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Mapping the Isle of Man on Openstreetmap

Back at the end of last year I bought myself a relatively cheap GPS unit - the Garmin eTrex personal navigator. I had wanted one for a few years and frankly it felt strange having gone through two related degrees, being interested in the area, and yet still not owning one of my own. For a long time I had felt left out, not being able to take part in things like Geocaching, easily geotagging my photos or helping expand open source mapping databases.

For the first few weeks that I had the device, I spent some time working out what situations it would work under - from being in the open, to keeping it in my pocket, to being surrounded by trees, buildings and even inside trains - and what sort of accuracy it could achieve. Whilst doing that I was also building up my database of waypoints around Stuttgart.

Christmas time came, and it was time to head home for a short break. It was interesting holding the GPS up to the window on the plane, seeing the acceleration as we accelerated down the runway. This was all experimentation though, in the lead up to my main plan of action for when I got back to the Isle of Man.

I wanted to drive as many of the island's roads as possible, taking tracklogs as I went, to allow me to add them to Openstreetmap, the open source database of streets around the world. It has taken me quite some time in the weeks since, but I've finally mapped just about all of the roads I drove (or at least the ones where the GPS was tracking). You can see the result by zooming in to the Isle of Man on the site.

The mapping of the Island is nowhere near complete (it's mostly the southern end that I concentrated on), and now that I'm back in Stuttgart, I want to see if I can find people located in the Isle of Man with a similar interest in opening up this sort of level of mapping to the public. Anyone with a GPS (and computer connection) can help out by driving some of the remaining roads, or even fixing areas of the map that I've inevitably not mapped as correctly as I would have liked to have done.

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 12:11 AM on Saturday 28 January 2006 | Comments (9)
Tags: gis openstreetmap mapping geo isle of man isleofman gps open source opensource

Degree certificate

My official degree certificate arrived at home today, with a nice suprise.

Based on provisional results I thought I'd come out with a high Pass level mark, though not quite enough for a Distinction. Having now received the certificate from UCL, it turns out I have actually been awarded a Distinction in MSc Geographic Information Science. It was brilliant news when I found out!

Posted in Education, Geographic at 6:27 PM on Friday 27 January 2006 | Comments (2)
Tags: gis msc masters distinction degree ucl

Waiting for the GPS news

I've been waiting all day to see what the new GPS plan is that the US were meant to unveil today. It sounds like it'll be similar to Europe's planned Galileo system, giving consumers location information with a higher level of accuracy.

With a constellation of satellites already in orbit, however, they can presumably add a second frequency - and therefor better accuracy - without too much effort, easily beating us Europeans to the claim of having a more accurate GPS network.

Posted in Geographic at 6:30 PM on Wednesday 25 January 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags: gps geo galileo

Google Earth for Mac OS X (+ 3D buildings)

When I decided back in August last year to move back to the Mac, I had chosen to move to a platform that wasn't very well supported when it came to programmes like Google Earth or NASA's Worldwind. I survived without it for a while, but you can probably imagine my excitement when in December an early Mac OS X beta version of Google Earth started making the rounds on the internet. It wasn't being released by Google officially, but I couldn't help but download it to give it a spin.

The early version seemed a little unstable at times but it had just about everything that the PC version had, and was every bit as enticing and mesmerising. Even my family agreed after I got the computer out at Christmas and opened up Earth. Fascinated for hours, we looked at places the world over, at times flying through some of the more impressive of global landmarks. Then, when I came back to work, I noticed that Google had officially launched their Mac version, leading to even more exploration.

What I hadn't seen until last week, was the number of three-dimensional buildings that are available for placing on top of the satellite imagery. In London, for example, there is a 3D UCL campus available, as well as Centre Point, the BT Tower, the Euston Tower and the London Eye - all from a guy at UCL. In Paris, you can overlay the Eiffel Tower on the map. In the middle of the Nevada Desert, you can see the outline of Area 51 buildings, or even a slightly more exotic version. It's great to be able to fly around these buildings and explore them from a desk anywhere in the world.

Posted in Geographic at 8:55 PM on Monday 23 January 2006 | Comments (6)
Tags: googleearth google earth 3d kmz kml buildings macosx