Church’. St Mary’s is not Roman Catholic. It’s Church of England. People have been firebombed in Ulster for less. Charlbury’s Catholic church is, as the full address suggests, a few streets away on Fisher’s Lane. (Incidentally, thank you to my Twitter followers for suggesting that maybe RC meant Radio-Controlled. It could make baptisms a whole lot more fun.)

You can also see that the Bell is in the right place, but the Bull, which should be at the corner, is closer to where the Three Horseshoes actually is.

(Incidentally, there’s a little sponsored link beside the wee Bull for Millie Benjamin Bridal Wear. Curiously, when I looked at this earlier, this in turn triggered a foot-of-page ad for ‘Milly Dress at Shopbop’. So buying one sponsored ad alerts Google to place potential competitors’ ads at the same place? That’s an… interesting loyalty tactic.)

The ‘Cotswold View’ campsite has been placed on a little unpaved street called Cotswold View. As the full address again makes clear, it’s not there. It’s actually on the road to Enstone. Whether it’s actually on ‘Enstone Rd’ is debatable – I’d have said Banbury Hill, and so does Tele Atlas.

Note the non-standard space in the middle of the phone number. A Google search for “Cotswold View” “Enstone Road” “810 314” only returns a few results, two of which are at 192.com (once described as Britain’s most invasive website in a shock-horror exposé, and no strangers to data mining themselves). I’m guessing that Google is either mining 192.com or has licensed the same data. (No results for Argleton at site:192.com, though!)

This is also interesting in that Google clearly aren’t doing a postcode lookup, which would be easy technically but horrible legally. A postcode lookup would put the icon in the right place.

The Fiveways Takeaway appears on the wrong side of the road. Well, big deal. But again, the only result for Fiveways “Sturt Road” “811 555″ is 192.com.

(Curious decision on Google’s part not to show ‘Takeaway’ as part of the name, but yet also not to use a custom icon. Fiveways is originally the name of the junction you see just to the south-west. “Turn left at Fiveways” is a common direction in Charlbury. If you took that literally while looking at this map, you’d drive up Sturt Close.)

This one just made me giggle. The problem with having good satellite imagery, as again Google Maps FAIL points out, is that it shows up the inadequacies of the rest of your data. There is clearly a bowls club in this picture but it ain’t where the icon is.

This is a dead canary

So. A small Oxfordshire town, only a handful of mined icons, and around half of them are faulty in some way. Data is being conflated which shouldn’t be (’Cotswold View’ caravan site on ‘Cotswold View’ street, ‘Charlbury RC Church’ located at a church in Charlbury). Positional accuracy is iffy, at best. How endemic is this faulty mining? It’s pretty endemic.

Even getting to this stage is, of course, a display of awesome technical ability. And there is no doubt that the logic will iterate like every other Google product, becoming more accurate each time.

But it does also point out the limitations of applying search-engine technologies to mapping. If you search Google for something non-trivial, you don’t expect the top result to be the one that answers your question. You hope you’ll find it in the top 10, and if not, you’ll turn the page until you get the answer. It’s fuzzy like that and people accept this.

Map data isn’t fuzzy. You have to get it right, first time. Charlbury Bowls Club’s location is approximate, but nonetheless, wrong. St Mary’s is a church in Charlbury but it’s not the Charlbury RC Church.

Data mining gets you worldwide coverage fast, but takes a long time to get to 95% accuracy: you could argue it never will. Crowdsourcing, OpenStreetMap-style, gets you to 95% accuracy fast, but takes a long time to approach worldwide coverage. Professional surveying a la Tele Atlas gets you both, at a huge cost.

All of this is especially interesting in the light of the superb Mike Dobson interview at SearchEngineLand. If you only read one article about webmapping this year, make it that one. He’s the only commentator I’ve seen who appreciates how much data mining Google is doing:

“It is clear to me that conflation and data mining across redundant sources are major components of [Google’s] update process.”

He then suggests that the strategy is to start with data mining, then refine it via crowdsourcing.

“One of the tenets of crowd sourcing is that the frequency of errors decreases with increased inspection. So, Google might make a wrong change from time to time, but the odds are that someone will correct it.” [See also his later comment on Tele Atlas and GDT.]

