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State of The (Manx) Map

The map of the Isle of Man is the featured image this week on OpenStreetMap so I think now is a good time for the State of The (Manx) Map post that I've been considering doing for a while. (Obviously borrowing ever so slightly from the name of the upcoming State of The Map conference in Manchester... have you registered yet?).

Overall coverage

The overall coverage of the Island is great thanks to the assistance of the Isle of Man Government, as you can see from the map below. Much of the detail from the government map has been included in the OpenStreetMap data, although I'm sure there are some features that have been overlooked to date.

The gaps in the map start to show when you zoom in to specific areas. Taking Douglas as an example, I'll show what level of detail is available and what will need local assistance (and possibly a mapping party) to get the town maps to a usable level of detail.

Douglas in detail

Douglas has the majority of its major routes mapped already, but it's missing a lot of the detail in between, like smaller roads, housing estates, pathways and the like. Where these do exist in the map already, they usually do not have a name associated with them, and almost never have all of the cul-de-sacs and such mapped out.

The likes of Castletown have more of their roads covered (it's smaller, and much easier to cover them) but likewise doesn't have the names of many of the smaller streets. Port St Mary is covered pretty well, including names, thanks to the support of one guy and his bike.

If you live in a place that's missing detail, you have an opportunity to help... Let's try and beat Google Maps to coverage of the Island!

Mapping party

If anybody from the Island is interested in doing some mapping (taking a GPS unit out and writing down street names as you go), especially around Douglas and Ramsey, then let me know. I'm likely to be back on the Island for most of the last week in August, so perhaps a little mapping party is in order then...

On a related note, it's great to see as well that some other free maps of the Isle of Man are surfacing on Wikipedia, licensed under a Creative Commons license.

Best of all, the image is in vector format and so can easily be altered to illustrate things with ease (it's perhaps a good starting point for the TT Course map I started last month).

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 6:47 PM on Wednesday 27 June 2007 | Comments (1)
Tags: OpenStreetMap Isle of Man map geo

3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator

I folded last week and bought myself a SpaceNavigator 3D mouse from Amazon after reading great reviews of it. They have been out a little while but only recently has the company released a Mac driver, and Google Earth added support for it in 4.1.

Flying around Earth is likely to be my main use of this great little peripheral.

Since I first opened up Google Earth I didn't find it completely intuitive to navigate, but I got used to it. Mice and trackpads simply weren't designed for this purpose.

The SpaceNavigator is designed exactly for it though, giving you so much more power in navigating a 3D globe. I have already spent hours just flying around Stuttgart's valleys and even trying to land at its airport - I wasn't too successful - as well as flying around the Isle of Man and exploring parts of Japan and Manhattan where there are 3D buildings available to create an imersive world through which to fly.

I'm not sure I have much of a practical use for the SpaceNavigator at the moment, but it's great for just allowing yourself to get lost exploring the world from the comfort of your laptop. And with Amazon offering to pay 20EUR of it just for me to use their credit card, it was difficult to stop myself getting this great little navigator.

Posted in Geographic at 10:40 PM on Tuesday 12 June 2007 | Comments (1)
Tags: 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator Google Earth

Track OpenStreetMap diaries through RSS

A year ago I was really interested in seeing the community aspect of the OpenStreetMap website improve, and the recent update to Rails brought a lot of the functionality that I was looking for, with space to be tweaked and improved upon. Since I started to learn Ruby on Rails recently, what better way was there to help, but build on the functionality that others have put in already.

I outlined some ideas on the wiki and decided that some of my first priorities would be adding RSS to the diaries, making them easier to post to, improving the user profiles and also the messaging interface. I've added a few small changes over the past few days, but today saw the release of the biggest one so far: an RSS feed for all diary entries, so you can now subscribe to updates of everyone mapping on OpenStreetMap. Over time I'm also hoping to add other feeds for individual diaries, for your friends and also for those mapping nearby.

If you haven't used OpenStreetMap's diary feature, now is the time to give it a try and let people know what you're working on mapping at the moment. Right now, you can post to it by viewing your own diary (through your account page) and clicking on 'new post', but I'll be looking to make it easier for users to post as well.

Update: looks like it needs a little tweaking still, but the basics are there.

Posted in Geographic, Web at 10:06 AM on Tuesday 12 June 2007 | Comments (2)
Tags: OpenStreetMap Ruby on Rails

Google embeds rich data in maps

Google has just started embedding rich transport data into their maps, allowing you to click on a transport stop (train station, bus stop, ferry berth, etc.) and see - depending on what information is available for that city - a link to the transit company's website (e.g. in Stuttgart), the services that stop there (e.g. in London), and even the next few departures (e.g. in Manchester or Zurich).

The big G aren't the first to do this, but they are the first that I am aware of to embed information without making it obvious that it's there. Multimap has been allowing their users to overlay local businesses and POIs for quite some time. It perhaps wasn't the best integrated feature in their original site but with the release of their nice shiny new site, it is much better integrated, with the ability to turn on and off different layers of information. Unfortunately it doesn't quite go as far as upcoming departures, but with more and more local authorities providing this information in standard(ish) formats it's something that we could see more of on mapping sites in the future.

Subtly introducing more and more rich information into maps without overburdening the user with information will be a great way forward for online mapping, and something that I'd love to see happening in OpenStreetMap as the database grows.

Posted in Geographic, Transport at 11:08 AM on Tuesday 5 June 2007 | Comments (0)
Tags: Google Maps transport Multimap