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Who will contribute to People's Map?

It seems the People's Map have launched their online editor today, taking their mapping service from just showing their own pre-created maps to actually allowing people to edit the maps themselves and help them build up a map that they can sell.

The People's Map is great in some places (such as over the Isle of Man) because it has high resolution aerial imagery in places where OpenStreetMap doesn't yet. I might even be keen to spend time mapping the Isle of Man from their imagery, allowing them to use that data for their own purposes, as long as I could also re-use the time and energy I'd spend on that. In their 'fair and straight forward licensing' they even suggest that this could be possible (though I never got a response when I asked for clarification):

Users can associate their own private data to the People's Map without any ownership transferring to the People's Map Partnership

However, when going to sign up to try out their editing tools today, I would have had to agree to the following term in order to contribute:

You agree that the information you submit may be freely used by the People's Map in perpetuity. You will have no rights over the information once you provide it to us.

It will be really interesting to see if people actually take People's Map up on their offer of mapping the British Isles for them without being able to use that data until they pay for it. At least with OpenStreetMap data, you're free to do what you like, as long as you credit the project and make the data available again to others wanting to do the same. Oh, and it's all free.

Can the People's Map add extra value to what OpenStreetMap is already doing, by putting their revenue to good use, perhaps using it to validate the crowdsourced data?

Posted in Geographic at 11:28 PM on Sunday 30 September 2007 | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: OpenStreetMap People's Map mapping geo

DrupalCon attendee map

View Larger Map | download KML file

The map above shows the approximate locations of over 400 of the DrupalCon Barcelona 2007 attendees, based on the city or country they entered when registering for this year's DrupalCon. People travelled from every continent except Antarctica (maybe next year?) to visit the conference though most attendees travelled from Europe or the US.

If you're reading in an RSS reader, or if you prefer using Google Earth rather than Google Maps, you may want to load up the KML file, otherwise you'll need to move the map around a little to make Google Maps load all the locations for you.

(Sorry for all the pushpins. I was hoping to move beyond pushpins but the GeoCommons server didn't seem to like my file, probably due to the lack of attribute data in it.)

Posted in Drupal at 8:32 PM on Monday 24 September 2007 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: map drupalconbarcelona2007 DrupalCon Drupal

DrupalCon Barcelona 2007 this week

Tomorrow I'll be traveling down to Barcelona with my colleagues for this year's DrupalCon.

Much like last year's OSCMS Summit (which basically turned into a DrupalCon) and DrupalCon Brussels it will be a great chance to meet up with other Drupal developers and users, see what others are using the platform for, join in discussions about its future and hopefully promote some of the pieces that we've been developing at work or have sponsored.

I'll hopefully be doing a lightning talk on the use of Drupal as a GeoCMS - if there are enough people interested - perhaps demonstrating some Google Earth integration through the KML module, GeoRSS integration, or even WFS integration (if I can get it working before then).

If you're going to DrupalCon and are interested in the geo aspect of Drupal (or geo in general), let me know or catch me there - I'll be the one with the 'geodaniel' name badge.

Posted in Drupal, Geographic, Work at 12:03 PM on Monday 17 September 2007 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: drupalconbarcelona2007 Drupal DrupalCon geodaniel

Pinpoint your OpenStreetMap diary entries

If you look back at the OpenStreetMap diary entries, the vast majority of them make reference to a place the poster has been mapping, but there was no way of actually specifying the location of that place. Now, if you're writing an entry in your OpenStreetMap diary (as any OSM user can) you can also specify a location for that entry.

When people view the diary entry they can now click through to view or edit that area of the map to see what you're writing about. Each pair of coordinates is wrapped in the geo microformat too, so if your browser knows how to handle them, it should be able to pick them out.

The feed of diary entries also includes the location information (currently only W3C geo, but should soon have actual GeoRSS too), allowing you to visualise them on Google Maps, for example, or any other geo-enabled feed reader.

Posted in Geographic at 1:44 PM on Tuesday 4 September 2007 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: OpenStreetMap GeoRSS