In other words, Google’s strategy is to get worldwide coverage via mining, then refine it until it’s accurate by crowdsourcing. That makes a lot of sense. But it remains to be seen whether their reputation can withstand the Telegraph story that will inevitably accompany each excursion into the mines.

Drums. Drums in the deep. They Are Coming.

Trying to install JOSM on Nokia 5800 Navigator. No luck.

2009-11-03T21:24:32+00:00

I was crazy enough to install Nokia Java Runtime 2.0 for S60 from Nokia Beta labs. Then I tried to install JOSM Java OSM editor (josm-tested.jar which I renamed josm-2255.jar). When trying to install the .jar file on the phone i got an error "compulsory attribute 'MIDlet Name' missing".

Postboxes

2009-11-03T21:18:54+00:00

I've been making a push recently to seek out postboxes in East Kent. CT1, CT2, and CT5 are already shown as complete on the Dracos website. Now we've only got one box left to find in both CT3 and CT4 before each of those is complete as well.

Finding some of the boxes has been particularly tricky as some the descriptions are pretty useless. For example one of the CT4 boxes is described as "Stone Street". To anybody local to me that means the Roman road of the same name. Pretty much the whole road is within CT4, which covers a sizeable portion of the East Kent countryside. Basically the description narrows it down to a search of about 8 miles in length of road, or about 80% of its total length. Now that's helpful.

I've mainly been concentrating on the CT postal sector, but also straying over into the neighbouring ME and TN sectors from time to time. Today I'm pleased that we've reached a milestone of sorts for CT: 2/3 of all of the boxes have now been found when comparing against the Dracos data. That equates to 708 boxes.

In searching out some of the remaining boxes I've found that a few typos have unfortunately been made in the refs for I'd mapped a long time ago. Thus they weren't showing up as mapped when the Dracos updates from OSM data each Sunday. Some Postgres queries quickly uncovered candidates for these though, followed by a trip to the boxes themselves to confirm their correct refs. A further Postgres query reveals that there are a few boxes elsewhere in the UK with duplicated refs. So, if you live near one of these boxes then it may be worth another check:
CO13 70
DG11 40
E17 35
E4 4
IG2 70
IV1 113
KT10 173
N21 18
N22 6
RG21 210
RH14 81
S40 6
S61 303
SE1 36
SE25 4
SE9 50
SW15 3
WA8 5

Now that we've got reasonable approximations to the outward postcode sectors in East Kent I've been able to make decent use of it to visualise the distribution of the membership for the cycle campaign group that I'm on the committee of. It's really useful having the data available in a compatible licence. Now, if only the Royal Mail would realise this too and open up their data...

Got WebGL up and running!

2009-11-03T20:12:34+00:00

… well, two red triangles, anyway For those who don’t know, WebGL provides a JavaScript API for in-browser 3D OpenGL graphics, though it’s pretty new and only available in nightly builds of Firefox and WebKit so far. However it looks really exciting and I’m aiming to experiment with it by building an initially very simple viewer of OpenStreetMap and NASA SRTM data. After that… well, we’ll see!

Problem one is a lack of resources on the web, seeing as it’s a very new technology. One invaluable and growing resource, however, is Giles Thomas’ excellent tutorial series, learningwebgl.com. He’s converting the standard NeHe OpenGL tutorials to WebGL, one tutorial at a time. Another useful resource is Benjamin De Lillo’s One Black Triangle post, which presents a Hello World type program for WebGL.

Anyway, here’s my efforts so far; it’s a variation on the One Black Triangle theme but presents, erm…. two red triangles instead. The source code is annotated with my understanding of how the code works (caveat: may not be 100% accurate, this is my first WebGL program!) I’ve tried to strip down the code to the minimum required to do something useful, but nonetheless, it still seems quite a bit more than the equivalent Hello World in full OpenGL. Seems there’s a completely different philosophy for drawing shapes: rather than just specifying the vertices, you have to set up an in-memory array and use shader programs: mini-programs running on the actual GPU. Means a steeper learning curve, but looks like performance will be better in the long run!

Anyhow I’ll be updating the blog as I develop more and more complex WebGL examples, leading hopefully to a full OSM / SRTM example, so watch this space…

US 287 From Loveland to Longmont.

