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The State of the Map

This year will see the third anniversary of the OpenStreetMap project. It started as a rather ambitious undertaking, something which many didn't believe in, yet three years on it's thriving (as I may have alluded to previously).

Coverage has been steadily spreading outside the project's roots in Britain, through Europe, to a number of other corners of the world, and hopefully will continue to spread as word gets out about the advantages of open geodata.

The project has grown considerably in size, from just a few people back in the day, to over 6000 contributors today. Last year saw an anniversary party to celebrate the project's second year, with around 30 people turning up to celebrate.

Meanwhile, the first official OpenStreetMap conference, aptly named The State of the Map, will be upon us in just a short time and has a great lineup of speakers from academia and the geographic information industry as well as people from all sorts of other walks of life.

The State of the Map conference in July will be keynoted by Ed Parsons, ex-CTO of the Ordnance Survey and now Geospatial Technologist at Google. Other speakers will include the founder of Multimap, the chair of the Society of Cartographers, the architects of the current map visualisations, those coordinating the Dutch and Spanish mapping efforts, and still many others.

From a personal point of view, it's great to see that Muki Haklay - my old MSc in GIS course tutor from the Department of Geomatic Engineering at UCL - will be presenting, and that the conference is being hosted by the University of Manchester's School of Environment and Development, where I did half of my BSc in Computing and Geography.

Anyway, enough of my waffling.

14-15 July in Manchester is shaping up to be a great weekend, showcasing the bleeding edge of geographic information creation (and I don't just mean from the blisters you can get from walking around a city with your GPS).

If you haven't reserved your place already, admission is cheap, so register today for your chance to see the future of mapping you'll actually be able to use. See you there!

Posted in Geographic at 7:26 PM on Thursday 31 May 2007 | Comments (0)
Tags: The State of the Map OpenStreetMap conference open geodata

Finding Drupal sites from Google Earth

I love finding new sites that use the Drupal KML module, and seeing what they're doing with it. The great thing about it is that it can be used for absolutely anything that has associated location information, so every site out there can be a site about something completely different to the previous one.

The site I discovered today is an Ontario real estate website, listing houses for sale and their locations, but also events and other such things. Not only are they able to add a 'kml' link to each relevant page, allowing the user to click through to Google Earth and see the location, but they are also able to have people find their properties through Google Earth itself.

For a while Google has been indexing KML feeds (ones from Drupal included) and allows their content to be searched in Google Earth. To take an example, there is a $300k townhome in Newmarket, Ontario for which the realtor has added location information to the node in Drupal. Try doing a search for 'townhome in Newmarket' whilst in Google Earth, and you'll see that property show up as the first in the list of web search results.

The KML module can help bring your information to a completely new set of users, or potential customers in the case of the Jasmina Homes site.

How do I know about what sites are using the module? Well, I've started keeping track of of them through the Google Alerts service, monitoring any site that has links with kml/node in them.

Posted in Drupal, Geographic at 9:55 AM on Friday 11 May 2007 | Comments (1)
Tags: KML Drupal Google Earth

Wikipedia gets Manx road maps

In just over two weeks the Isle of Man will be celebrating the Centenary of the famous Isle of Man TT Races and Wikipedia's section of articles around the topic of motorcycle racing on the Island has been quickly expanding, reflecting the interest in the event.

With OpenStreetMap's map of the Isle of Man improving, I offered a little while back to create a map of the TT course to help illustrate the articles on Wikipedia.

It turned out not to be quite so simple, however. The course itself is covered on OpenStreetMap but the location of points of interest around the course is not. The information about milestones, viewing points and other points of note around the course is available in part on Wikipedia, and more so on other sites, though nowhere is it available in the public domain or in a reusable fashion.

I'm ever hopeful that I might hear back from the Department of Tourism at some point, allowing the use of this important location data, or perhaps from someone who's actually travelled the course and collected this information for themselves with their GPS. In the meantime I've gone ahead and created a basic overview map of the course as a bit of a teaser.

When I get back to looking at this, I also need to find a more efficient way of taking OpenStreetMap data of the Isle of Man, filtering out the bits I want and highlighting them on top of a faded base map. I'm a little embarassed to admit I just used GIMP to make this simple overview map.

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 12:13 AM on Thursday 10 May 2007 | Comments (0)
Tags: Isle of Man TT Isle of Man Maps OpenStreetMap