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Why you shouldn't navigate by postcode

Thanks to a blog post I wrote a couple of years back, I was recently invited on a tour around the new Heathrow Terminal 5 before it opens to the public later this month. More on the tour in a later blog post (also listen to the This Week in London podcast for a walkthrough of the new terminal ).

To get to the British Airways headquarters for the tour on Monday, I had typed the postcode (UB7 0GB) into the Transport for London Journey Planner website and found a set of connections that should have taken me there with plenty of time to spare. It did strike me as a little weird that the headquarters were situated so far from the airport itself (see the same location on Google Maps), but didn't think too much more of it as mt flatmate and I started on our journey to Uxbridge and the end of the London Underground Metropolitan line.

Walking through a residential estate and arriving outside the Uxbridge Royal Mail delivery office, I did start to wonder where the British Airways office was. Named Waterside, it was bound to be next to some water, and of course there was a canal flowing through to lull me into a false sense of security. With desperation growing, we walked into the delivery office to inquire there. As I walked towards the counter it suddenly started dawning on me that BA had perhaps had their mail directed to the delivery office. The Royal Mail guy confirmed this, saying something along the lines of "They do have a PO Box here, yeah. Did you follow your TomTom to get here?".

We were already running later than planned, and it turned out we were miles away from the actual headquarters bordering Heathrow (see map). Luckily we managed to get a taxi and caught the tour group just as they had given up hope on us arriving and were starting to head off.

Postcodes can be a great way of finding a location, with mapping websites and journey planners typically having knowledge of postcode locations across the whole of the UK. That said, how can they be useful considering their sole purpose is not for telling everyday people where something is, but instead for telling a postal delivery worker where to take the mail? How do you know when a postcode is going to relate to a building (often for large users such as businesses, schools, hospitals, etc.), a street (as is often the case), or somewhere completely unexpected such as a postal depot?

Perhaps this is where the user-generated databases of postcodes can start to step in. I've added the postcode UB7 0GB to the New Popular Edition Maps website that allows people to add postcodes they know the location of, as long as they can work out the location from 1940s Ordnance Survey maps. The database of postcode locations is then available to anyone without restriction.

Posted in Geographic, London at 6:26 PM on Thursday 13 March 2008 | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: London postcodes Royal Mail British Airways navigation

Quick tour of Google's cartography around the world

A colleague of mine commented the other day on the 3D buildings that Google had introduced in St Paul, Minnestota and sounded suitably impressed. It reminded me of when I first heard about the introduction of building outlines, and then the extrapolation of them in some places to give a 3-dimensional effect. Since then I had intended to give a quick tour of the way Google represents places around the world using differing cartographic styles in different countries, largely to reflect the map conventions that people are used to in those places.

So, here goes, with a sample of places I've selected from around the world, starting with perhaps the most unique styles I've seen so far in Google maps and generally working westwards:

Shanghai, China

The Chinese maps (available through maps.baidu.com, Google's Chinese subsidiary, not through other Google Maps portals) show business locations such as KFC, with a handful of other markers used to highlight different services, each named respectively.

There are very few building outlines included and, as in most places, the streets are simple lines, many of which appear to be unnamed.

Update: I confused Baidu (not a Google business) with Ditu, the Chinese version of Google Maps. The maps of Shanghai are quite similar to the Baidu ones I described, though seemingly without commercial entities like KFC on there.

Tokyo, Japan

The maps of downtown Tokyo seem to be very pedestrian-centric, with prominent stores and landmarks being represented, sometimes with a logo (e.g. 7-Eleven and am/pm stores) and sometimes with a red dot and the name of a building. Some of the larger buildings are depicted in 3D though for others, just the outlines are included.

In addition, streets are shown not just as lines, as they are in most other Google cartography I've seen, but actually as they are laid out on the ground, with pavements and crossings clearly marked.

St Paul, Minnesota, United States

The downtown area of St Paul, MN is covered by 3D buildings, including all of the skyways that link together to form a vast indoor network above the ground. Further from the centre of the city, there are very few buildings to be seen.

Other than this network of pedestrian walkways, the rest of the map could be considered very vehicle centric, with no public transport information (surely there are some bus stops at least?).

New York City, United States

Downtown Manhattan Island in New York has a more extensive coverage of 3D buildings and also has public transport information included, with both stops/stations and the services that run through them. With so many tall buildings in the downtown area, especially around the central business district, it can be difficult in places to make out roads in between buildings.

Google has been extending its transit information to all sorts of new places, providing easy access from within their maps wherever possible.

London, United Kingdom

London has no building outline data, though Google has tried and failed to obtain the the information. Google and the Ordnance Survey never reached an agreement, so the excellent data sources that were built up from OS data as part of the Virtual London project aren't (yet) available to be used outside of academic circles.