2009-11-03T17:59:18+00:00

US 287 has had a major rebuild in the last couple of years in this area. So I made some tracks and changed it into split north and southbound highway. My first attempt at something so big, but I thinks it is much more accurate then before. I would really like someone to look at the changes in downtown Loveland. A few years ago US 287 was split into one way streets for north and south traffic. I think I got it right, but keeping the tags straight was confusing.

DC-GIS Data Sprint #2

2009-11-03T17:14:56+00:00

Title: DC-GIS Data Sprint #2
Location: HacDC (1525 Newton Street NW, Washington, DC)
Description: The next mapping sprint has been scheduled for November 7th at 12 noon at HacDC.

We’ll be working on the DC GIS data which has been automatically converted to OSM.

Newbies and experienced mappers welcome!
Start Time: 12:00
Date: 2009-11-07
End Time: 17:00

Summary of LUG Radio Live ‘09

2009-11-03T17:14:37+00:00

There’s a good summary of LUG Radio Live 2009 over here including OSM happenings with a talk by Andy Robinson:

Andy Robinson, also known as “Blackadder”, is an active contributor to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) Project and is the current secretary of the OSM Foundation. OpenStreetMap is an open source project run by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, that is building free online maps, not based on any copyright or licensed map data. The OpenStreetMap maps are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.0 license.

Downtown Milwaukee

2009-11-03T16:23:31+00:00

I fixed a few buildings in downtown Milwaukee that were either in the wrong locations or were long ago demolished.

豊橋と一宮

2009-11-03T15:26:40+00:00

国道249号線は多分完了
４２号線は今回で完了かと思ったら中抜きになってしまった、残念。。。

Автобусни маршрути

2009-11-03T15:23:25+00:00

Мисля че попълних повечето автобусни маршрути които тръгват или минават през жк. Люлин.

Parks

2009-11-03T15:15:53+00:00

Added some parks and amenities in Belmont Area

Creative Commons License

2009-11-03T14:34:21+00:00

photo credit: The Pack

Yesterday I started thinking about a new rendering rules system for Kosmos. The existing system (using Wiki tables) was OK for a while, but it’s starting to show its old age: there is no rule inheritance, the rules are cumbersome to edit (because of wikitext), the selectors are not very powerful, rules are not reusable etc.

I started by investigating how similar software is doing these things. Mapnik has a more elaborate XML-based ruling system. It’s powerful, but it seems too verbose for what I had in mind – I want the rules to be simple to write and even simpler to read. And I want to stay away from XML: XML is easy to parse but not that friendly to humans. And writing expressions using XML character entities (example: “<Filter>[CARTO] >= 2 and [CARTO] < 5</Filter>”) is really unfriendly and error-prone.

The next thing to look at was MapCSS, a CSS-like language for map stylesheets and is a brainchild of Richard Fairhurst, the author of Potlatch, the excellent web-based OSM editor. I like the idea, but I’m worried how it could be implemented in the context of a database-driven map engine. The databases can be huge and you want to minimize (and optimize) the queries run on them, but MapCSS seems to allow too many combinations to make it usable for generating maps in (almost) real-time, and that’s what Kosmos is about. When working efficiently with the database, the rendering engine wants to collect all the related objects in one go, and then decide how to render them. So, for example, if it wants all highways to be rendered red, it’ll fetch all the highways from the database (with a single query) and then go and paint them all red. MapCSS doesn’t really allow this: you need to process each OSM object on its own and go through the list/tree of MapCSS rules in order to know whether (and how) to render it. Maybe I’m wrong and there is a better way to approach this, I’ll have to discuss this further with Richard and see what he thinks.

So now I’m thinking about defining my own domain-specific language (DSL) which would be used to specify rendering rules. I don’t have any specifics yet, but there are some things worth thinking about:

The DSL should not be XML-based: angular brackets are not for humans.
Separating definition of features from the definition of styles: features tell you what something represents. A forest, for example, is a feature that corresponds to an area tagged with natural=wood or landuse=forest. How it is rendered depends on the type of the map: on topo maps you would render it in green color. On driving maps maybe you wouldn’t render it at all. So the idea is to have a features definitions that could be stored in one place (one wiki page) and then reused all across the styling rules. Right now this is not possible in Kosmos.
Expressions: the selector expressions should be more powerful than just simple logical operators. The same goes for expressions for style attributes.

