Before traveling back to the Isle of Man for the second Manx mapping party, I received an email from Juan Watterson, the Member of the House of Keys (MHK) responsible for the Isle of Man Government's mapping efforts (as part of the Department of Local Government and the Environment) who was interested in OpenStreetMap and in particular the Isle of Man mapping project. Juan kindly put me in touch with the Government's Senior Cartographer, Rob Clynes, with whom I met up when I was on the Island.

Back in 2007, Rob offered Nick Black the use of the official 1:100,000 small scale map of the Isle of Man from which to gather data for OpenStreetMap. Since then, CloudMade mapped the Island more thoroughly than we had done previously, and donated their data. While that gave a massive boost to the map data for the Island, there was still plenty more information which could be added to the map, hence the recent mapping party.

Meeting with Rob, he talked me through me some of the work he does, like digitising high resolution aerial imagery, change monitoring, co-ordinating the updates of the imagery, and cartography for the smaller scale maps (1:100,000 and 1:25,000) they produce - largely as a side product - and turn into printed maps. It was interesting to compare the data collection and management processes they have with those we use in the OpenStreetMap project, comparing my Walking Paper scrawls and GPS tracks from the weekend before with the official map data creation.

Having chatted with Rob for a while, he mentioned that he should be able to sort out some more data to help out the OpenStreetMap project. I got home yesterday to find a DVD of geodata sitting on my door mat. We now have access to two datasets from which we can derive data for the project:

• the 1:25,000 tourist map (2007), provided as a set of four GeoTIFF images
• the high resolution aerial imagery (2001), provided as a set of three MrSID images

OpenStreetMap	IOM Government 1:25,000	IOM Government aerial imagery	using overlays

There is a massive amount of information which we can gain from these datasets still, and I will be posting some ideas soon about different possibilities, such as collecting place names, paths and tracks, historic sites, outlines of the national glens, open rambling land, etc. as well as using the data for error checking and correction in the existing OpenStreetMap dataset.

I am planning to make these datasets available as a WMS server that can be used in JOSM (and Potlatch) for editing, once I've had a chance to organise it, and have had an official license document through.

If you're interested in helping collect data from the data to add to OpenStreetMap, please leave a comment below or get in touch.

* Isle of Man Government map data and aerial imagery © Crown Copyright, DLGE; OpenStreetMap data © OpenStreetMap and contributors, CC-by-SA.

Recently I have been looking into the specifications for the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Feature Services (WFS) that provide a standard interface between geographic information systems (GIS) for the transfer of geodata.

I've been starting to think about it in terms of using the Drupal web framework as a geodata store that can be used by any standards compliant GIS. Drupal can already be considered a Geospatial Content Management System (GeoCMS) so this seems like a natural extension to allow other systems to talk to it.

In GIS, the term 'layer' is usually used to group together geographic information relating to the same kind of feature, e.g. forests, places or roads. These are often stored in different files or different tables in a database. In Drupal the equivalent concept is a little more flexible and fine-grained. All of the information is stored in one place (with the ability to extend a basic piece of information with extra attributes) and can be filtered by any number of 'tags' that may be assigned to different pieces of information.

Using a WFS server as an interface to data held in Drupal would mean that systems would have access to any number of geographic datasets simply by combining tags to retrieve the data that they need.

I'm looking forward to putting more work into building up a spec for a WFS Server module for Drupal, and hopefully one day geographic information systems will be able to query Drupal for dynamic geodata, and even create, update and delete it as well.

The OSCMS summit is now over, but it's been a great week, packed full of information and activities. I've met a number of the other people interested in using Drupal for location-enabled activities, from simply tagging of content with a geographic location, to mapping those locations (and others) and actually implementing more GIS-like functionality.

One of the things I really want to see happen (and will certainly be helping with) is making sure that we are complying to standards of geographic data sharing so that information from outside the Drupal framework can be pulled into Drupal, and information can similarly be pushed out and used by other systems - from Drupal sites (through GeoRSS feeds - or the other GeoRSS standard being proposed), to Google Earth (using KML) and also systems capable of reading in OGC-compliant feeds (probably implementing a WFS interface).

Improving the usability and functionality of inputting geographic information is also high on my priority list, trying to get away from the largely US-centric input that is present at the moment. Of course, that's not easy when the availability of reliable and open geographic data is scarce outside of the USA.

I'll be keeping track on here of the bits I'm working on - and others are working on - here in my blog over time.

Back at the end of last year I bought myself a relatively cheap GPS unit - the Garmin eTrex personal navigator. I had wanted one for a few years and frankly it felt strange having gone through two related degrees, being interested in the area, and yet still not owning one of my own. For a long time I had felt left out, not being able to take part in things like Geocaching, easily geotagging my photos or helping expand open source mapping databases.