The London maps also show transport information, but few other landmarks (Covent Garden Market being one).

Moscow, Russia

Moscow's map depicts building outlines and their (street) numbers as well as Metro stops, though there is no embedded transport information there as of yet.

One thing I find interesting about Moscow is the delineation caused - presumably - by combining different datasets, showing stark differences in the levels of foliage in and around Moscow compared to its surrounding areas. Is that due to different ages of datasets, an actual difference in coverage up to a physical boundary, or a desire to show Moscow as being a greener city than it actually is? (Having never been there, I'm not sure which of those is most likely).

Posted in Geographic at 7:12 PM on Sunday 18 November 2007 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Google Maps cartography

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 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

Timestamp and address support in KML module

In addition to the recently implemented views support in Drupal's KML module, the latest Drupal 5 version of the module now adds support for time and addresses.

Each of the placemarks now has a timestamp based on its creation date in your Drupal site, allowing you to filter your content by a specific time frame using the Time controls in Google Earth.

Also, if you have added address information to your nodes then this will be added to the placemarks as well (in both freeform format and the xAL standard), allowing content to show up in Google Earth even if you haven't added specific coordinates to it through your Drupal site. The geocoding is down to Google Earth and sometimes things will default to 0,0 if it isn't able to work out where in the world it should go.

Posted in Drupal, Geographic at 11:10 AM on Tuesday 21 August 2007 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Geocoding Time navigation KML module

Map localisation in an international context

When you use an online maps of another country using a mapping service like Google Maps or Yahoo Maps, would you expect the place names on that map to be displayed in your own local language and/or script or to be in that of the country you're looking at the map of?

I was posting a video to one of our sites (naturally Drupal-based) at work today to test some functionality, and started wondering when I came to add a location to the post. The point of the test wasn't to check the mapping-based functionality in the site, but that is what caught my attention.

The video I was posting (one about giant hornets, and very cool, even if they do freak me out) was filmed on the Japanese island of Honshu, so naturally I wanted to geolocate it somewhere there in the general sort of area so others could see where it was filmed.

As I zoomed in to Japan I quickly noticed that all the place names were in Japanese with no English equivalent. That left me out of luck as somebody who knows the English name of the place but knows nothing of Japanese script. Looking to the west of Japan, Russia is in the same situation, having place names only in Russian. China, on the other hand, actually has place names in both English and Chinese (and they also have a localised version of Google Maps just in Chinese). Check out this map to see a couple of examples from that region of the world.

So my first question is, why are the maps showing multilingual names in some places but not others? Is it about data availability, perhaps the level of effort it would take to merge multiple datasets of place names for some countries?

Hopefully names will, in time, be shown in different languages for other countries too.

For these maps to be a truly useful international as well as local resource, place names should ideally be available in the local form as well as in other forms. Instead of picking one 'international' language such as English, they should probably be available in the local language of the country that the company has aimed a mapping portal at (Google has ones for the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, China, and about ten others).

So, for example, the US and UK portals would show place names in English by default, with the local language of the country displaying alongside. For others, such as the French portal, the French versions of place names could be used with the local version, falling back perhaps to the accepted international (usually English?) name of the place where there was no translation available. In Russia, the Russian version would be used if there was one, along with the local version.

Traditionally, maps were published by governments or other mapmakers within a country and would typically have the place names conveyed in the language of the publishing country (maps made in France would have all the names in French, etc.) because that's who the maps were targeted at. In a more connected, distributed world, the publishing country becomes less relevant and the target countries much more so.

It may be a lot of work but at the end of the day I think international maps should be localised into the language of the user. If the problem is data availability then the likes of Geonames and the implicit database of linkages between articles of different languages in Wikipedia could play a great role here with their growing databases of place names. In OpenStreetMap as well, we have the ability to store place names in as many languages as they have names (e.g. name:en=Isle of Man, name:de=Insel Man, name:fr=L'Ile de Man), though I think currently we only render the default name value on the main maps (which is likely to be the local language of that country). In the future this could be improved upon, as long as the data is in the database.

Update: a website called diddlefinger.com has been adding its own labels on top of Google's maps of Japan for a year or so now. Interesting use of the API to make things more usable for an international audience.

Posted in Geographic at 8:15 PM on Thursday 16 August 2007 | Comments (0)
Tags: Maps Localisation l10n Cartography

Where to find maps of the Isle of Man

When I first started adding road network data for the Isle of Man into the OpenStreetMap project, there were only a few map sites online that had maps of the Island, and none as easy to use as the Google Maps service (which at the time did not include maps of the Island, and still doesn't to this day) which rocked the world of web mapping when it launched.

As I recall, the sites with maps of the Island at that time were limited to MultiMap and the Ordnance Survey Get a map service.

