Mapping the Isle of Man on Openstreetmap

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Mapping the Isle of Man on Openstreetmap

Isle of Man roads mapped using 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
Tags: gis openstreetmap mapping geo isle of man isleofman gps open source opensource

Comments

I don't know why, but I'm far too impressed by this. Admittedly I'm also trying to figure out which bit counts as "Down South", but you've been too thorough in your work.

Posted by: Ben Thomas at January 30, 2006 7:21 PM

Haha, "Down South" is basically (to me, at least) anything south of the Peel-Douglas road, above that is Middle, and then North. That's simplifying it some, but that's how I see it at least. And it's reflected in part by official boundaries on the Island, I think, as I try to think back to Scouting times.

Posted by: Dan Karran at January 31, 2006 12:17 AM

Hi Dan - I enjoyed reading about your street mapping of the Island. I found your site from googling- "isle of man" GPS , so you're website is pretty high up there !! I was loooking for a personal GPS unit best for the Island and wondered which one you used.

Posted by: Chris at April 30, 2006 9:52 PM

Dan - regarding my last comment.

I see your opening sentence for the device you use!

Would you recommend this device after having used it?

Posted by: Chris at April 30, 2006 10:01 PM

Chris, it really depends on what you want to use your GPS for. The one I have has no ability to store maps or anything, it merely stores a log of where you've been. It's also not the best for using in towns or under heavy canopy, but for the most part it's worked pretty well for me, at least for geotagging photos and for recording routes for OpenStreetMap.

Are you going to join the OSM project when you're sorted with a GPS? :)

Posted by: Dan Karran at May 1, 2006 10:44 PM

I drive a wagon for a living collecting scrap materials from all over the island. Apart from minor "tracks" that are to small for HGV I drive pretty much every road you would ever want to list on a fairly regular basis. Can I help? I have a tomtom satnav gps reciever that I use for uk but dont know if this helps with IOM mapping. Hope to hear from you soon - Intersting project that would make the likes of my job a lot easier when trying to find places in the middle of nowhere!!!!

Posted by: Nathan at February 28, 2007 12:39 PM

I'm looking for iom map for my tomtom go510. can anyone help
cheers
ken

Posted by: ken mitchell at June 9, 2007 4:23 PM

Hello, a friend mine managed to put a tom tom one map into his sd card and it now works for the Island. I am looking to find a way of getting my N95 to work, works great on the mainland..

Posted by: Damian at September 25, 2007 4:02 PM

hi do you know where i can get the map of isle of man to use on my n95 sat nav, hope you can help cheers email me if you can ,,,,, niall

Posted by: niall at February 23, 2008 4:50 PM