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Dan Karran

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Free maps get a great new look

mapnik_isleofman.png

The free-to-use maps that volunteers in the OpenStreetMap project have been building over the past year or two have been given a new look. Thanks to the Mapnik project, the new maps look much more like Google Maps et al. and are actually available through the 'slippy map' interface on the OpenStreetMap website instead of having to download the data and generate them locally as had been true until recently (e.g. see the map of Stuttgart I generated recently).

There are a lot of tiles to generate, and it may take some time to generate tiles for the whole world. The focus therefore had initially been on getting England covered, but is now expanding to cover other areas. Nick Black stepped in to render the Isle of Man, where these examples are from.

Free map of Castletown, Isle of Man
mapnik_castletown.png

Free map of Port Erin and Port St Mary, Isle of Man
mapnik_portstmary.png

These maps are all available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Posted in , at 1:38 PM on Thursday 23 November 2006 | Comments (0)
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Scanning a 1940s map of the Island

castletown-bay.jpg

I spent much of my evening today scanning in the 1940 Second War Revision map of the Isle of Man. Now that it's all scanned I took the opportunity to have a closer look around some of the places I'm familiar with back on the Island, as well as some things from the past which I'm not so familiar with.

Much has stayed the same on the Island since this map was made at the start of the Second World War, though there have also been some big changes. Towns have grown in size, bypasses have been built to take increasing traffic out of old centres, train lines that used to run from Douglas through St Johns to Peel and Ramsey have been dismantled, and the airport extended from its wartime status as an aerodrome into something a little bigger.

Before I started looking into the grid system used on this map this evening, I hadn't realised that the maps produced during the war weren't yet using the British National Grid for referencing, and instead were using a military grid that also consisted of 1km grid squares - just not the same ones as the National Grid.

Posted in , at 11:15 PM on Thursday 16 November 2006 | Comments (0)
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Old maps of the Isle of Man

plan-of-douglas.png

A couple of weeks ago I started looking around on eBay for old maps of the Isle of Man, partly because they may be of some use to the OpenStreetMap project, and partly because it would be really interesting to see what had changed in the past fifty or hundred years around the Island.

The thing that triggered me to go out and find them was the launch of Richard Fairhurst's online browser of the 1930s and 40s Ordnance Survey New Public Edition map of England and Wales. He'd spent quite some time collecting the maps from secondhand shops knowing that 50 years after their publication the copyright on them expired and hence they get released into the Public Domain where anybody can do with the data what they wish. He worked with a couple of other people to scan all of the maps and build a site that lets people browse them and start to build up a copyright-free database of postcodes. It lowers the barriers for people willing to share the locations of their postcodes, and makes it much easier (though less accurate) than the Free The Postcode method of getting people with GPS units to submit precise coordinates for postcodes they know.

But back to the maps of the Island. The one map I was most interested in was the Second War Revision (Sheet 17) published by the Ordnance Survey in 1940. It covers the Isle of Man at a similar scale as the modern Sheet 95 of the Landranger series, but is now in the public domain, having been published 66 years ago under Crown Copyright. It will be a great reference point for extracting data for OpenStreetMap, showing the paths of rivers and roads between towns and villages on the Island. It doesn't really give enough detail to be useful within the towns themselves.

I also found some old street plans of Douglas, Onchan, Ramsey, Port Erin, Port St Mary and Castletown dating back to the late 40s (the Peel plan appears to state Nov 47). They can't be used for anything other than personal interest, as far as I'm aware, because they weren't published under Crown Copyright and the copyright instead falls either under the local authorities of those places, with the cartographers, or with the publisher. All of which mean that the maps won't fall out of copyright until at least 70 years after they were published, or 2017. Or at least, that's as I understand it.

The 1963 Ordnance Survey map (Sheet 87) I also found would have fallen out of copyright a little before that, in 2013, but in reality it probably doesn't give much more information than the 1940 version, and the Island will have long been mapped in OpenStreetMap by that point.

Talking of mapping the Isle of Man, I am planning to do some more mapping of Castletown and Douglas for OpenStreetMap between Christmas and New Year. If anybody is interested in helping out or finding out more, just get in touch. I have a spare GPS unit that can be used as well.