Things have come a long way since then though. The OpenStreetMap maps of the Isle of Man are not too far away from being complete (with a little help), but aren't yet ready for end users looking for detailed maps. Many of the other map providers do, however, have great coverage of the Island in their maps. Here's a bit of an overview detailing the merits of each of them:

Site	Overview	Description
192.com		Map of roads, railways and railways stations (marked incorrectly with British Rail logos), rivers, plantations, reservoirs and long distance footpaths. Does not allow zooming in to towns for detailed street maps.
Ask.com		Map of roads, rivers, some plantations and reservoirs. Includes detailed street map information.
Google Maps		Map of Island outline.
Microsoft Live Search		Map of terrain, roads, railways and railways stations, rivers, plantations and reservoirs. Includes detailed street map information. Island incorrectly attributed to the UK.
Multimap		Map of roads. Does not include detailed street map information (streets disappear from map beyond a certain zoom level) but does include the Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 map of the Island if you hover your mouse over the 'map' toggle to the left of the map.
OpenStreetMap		Map of roads, railways and railways stations, rivers, plantations, reservoirs and some long distance footpaths. The town street maps are not very detailed yet.
People's Map		Map of main roads and some rivers. The map disappears past a certain zoom level, but they do have excellent aerial imagery for the whole of the Island.
Yahoo! Maps		Map of terrain, roads, railways and railways stations (marked incorrectly with British Rail logos), rivers, some plantations and reservoirs. Includes detailed street map information.

I've included all the draggable ("slippy") map providers - or at least the ones I can think of right now - to give a bit of an overview of how their coverage differs, and also give a bit of a glimpse into the differences between their cartography and general feel of the maps. Also worth a mention here are the street maps that the Government provide for most towns across the Island.

With all these mapping services providing maps of the Island for free, is it really still worth continuing to build up the map data in the OpenStreetMap project? Of course it is! These maps are nothing but that: static maps, and some of them really great ones at that. They are great if all you want is a static map, somewhere to share a single location with someone else, or even the ability to overlay your own information on top of the map using that provider's API.

The whole point behind the OpenStreetMap project though (and to a certain extent, the People's Map project) is that the underlying map geodata is available and re-usable under a free license for you to be creative and do what you like with that data.

Maybe you're working in conservation and want to create a map showing all the rivers and different habitats on the Island, but not include roads. Maybe you are a walker and want to create a map that shows just the footpaths on the Island. Maybe you run a local listings site and you want to create a map that shows only the locations you want it to show and hide things that may not be of interest to your visitors. There are many possibilities, and the great thing is that if you have an idea, you can go off and use the data we're building up, allowing you to fulfil your idea without having to use the prescribed maps that are provided by the big providers.

Note: all the maps included above are copyrighted by their respective owners, and are included here under fair dealing clause for comparison of their individual benefits.

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 10:11 PM on Saturday 11 August 2007 | Comments (5)
Tags: Isle of Man maps mapping

On cartographers and neocartographers

Neogeography has been growing pretty quickly over the past few years, much of it I think kicking off when people started mashing up location-based data with Google Maps, perhaps the most memorable of those early ones being a mashup of data from Craigs List classifieds site and maps from Google.

With so many mashups online already (over 50,000) and many more on their way, there is a bit of a concern from professional cartographers that neogeographers - or more specifically, neocartographers, the ones making the maps as opposed to the ones laying information on top of existing maps - who may not have a background in cartography, will ignore the many principles that cartographers use to create maps that are both useful and usable.

What is refreshing to see is that well respected cartographers such as Steve Chilton, Chairman of the Society of Cartographers, are encouraging cartographers and neo-cartographers to work together, towards the common goal of sharing geographic information more effectively and helping shape the way people look at the world.

"My contention is that cartographers need to embrace these neo-cartographers, and work with them in the way that they possibly didn't with GIS providers/users, and to get out there and influence the way we look at the world - which effectively is what this whole Google Earth phenomenon is changing in society."
Steve Chilton

You can read the (first part of an) interview with Steve over on Rich Treves' Google Earth Design blog. You may also be interested in his presentation "Here be Dragons: some principles of cartography and OSM" (audio) from the recent State of the Map conference.

In the OpenStreetMap project we're very grateful to have Steve share his cartographic skills (along with other cartographers such as Richard Fairhurst who presented "Why Mash-ups suck (and Cartography matters)" at the SOTM) to help better the quality of the maps that we produce from our community-collected data.

If you're a cartographer with an interest in neo-cartography - and ways in which you could help shape it - or a neo-cartographer with an interest in improving your cartography skills then there's one event you should go to this summer: the Society of Cartographers Summer School in Portsmouth between the 3rd and the 6th of September.

I wish I could be there to improve upon my - very basic - cartographic skills.

