government

As I'm sure you know, there have been numerous innovations in the world of geography online in recent years, from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap, FireEagle to Twitter, and many more, but most (if not all) of these developments have come from commercial or open source worlds with little support from the public sector - unless you had access to large amounts of money to pay for their data.

The British Government is now starting to see the benefit of opening up data though, and I'm particularly happy to see the Ordnance Survey looking to make more data available to the public. All of which should stimulate innovation even further as it starts to make information available that was previously locked up in only commercially available datasets.

Related to this overall effort, the OS is currently promoting their GeoVation Challenge to encourage people to share their ideas for geographic innovation. There is even money up for grabs for the best business ideas proposed, designed to help get those ideas to market.

So, if you have ideas for map-based or generally geographic things you'd like to see developed, but don't have the time or knowledge to do it yourself, you can share them in the GeoVation Ideas Challenge and be in with a chance of a tour around the OS headquarters in Southampton (an interesting visit if you get the chance). On the other hand, if you have a business idea, and are prepared to put the work in to get it going, you can share your idea in the GeoVation Awards Challenge and be in with a chance to win up to £10,000 to help get your venture off the ground.

If you're interested in taking part, you will need to act fast as the closing date for entries is 4 January 2010. Best of luck!

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?