For the first few weeks that I had the device, I spent some time working out what situations it would work under - from being in the open, to keeping it in my pocket, to being surrounded by trees, buildings and even inside trains - and what sort of accuracy it could achieve. Whilst doing that I was also building up my database of waypoints around Stuttgart.

Christmas time came, and it was time to head home for a short break. It was interesting holding the GPS up to the window on the plane, seeing the acceleration as we accelerated down the runway. This was all experimentation though, in the lead up to my main plan of action for when I got back to the Isle of Man.

I wanted to drive as many of the island's roads as possible, taking tracklogs as I went, to allow me to add them to Openstreetmap, the open source database of streets around the world. It has taken me quite some time in the weeks since, but I've finally mapped just about all of the roads I drove (or at least the ones where the GPS was tracking). You can see the result by zooming in to the Isle of Man on the site.

The mapping of the Island is nowhere near complete (it's mostly the southern end that I concentrated on), and now that I'm back in Stuttgart, I want to see if I can find people located in the Isle of Man with a similar interest in opening up this sort of level of mapping to the public. Anyone with a GPS (and computer connection) can help out by driving some of the remaining roads, or even fixing areas of the map that I've inevitably not mapped as correctly as I would have liked to have done.

My official degree certificate arrived at home today, with a nice suprise.

Based on provisional results I thought I'd come out with a high Pass level mark, though not quite enough for a Distinction. Having now received the certificate from UCL, it turns out I have actually been awarded a Distinction in MSc Geographic Information Science. It was brilliant news when I found out!

The final exam results of the year came out last week, and generally they looked a lot better for everyone than the first semester results of the January exams.

We weren't told exact results but I managed to get Passes with Merit in Management in GIS, Spatial Decision Support Systems and in our Group Project, along with a Distinction in Advanced Topics in GIS - the more technical of our modules this semester.

To celebrate, and generally just to treat myself, I flew to Salzburg for three days to enjoy some time on one of the lakes nearby. More on that later.

Well, having started my MSc in Geographic Information Science at UCL back in September of last year, it's now starting to come to an end - or at least the teaching part of it is. This evening I have handed in my last piece of coursework, and next week my final exams begin. This semester I'm taking three modules that have exams and each of them is three hours long. They're basically placed a week apart, leaving a nice period in between for revision unlike in previous years in Manchester where I've had a day in between if I'm lucky.

Following the exams I'll be working full-time on my dissertation for the summer. June to September seems like a long time until I start thinking about exactly how much work I will have to do over the summer. Luckily it's work I'll enjoy doing so there are no real issues. Still, I'm sure the summer will go very quickly, hopefully involving lots of time spent in Regents Park and on Hampstead Heath, both of which are really close to where I'm living. If there are any wi-fi hotspots around there, I can even work while I'm there!

For my dissertation I'm lucky enough to be working with a company I've been fascinated by since the early days of the internet. Earlier in the term a GIS developer (who is also a UCL alumni) came in to give a presentation on the company he worked for, Multimap. With this being just at the sort of time when we should have been thinking about a dissertation to take on for the summer months, two things clicked in my head and I thought I'd get in touch with them to see if they had anything I could help them out with as part of my dissertation. I was very hopeful as they were basically doing exactly what I wanted to do - geographic information for the web. My whole course of education has been based on the fact that I'm interested in geography and computing and especially the areas in which they combine. That desire explains my choice of topics at A-level, BSc level and now MSc level. (If only there was some way of combining photography with them as well!)

I was really happy when Multimap got back to me and asked me to come in and meet them over lunch to talk about the possibilities. So now I have a dissertation topic to work on after the exams, in an area that fascinates me and with a great company. What more could I ask for? After I've researched the area in more detail, I'm hoping to create some geographic analysis software to help them out with some of the work they do. I can't really go into it yet, but hopefully will be able to in the future. I've been discussing non-disclosure agreements with them and my course tutor over the past few days and frankly it's fascinating - if a little scary at the same time. Whilst being aware of them, I've never had to deal with NDAs before at all.

The website I created as the final year project for my first degree (BSc Computing and Geography with Industrial Experience) up in Manchester was designed as a project on its own - not being worked on with any organisations - so there were very few restrictions as to what I could do. Originally I would have had more input from other organisations but sadly that plan never worked out, so it was a complete standalone project in the end. I still managed to achieve a comfortable 1st class mark for the project though, which I was extremely pleased with.

So, next thing on my agenda is to make sure I'm prepared for the first of my final exams on Tuesday...