... Judging by my map of areas around Douglas for the Isle of Man mapping party and overview map of the TT course that I produced a few months back, I could definitely do with improving them!

Posted in Geographic at 10:45 PM on Thursday 9 August 2007 | Comments (1)
Tags: neogeography neocartography cartography

Google's approach to crowdsourcing map data

I was curious about this after the State of the Map conference but it seems last week Michael Jones, the CTO of Google Earth, shone a little light on the subject of Google's crowdsourced maps of India (along with other geo things from Google) at the Cambridge Conference.

I've transcribed the part of the podcast that really interested me (see below), describing what they've built up in terms of geodata for 50 Indian cities and how they are doing it with a pilot project to deploy a 'care package' to countries to let the citizens map it for themselves based on local knowledge and Google's excellent aerial imagery sources*.

"... I'll show you one more thing. Lets say we go to Hyderabad, India. Now, it turns out that it takes more than money to get good GIS data, it actually takes data that's available to get. Now we have a problem with that because sometimes we can't get good data.

This is Hyderabad, and if you see the dark areas, those correspond to roads in low detail. If you zoom in, you'll see the roads, and if you expand a little bit, you'll see both roads and labelled places... there's graveyards, and some roads and so forth.

Now, everything you see here was created by people in Hyderabad. We have a pilot program running in India. We've done about 50 cities now, in their completeness, with driving directions and everything - completely done by having locals use some software we haven't released publicly to draw their city on top of our photo imagery.

So we're building a little care package we can send to countries like Togo, and say if you want to have maps of your country, you may not have a national mapping agency of any merit, but if you have some inspired amateurs, you can map out your country. FIll out all the details and then you can do routing and navigation just like in the big countries.

There's no real economic benefit in that, it just seems right that everyone should have a map. So we're doing everything we can to get mapping data to every human and in some countries where there's no data, we're trying to give them tools to build the data.

There is data in India it's just that the Royal Survey of India got its licensing plans from its ancestor in the Ordnance Survey. [laughs]. But there are countries though, where there is no data and we have to help them develop data. There are countries where there is data, and we license that. There are in between countries where there is both commercial data and official data, and we'd love to have the official data - and we'd be happy to pay for it - we just need to have some way to work with the government to do that.

So that's an exciting opportunity for us, but I'll remind you, just from a technology standpoint, we'd love to work with you but we don't have to. [laughs from the audience]. And the reason for that is that the local people are the local experts. They're not surveyors so you can't really trust their locations, but what's interesting when you have a few million users, you can do statistical analysis of contributed data. You can get the same thing from different IP addresses over a long period of time, with a high correlation, you can start to believe in it. You can show that with a tentative colour, and have people click on whether they believe it or not and have confirmatory comments. You can actually converge to pretty good data and it has the advantage of, when the road is closed, you can click on that road and say it's closed today. If you're having a block party, you can say the block is closed this day. Traffic data that's up to date every day."

If you're familiar with OpenStreetMap then this may all sound familiar, except for the fact that Google has an enormous audience all over the world, and if only a few of Google's users in each place around the world would start mapping their local areas then the planet would be mapped in no time.

I wonder if they will license the data out at all, or just allow the rendered maps to be used through their services?

(via)

* This crowdsourcing project may also partially explain why Google is not as keen as Yahoo in allowing OpenStreetMap contributors to use their aerial imagery.

Posted in Geographic at 8:01 PM on Tuesday 24 July 2007 | Comments (1)
Tags: Google Google Maps India crowdsourcing

Isle of Man mapping party

The Isle of Man is going to be having its first OpenStreetMap mapping party on Saturday 1st September, with the main aim of mapping the Island's capital, Douglas.

(I'm not going to be around after Sunday morning unfortunately - I need to fly back to Stuttgart - but if others are then Ramsey may also be a good target if we get Douglas completed.)

Details are pretty sparse at present but I'll be fleshing out the Isle of Man mapping party information over on the OpenStreetMap wiki. If you're interested, please add yourself to the list over there.

If anyone is thinking of travelling from outside of the Island and would like advice on getting to the Island, or somewhere to stay, let me know.

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 2:14 PM on Saturday 21 July 2007 | Comments (2)
Tags: OpenStreetMap Mapping party Mapping geo Isle of Man

How the GeoCMSs compare

At the State of the Map conference it was great to be able to meet up with two guys who also have interests in creating geographically able content management systems (GeoCMS), Andrew Turner who created the GeoPress plugin for MovableType and WordPress and Henri Bergius who is one of the founders of the Midgard CMS.

Before their talk on GeoClue we had a good opportunity to sit down and talk through some of the current functionality of the different systems, see where they differ, and try to agree on some common base functionality that we felt should be present across the different platforms.