Posted in , at 9:27 PM on Wednesday 15 November 2006 | Comments (0)
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Geodan becomes Geodaniel

Geodan, the nickname I had adopted in the world of Drupal, has now become Geodaniel.

Both Geodan and Geodaniel are a play on the fact I'm called Dan (or Daniel, if you take my actual first name) and love geospatial things. The former, however, is (unfortunately for me) also a trademark of Geodan, a company based in the Netherlands that specialises in geo-information. Working in the same area as I'm interested in, and with the same name, they were understandably worried that I was creeping up the search rankings for the term 'geodan'. In light of this, last week they contacted me and politely told me to stop using the geodan.org domain.

In need of a new home for my Drupal geospatial interests, I went searching for somewhere else I could stake my claim. This time, hopefully, without unintentionally breaching anyone's intellectual property. Luckily they didn't mind me using Geo Daniel as a nickname, so today I started transitioning geodan.org over to geodaniel.org - the new geospatial testbed for Drupal.

As for developments in the geospatial world of Drupal, I haven't had much of a chance at work of late to do much in that area. It has been great over the past few weeks though, hearing from lots of people who are using, or wanting to use, Drupal as their Geospatial Content Management system.

Posted in at 10:03 PM on Monday 13 November 2006 | Comments (0)
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Mapping Stuttgart on OpenStreetMap

Map of Stuttgart, Germany on OpenStreetMap

Since the Munich mapping weekend a few weeks ago I've been putting some more work in to try and improve the mapping of the centre of Stuttgart in OpenStreetMap.

The image above shows the current state of the map for Stuttgart. It's still missing a lot of information including many of the major roads, mostly because I don't drive here. There were also very few streets in the centre of town until this weekend when I made a conscious effort to go in and collect data for some of the pedestrian areas of the city.

If you're in Stuttgart and interested in helping out with mapping, get in touch. There is GPS data appearing in the area from someone driving around, which acts as a good base for some of the major roads, so if that's you, get in touch and maybe we can work together to make sure they're tagged with street names and the like.

Posted in , at 6:57 PM on Sunday 5 November 2006 | Comments (0)
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Piccadilly English Shop in Stuttgart

Piccadilly English Shop, StuttgartI had known for quite some time that there is an 'English Shop' here in Stuttgart, and have recently been craving some British goods - mostly fish and chips, which just aren't the same outside of the British Isles - and so went into town today to see what they had to offer. In particular, I was looking for some Cadbury's Dairy Milk chocolate, and maybe New Scientist magazine if they had it, as I hadn't seen it in my normal supplier of international magazines for a long time.

Once my feet had all but given up from walking around the town (trying to map the pedestrian areas of the city for the OpenStreetMap project) I decided to go looking for the English Shop. I knew the area it was in so it didn't take me too long to find it.

Walking in, I was greeted by a fridge of British drinks such as Irn Bru, Ribena, Tango and Vimto. Walking in a little further you come to all the typical 'I've been to London' merchandise, like Mind the Gap signs, mugs and things, as well as all sorts of other things with the Union Jack (and other British flags) on them. I wasn't particularly interested in these, so passed on by to see what DVDs they had to rent. (Note to self: must go back and register to get DVDs for 1 Euro a night). Then, on to the section filled with Walkers crisps, biscuits, other things, and of course, the chocolate. When I walked in, I spotted a small selection of chocolate under the counter but didn't see any Cadbury's products, and was a little worried. But the main selection included Dairy Milk along with a good selection of other stuff. Picking up a few things on my way through that aisle, I went to explore the rest of the store, passing the 'fresh' foods (cheese, sausages, etc) and selection of alcohol. I grabbed a can of Ribena and then went to pay.

It all added up quite quickly (the Terry's Chocolate Orange helped in that, at over five Euro) but frankly I think it was worth it. I suspect I'll be back there once in a while.

Still no luck with New Scientist though. If anyone knows of a supplier here in Stuttgart, please do let me know. Or if anyone wants to send me a copy, that'd be welcome too *grin*

Posted in at 10:28 PM on Saturday 4 November 2006 | Comments (2)
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