geo
Drupal developer with an interest in all things geo
After two years of working from home, I've decided it's time to make a move back into an office and look for some contract-based or perhaps permanent work in London.
I have four years of experience using, developing and helping guide the development of Drupal projects as well as a background and interest in all things geographic, from maps to open data (as you've probably seen from the topics I cover in my blog). With these skills I am looking to find some work as a Drupal developer for an organisation based in London, ideally integrating my geographic interest. Alternatively, I'm open to other opportunities that I may be suitable for.
If you have, or know of, any positions coming up from January onwards, I'd love to hear from you to discuss the details. You can find out more information about me in my CV (pdf) or on my LinkedIn profile.
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?
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.
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).
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?