The features included things like ability to save a location (obviously), how many locations could be used to reference each post, the presence of maps and which providers they used, the ability to post location information through the blogging API, the inclusion of Microformats (hCard), syndication formats (GeoRSS, KML, etc.), OpenSearch capabilities, reverse geocoding of coordinates to give place information, posting by email, and a couple of others.

When I get a chance I'm going to build up a table over on the Geospatial Content Management System Wikipedia page to compare the systems we talked about (WordPress, Midgard and Drupal) but also others such as Joomla, TikiWiki and Plone. Any input on those would be much appreciated as I haven't done much with them to date.

Update: I didn't notice that Henri had already blogged a little about this, and after the conference went off and added maps to Midgard using Mapstraction... cool!

Posted in Drupal, Geographic, Web at 5:06 PM on Wednesday 18 July 2007 | Comments (1)
Tags: SOTM SOTM07 GeoCMS Drupal Midgard Wordpress GeoPress

Crowdsourced street maps for commercial providers

The State of the Map conference at the weekend - organised mostly by the OpenStreetMap Foundation - was a great success. It drew in a broad mix of a crowd, from OSM hackers through to academics, surveyors, cartographers and those in business who are in a position to both benefit from the project and support it in achieving its goals of mapping the world - many of them actually being sponsors of the weekend.

Ed Parsons, geospatial technologist at Google, took the opening speech on Sunday, drawing on his experience as ex-CTO of the Ordnance Survey and his new role at Google. He highlighted just how much of the world is covered by user-created content of some sort, showing hubs of activity in Britain - likely due to the Geograph project - and other places around the world, noting that there were very few gaps in the coverage. Few gaps in coverage suggests there are few places without people who have and interest in geography and the area around them. It'd be interesting to compare Ed's (Google's) map of user generated content with OpenStreetMap's map of user generated geodata and see how different or alike they are in their hotspots of activity.

The main point of this post was to point out Ed's announcement that Google is using crowdsourced map data for some of their maps of India. I don't recall the source of the data (Mumbai Free Map, perhaps?) but I am curious, at what point would Google start using OpenStreetMap's crowdsourced data?

He brought up two issues that were affecting that decision at present: licensing - a big issue in the community - and quality* - something we need to start start thinking a lot more about now that some areas are 'complete' and potentially ready for being used as such, and many others getting closer to that point every day. What issues did they have to work through to get the Indian maps into their transport layer on Google Earth (and Maps?)?

No prizes for guessing which part of the world I'd like to see covered by the major mapping providers...

The closing talk at State of the Map was given by Sean Phelan, founder of MultiMap, about the history of web mapping. He was joined by John McKerrell, senior software engineer and developer of their cool new 'slippy map', to talk about the modern age of web mapping.

Sean's personal prediction (wish) was that they'd be able to use OpenStreetMap as a layer on the MultiMap website by the end of 2007. But with the (possible though ambitious) aim of Steve Coast - OpenStreetMap founder - of finishing the map of Britain by mid 2008, it'll be interesting to see how they deal with the issue of 'completeness' of the map. How will end users feel about an incomplete map? Will it drive more people into the project to fix up the map?

Users aside (for now), there's one thing for sure and that's that MultiMap, the first British online mapping provider, will be viewed as a visionary by those of us building the maps and hopefully also by those in industry who may not be convinced right now of the value of user-created maps.

* actually, looking back through Ed's presentation I think the second point wasn't quality as such, but about the reach of the project... I should've taken notes :)

Update: See Frank Taylor's post on gearthblog.com about Google's maps in India and listen to Michael Jones' (Chief Technologist of Google Earth) presentation about it.

Posted in Geographic at 10:21 PM on Monday 16 July 2007 | Comments (0)
Tags: OpenStreetMap MultiMap Google Maps SOTM SOTM2007

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

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

Manx Government helps OpenStreetMap

When I wrote my last post about the difference between Google Maps coverage of the Isle of Man and that of OpenStreetMap, I hadn't realised that the OSM version could have been even better without too much more work.

I discovered it only recently, but two weeks prior to my post, Nick Black had posted to his blog about mapping the Isle of Man as well. Nick had been in touch with the Isle of Man's Department of Local Government and the Environment (DLGE, or DoLGE) to see if OpenStreetMap could benefit from any of the mapping data that the government own the rights to. They responded positively to the request and offered a licence to freely derive information from their 1:100,000 map of the Island for use in the OpenStreetMap project.

In doing this, the Isle of Man Government is one of the few cutting edge (a term I wouldn't normally find myself applying to government) organisations leading the way in contributing its data - even if only a subset - to the world of open geodata.