Anyway, this all means I have to implement some kind of a parser for the DSL. So I started looking into possible C# libraries/tools for writing parsers: ANTLR, Coco/R, GOLD, Irony.NET, … There is also a good article called Grammars and parsing with C# 2.0. Time to do some refreshing of knowledge lost way back from my university days…

Niederhünigen

2009-11-03T13:16:14+00:00

Die neu benannten strassen sind komplett erfasst, forstwege und wanderwege noch nicht ganz komplett aber wir arbeiten dran....

Mistery Park

2009-11-03T13:14:40+00:00

Eigentlich interessant das sich noch niemand ans taggen des Mystery Park, tschuldigung Jungfrau Park in Interlaken gemacht hat. Ist wohl wirklich unbedeutend ;-)

Argleton

2009-11-03T12:24:00+00:00

From todays Guardian -

"Argleton doesn't actually exist. It is a phantom village that appears on Google Maps. You can search online for Argleton's local weather forecast (10C yesterday), property prices (not much for sale at the moment) or for the number of a local plumber, but in reality the village's coordinates point to little more than a muddy field."

View Larger Map

Good things here

Saint-Soupplets et Meaux

2009-11-03T11:04:19+00:00

Hier soir, j'ai enfin pu récupérer le tracé de la nouvelle déviation au sud de Saint-Soupplets. Tout chaud, tout beau. J'en ai profité pour compléter un peu les ronds-points sur la N330 entre St Soupplets et Meaux.

Au passage, je me pose une question, si des mappeurs trainent dans le coin. La N3 (Paris/Meaux/Chateau-Thierry/...) a été largement déclassée ces dernières années, et de nombreux tronçons (dont Meaux-La Ferté-sous-Jouarre) se nomment désormais D603, etc.

Dans ces conditions, et vu que la route garde son caractère "principal" (elle reste un des grands axes hors-autoroute à rayonner de Paris), serait-il totalement idiot de la garder en "primary" d'un bout à l'autre?

Schreibweise Straße/Strasse

2009-11-03T09:41:23+00:00

Wenn man sich die Karten auf´s Garmin runterlädt, wird die nach deutscher Rechtschreibung hier richtig geschriebene "Straße" in das falsch geschriebene Wort "Strasse" umgewandelt. Das würgt mich fast, hab ich doch beruflich mit Satz und Rechtschreibung zu tun :-(
Auf Nachfrage bei Garmin wurde mir mitgeteilt, dass die Schriften international angepasst worden sind, und somit eine Schreibweise mit "ss" geläufiger sei als mit "ß".
Seltsam, aber anscheinend nicht zu vermeiden.

still so many unmapped islands in Indonesia and Oceania...

2009-11-03T07:57:04+00:00

There are still so many unmapped islands in Indonesia - did PGS miss them? I managed to add the group of Sangir Islands (http://osm.org/go/4pMkDwX) tracing landsat images using josm but yesterday I again found Togian Islands being unmapped...

Quebec's great North

2009-11-03T05:16:01+00:00

English below

J'ai terminé d'entrer les rues du grand Nord Québecois que j'ai parcourues en Aout dernier.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.64&lon=-79.7&zoom=7&layers=0B00FTF
Il y a quelques tuiles qui ne sont pas encore rendues

-Route 109 : 180km entre Amos et Matagami (Nord de l'Abitibi)
-Route de la Baie James : 620km entre Matagami et Radisson
-"Ville" de Radisson : seulement la rue principale.
-Route entre Radisson et le village Cri de Chisasibi : +100km
-Chemin entre Chisasibi et la Baie James (Océan Arctique)
-Quelques rues de Chisasibi.

Un super voyage à faire, de supers paysages, on peut dormir dans sa tente au bord de la route de la Baie James, au bord d'un lac en entendant les loups au loin. Radisson est une ville sans cimetière. Les indiens Cris de Chisasibi sont très accueillants.

I have finished mapping the Great North of Québec that I covered last August.

-Route 109 : 180km between Amos and Matagami (North of Abitibi)
-James Bay road : 620km between Matagami and Radisson
-"Town" of Radisson : only the main street.
-Road between Radisson and the Cri village of Chisasibi : +100km
-Track between Chisasibi and James Bay(Arctic Ocean)
-Some roads of Chisasibi (names missing).

A great trip to do. It is possible to sleep in your own tent in front of a lake, beside the road, hearing the wolves. Radisson is a town without a cemetary. The Cris are very welcoming.