At a scale of 1cm on the map to 1km on the ground, the geodata is only a very simplified version of that collected by the government, yet it can still help tremendously. As Nick pointed out in his post, the Isle of Man did have a fair number of roads covered on OpenStreetMap already, but the coverage was by no means thorough or complete, which is where the new data can help. It helps fill in gaps where roads had not already existed in the database. It helps in the classification of roads between primary (A-roads), secondary (B-roads) and others and helps with assigning the correct reference numbers (e.g., A1) to the roads. The data also helps with the perhaps more difficult to map features such as plantations, peaks, rivers and reservoirs.

Nick has spent some time tracing from the map, as have I, and the open geodata map of the Isle of Man is starting to be beefed up (switch to the Osmarender layer to see the latest map data, though you'll need to zoom in) to include more roads as well as everything else we can derive from the map.

Due to the scale of the government map being used to derive data from, there will be issues in data quality and accuracy, but it is a great start and gives us a broad base set of data to work from, all of which can be improved over time. And it can be improved by anybody who is willing to help. This is still especially important in the towns and villages of the Island where the mapping will still require a lot of work, partly because generalisation on the 1:100,000 map means that many smaller roads are excluded but also because street name data is still something which needs to be collected in other ways - the best of which is by people on the ground who have knowledge of the area.

I wonder if other governments will step forward and offer a helping hand as well?

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 7:56 PM on Friday 30 March 2007 | Comments (1)
Tags: Isle of Man geo open geodata OpenStreetMap Isle of Man Government government maps

Google Maps vs OpenStreetMap

Some of the cartographers on the OpenStreetMap project (which includes the chair of the Society of Cartographers in the UK) got together a few weekends ago for a cartography discussion day to try and clean up the rendering of free geodata from the project. The results of that day are now starting to appear on the maps, with much of the extraneous detail being stripped until you zoom further in, revealing more on each zoom level so as not to clutter the smaller scale maps.

With the changing of the maps I wanted to see how the Isle of Man was looking. I have to say, it's looking even better than the previous big update to mapping.

When I first learned about OpenStreetMap at the Open Geodata Forum I wasn't entirely convinced it would take off, though I was intrigued by the concept. Almost two years down the line and my opinions have definitely changed on that, as have the opinions of many others, including people in the geographic information industry.

To see why my opinions have changed, just compare the open street map of the Isle of Man to the Google Maps version which shows nothing except its name and an outline of the Island (with the Calf of Man joined at the bottom as if a bridge had been built to the islet).

With open geodata anyone can just go in and add new information or alter existing information if there are errors in it (like the link between the Calf and the mainland, for example) but you can't do that on Google Maps. Admittedly the Manx map is still somewhat lacking in certain areas, but it's a work in progress and it's getting there, slowly.

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 9:24 PM on Wednesday 14 March 2007 | Comments (0)
Tags: Isle of Man Google Maps OpenStreetMap Open geodata geo mapping

Geo brings people to Drupal

I recently discovered the iCommunity.tv localised video news site (via High Earth Orbit) and was especially interested as it was being run on Drupal.

This was one of the first places out on the internet that I'd seen Drupal's KML module being put to good use, for example to be able to view in Google Earth all of the citizen journalist videos from YouTube that are tagged as being from the city you're interested in (e.g. Stuttgart video news and its associated KML feed of Stuttgart video news). Grass roots journalism is only useful to readers if the content is filtered to your needs, if it's in the area you want to know about and it's the type of news that you're looking for. The iCommunity.tv site does that by tagging videos by location (both coordinates and the name of the nearest city) and by topic (politics, community life, arts, etc.) and lets you filter by a combination of those*.

I heard back from Chris Haller of iCommunity.tv after posting a comment on his announcement of the site. He told me that he was previously a Mambo/Joomla user, attracted to Drupal both by its flexibility and by its geo-capabilities. It's great to see that happening, and someone told me exactly the same thing yesterday too. It's also great that organisations like the Open Source Geospatial Foundation are using Drupal as their platform of choice.

Its good to see Drupal becoming more and more of a GeoCMS and people taking the tools and finding ways to apply them in useful and practical ways.

* KML feeds for multiple tags do not currently work in the KML module, as I've just discovered

Posted in Drupal, Geographic, Work at 10:25 AM on Thursday 1 March 2007 | Comments (0)
Tags: iCommunity.tv Citizen journalism geo Drupal KML Google Earth News

Russian 1:500,000 mapping of the Isle of Man

Before the fall of the Soviet Union, they put a lot of energy into mapping the rest of the world, at small scales like the section of map above, but also at larger scales for certain places of key interest to the Soviet government at the time.

The more detailed larger scale maps were deemed by the Ordnance Survey to be copies of British mapping and so although the maps are copyright free (Russia didn't believe in copyright when these maps were being produced) it is questionable as to whether they can be reused in the UK*.

You can read much fascinating information about Soviet mapping on John Davies' Soviet Military Maps of Britain site, but I just wanted to share this interesting Soviet cartography of the Isle of Man with names transposed into Russian.

The original map image is available from the Poehali website.

* The OS specifically call out 1:25000, 1:50000 and 1:100000 mapping, so I hope posting this 1:500000 map extract of the Isle of Man won't cause any problems.

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 12:30 AM on Monday 19 February 2007 | Comments (0)
Tags: Maps geo Soviet Mapping Cartography

Maps of Stuttgart

Taken at Buechsenstrasse 54, Stuttgart, Baden-Wuerttemberg, 48°46' 45" N, 9°10' 15" E

The state surveying office (Landesvermessungsamt Baden-Wuerttemberg) here in Stuttgart has a display on the outside of their building showing satellite imagery covering the length of the Rhein with a number of examples of maps from the places across the region over time. This old map shows some of the area around the Black Forest, or Schwarzwald, just south of here.

Posted in Geographic, Photography, Stuttgart at 6:51 PM on Sunday 18 February 2007 | Comments (1)
Tags: Stuttgart Maps geo

GeoRSS in the wild

I've been working today to try and get Drupal's GeoRSS module listening to more than just the deprecated Aggregator2 module to extract geographic locations from aggregated feed items.

The Feedparser module is the next on the list to support and as far as I'm aware is the only one of Drupal's aggregation modules to use an external parsing library, SimplePie. By using an external library it means that we don't need to deal with the sometimes complex task of parsing different types of feeds on the Drupal side, which is a bonus because efforts can be concentrated elsewhere whilst keeping the code nice and simple.

SimplePie is still in development stages but appears to have a good community around it as well as a couple of active developers. They're gearing up to their 1.0 release which includes functions to extract geodata from feeds using the W3C Geo and GeoRSS Simple encodings, the former being the most widespread of methods at present and the latter the one we should be moving towards using.

SimplePie's code is very much based around namespaces (e.g., xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#"), which a lot of other aggregator systems will often disregard in favour of the simpler method of parsing out just the individual element names from that vocabulary (e.g., geo:lat or geo:long) to identify the tags. Now that namespaces have suddenly become important (at least for SimplePie's code to work), it's interesting to see how easily overlooked they have been in the past.

Take, for example, the Geograph GeoRSS feed of their latest photos: they had a trailing slash after the GeoRSS namespace URI (http://www.georss.org/georss/ instead of http://www.georss.org/georss as it's defined in the spec). It was there because many namespaces do have the trailing slash, and simply left in by mistake, but because that's not what SimplePie was expecting, it didn't pick up the geodata in the feed. It's been fixed now (Thanks for the quick fix Barry!). There is also the case of the Flickr GeoRSS feeds that use the wrong namespace URI (using the one for W3C Geo instead of the GeoRSS one). Hopefully Rev Dan Catt or someone else at Yahoo will be able to fix that one up.

Even besides namespaces, some elements are often misused, and possibly the most widespread of those is geo:lon which should in fact be geo:long according to the spec. SimplePie doesn't understand the non-standard one and so can't pull the location information out of the feed. In this case, because it is so widespread, the parsing code should probably be extended to look for the non-standard element if it can't find the standard one.

Anyway, just some random observations of GeoRSS in the wild and how what seem like the smallest of differences can mean that the embedded location information will simply be missed by feed consumers.

If you've got a GeoRSS feed from your site, please do the right thing and make sure it's sending out the right information :)

Posted in Geographic at 4:43 PM on Tuesday 13 February 2007 | Comments (4)
Tags: GeoRSS XML Namespaces SimplePie

Google doodles in Hyde Park

I was in the Apple section of a department store in town yesterday having a test drive of the latest MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops when I noticed that they had Google Earth running on them. Trying the MacBook Pro out first, I was very impressed with the responsiveness of the machine when exploring in Google Earth. The MacBook wasn't quite as impressive, but still very nice and an improvement upon the iBook I've got at the moment.

As I was exploring, I zoomed into London and specifically into the area of Hyde Park and its north eastern corner. I had spotted a road pattern that didn't look quite right on top of the imagery that was being shown. Hyde Park is full of criss-crossing paths that are really quite distinctive from above, but what I was seeing didn't fit that pattern at all.

It rather looks like a glaring intentional error has been introduced, perhaps so they can tell when people have copied their maps verbatim (read the Maps that Lye page on the OpenStreetMap wiki for more information).

Wondering if it was perhaps a series of paths that had been introduced after the aerial imagery had been taken, I took a look at Yahoo Maps to see what they showed and they didn't have the paths included.

I suppose the logic in adding erroneous data here is that it doesn't matter if you follow it as you're in open space anyway, and so it won't matter to pedestrians if the paths don't actually exist.

Posted in Geographic, London at 6:55 PM on Sunday 11 February 2007 | Comments (3)
Tags: Google Earth Google Maps geo Copyright Easter Eggs London

Introduction to Neogeography

Have you ever been reading my blog and wondered what it is that I'm talking about, or why I'm so interested in everything geospatial (the vast majority of links I add to my del.icio.us bookmark collection use the term geo) and opensource software (especially in relation to the Drupal platform, which I got involved with through work)?

If you have, you may just find the Introduction to Neogeography by Andrew Turner a good primer. It's a great introduction (for those who already have a technological leaning) to the 'new geography', talking about concepts, common data formats, examples you can implement yourself and that sort of thing. It's a 54 page e-book and downloadable from the O'Reilly site.

The description reads

Neogeography combines the complex techniques of cartography and GIS and places them within reach of users and developers.

This Short Cut introduces you to the growing number of tools, frameworks,
and resources available that make it easy to create maps and share the
locations of your interests and history.

Learn what existing and emerging standards such as GeoRSS, KML, and Microformats mean; how to add dynamic maps and locations to your web site; how to pinpoint the locations of your online visitors; how to create genealogical maps and Google Earth
animations of your family's ancestry; or how to geotag and share your travel photographs.

I am glad that Andrew pointed out Drupal as a potential player in the GeoStack he talks about. As he puts it, "[t]he GeoStack encompasses the entire life cycle of geospatial data, from capture to consume using a variety of tools, formats, and applications." It's basically a suite of applications and services that can all speak geography to each other, sharing information with ease using standard formats. As an example, imagine going out with a GPS, uploading that information about your journey to somewhere, that site being able to share its information with sites that are designed to aggregate similar information and then have that available on demand, filtered as desired, to other services that can consume the information.

Drupal can actually play a part in each of these layers of the stack*, from allowing users to enter location information, serve it out, aggregate it from other sites and also be a consumer of that data.

* or will be able to again with a little work to get the newly updated location module and GeoRSS module talking properly with one another again

Posted in Geographic at 9:39 PM on Friday 9 February 2007 | Comments (0)
Tags: GeoStack geo Drupal GPS Neogeography

KML and GeoRSS now ready for Drupal 5.0

Over the past few days I've been readying the KML module (thanks to AjK for starting the work) and the GeoRSS module for new releases that will work on the latest, shiny, version of the Drupal content management platform: Drupal 5.0.

They are both now ready (with the exception of some minor bugs and some feature requests) and there are a number of bits I need to backport to the 4.7 version of KML module to ensure it starts working again with recent updates to the Location module. I also need to make sure that GeoRSS module is consuming feeds properly from the successor to Aggregator2, Leech, as well as Feedparser.

I've also been helping out a little with the port of Location module as it is an essential part of getting the two modules to produce their geodata. It's not quite ready to be tagged as being ready for Drupal 5.0 but most of it is already working in this release.

If you're interested in any of these modules, please try them out and report any bugs in their issue trackers. If you have any ideas for future features, please also add them in there. Ideas (and patches, if possible) are always welcomed!

Posted in Drupal, Geographic, Work at 9:23 AM on Thursday 25 January 2007 | Comments (2)
Tags: Drupal Drupal 5.0 KML Google Earth GeoRSS Modules geo

Furthering the OpenStreetMap module

Having started implementing a Drupal module for OpenStreetMap back in October I have spent a few hours here and there on pushing it forwards. Here's a quick update.

The module is at a stage now where you can download data for a specific region from OpenStreetMap, parse it, filter it by certain tags (and their values, if desired) and then create basic location-enabled Drupal nodes based on the results. Because it ties into the existing location module any other modules which rely on the location API can begin to use these new OpenStreetMap nodes, for example by plotting them on a map, by making the information available through RSS feeds or by displaying them in Google Earth.

I also started working on an OpenLayers module, and at work have been putting effort into improving the MapBuilder module that Nedjo Rogers started a year or so ago. Both of these modules will allow us to reduce dependence in Drupal on commercial mapping providers, instead moving towards using data from other, standards compliant, sources.

Assuming there aren't too many distractions over the coming week or so, I hope to have at least an alpha-quality OpenStreetMap module available soon. Phase one of the module will simply be allowing site admins to keep their local information site up-to-date with geodata from OpenStreetMap. Future phases will almost certainly allow for editing of data and the publishing of that back to the OpenStreetMap project.

Posted in Drupal, Geographic at 10:29 PM on Monday 18 December 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags: openstreetmap osm drupal module

Free maps get a great new look

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

Free map of Port Erin and Port St Mary, Isle of Man

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

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 1:38 PM on Thursday 23 November 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags: OpenStreetMap free maps mapping maps geo

Scanning a 1940s map of the Island

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 Geographic,