On Saturday 2nd October we will be holding the third Isle of Man mapping day for the OpenStreetMap project and it's open to anyone.

If you're on the Isle of Man and interested in maps, new technology or are just keen to get out and about and explore Douglas for the day, why not come along to join us on the mapping day to find out more about the project and get an introduction to mapping.

We'll meet for a coffee in the morning (from 10am) at Velvet Lobster on the North Quay in Douglas, and after a short introduction to the project and chat about how to get started mapping, we'll head out onto the streets to add some detail to the open map of the Isle of Man. After a while (1pm) we'll meet back at the Velvet Lobster for a bite to eat and chat about the morning's mapping, before heading back out. At 3pm we'll meet up at the cafe again and to introduce you to the basics of making your own updates to the map.

If you're keen to use the maps yourself, we can help you get set up to do that, and point you to some of the useful services available that use data from OpenStreetMap.

Want to find out more? Drop me an email to dan at karran dot net, tweet me @dankarran or give me a shout on 07736 314138. If you'd like to come along, I'd appreciate if you could let me know in advance, so we have an idea of how many people to expect.

Since I received the DVD of high resolution aerial imagery and maps from the Isle of Man Government last week, I've spent most of my spare time starting to digitise information for the OpenStreetMap project.

Using QGIS to load in the data, I started to gather all the names from the map that I could, including both place names (for small local areas, hamlets and villages that weren't already in the database) and also farm names. With over a thousand names, this is already a massive boost to the data in OpenStreetMap as it is data that would have been immensely difficult to gather on the ground.

The image to the left represents the shape of the Island, made up of all the points obtained from the map, and soon to be imported into the main database.

The three images below are of small areas that I have started to digitise the buildings of. I'm offering a prize (a pint at the next London mapping party perhaps) to the first person to guess all three places correctly. Two of them may well look familiar to anyone who I chatted to at the 5th birthday party of OpenStreetMap.

Most of the data in the images above (and future data others would like to extract for OpenStreetMap) would have been impossible (well, certainly extremely impractical) to gather were it not for the very generous support of the Isle of Man Survey in giving us a license to derive this information, for which I'm personally very grateful, and I know a lot of other people in the project are also excited about.

These images are licenced as CC-by-SA and the data behind them all will be in the OpenStreetMap database very soon.

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.

In just two weeks time, on Saturday 1st August 2009, I am going to be organising a mapping party in Douglas, Isle of Man for the OpenStreetMap project. The aim of the project is to build up a map of the world that can be used without the restrictions that are typically imposed by mapping providers such as Google Maps.

The Isle of Man already has a great amount of map data in the database - as you can see on the map at openstreetmap.org - so we have a good starting point, but it isn't yet complete, so there is plenty of information that we can still add. While the road network is very close to complete, we are missing many of the points of interest you might like to see on a map, or be able to search for (perhaps through a website, or in the future from your in-car navigation device), like pubs, cafes, restaurants, libraries, hotels, historic sites or museums, for example.

We also have some Manx names for places and streets, but this isn't yet widespread, so it would be great to capture this information from street signs around the town.

As we have a good street network already, the need for a GPS isn't as important as it was earlier on in the project, so the plan for the mapping party is to use printed maps (from the excellent Walking Papers project) onto which we can add annotations during the day. At the end of the day, we can use the paper maps for reference when entering the information into the map through the OpenStreetMap website, or scan them in and deal with them later, depending on how tired people are after a day's mapping.

If you're on the Isle of Man and interested in making or using maps (or just the underlying map data), then do come along and find out more. If you're also interested in a little exercise, come out with us and explore Douglas for the day, collecting information to add to the map. You can find out more on the OpenStreetMap wiki, or alternatively contact me if you'd like more information.

If you run an organisation on the Isle of Man which uses geographic information (e.g. business listings) and would like to find out more about including your information in the map database so they can be displayed on the map, or would like to use the maps on your website with your own information displayed on top, please get in touch.

(map from OpenStreetMap, CC-by-SA)

In September, the Society of Cartographers is going to be holding their 45th annual Summer School event in Southampton.

It's interesting looking through the programme to see just how much of the event is about data, and much of it coming from sources that didn't exist just a few years ago, from OpenStreetMap, the new UKMap and of course the various Ordnance Survey datasets that are available to organisations who can afford to pay for them.

I wonder how the content of this annual summer school has changed over the years since it started, as more and more data sources have become available for cartographers to use?

If you're in the UK and are interested in making maps, the event (7-9 September) looks like it will be a good place to see where cartography is heading, get some hands on experience in the workshops and also network with others in the industry.

I spent some time last year making some maps of the Snaefell Mountain Course (and other roads) on the Isle of Man so that I could add an overview map to the Wikipedia entry for the course.

Last night I was trying out some of the options in the OpenStreetMap 'export' tab, and since it can now export SVG (scalable vector graphics) files, I thought I'd have a try at redoing the maps from last year in a more re-usable and editable form using vector graphics instead of bitmaps.

To make the SVG map using data from OpenStreetMap (as shown in the preview), I just followed some relatively simple steps and a little trial and error while using the graphics editor.

I thought I'd share some of the steps below, in case anybody else was interested in making maps from the great data becoming available in the OpenStreetMap project.

So, what's needed to make your own custom maps?

1. An area of OpenStreetMap that's got enough information in it to be useful for your purpose.
   If the data you want is not all there, or you want to add more, see the beginners' guide and the map making guide to get you started off adding or improving data in the project.
2. An SVG image generated from OpenStreetMap using the export tab.
   To export your vector graphic file, zoom the main map into the area you want to export, click on the export tab, tweak the area you're interested in (if necessary), select 'Mapnik image' and 'SVG' from the options and click Export. Experiment with the scale to see what the results are, but initially the default scale will probably suffice.
3. A vector graphics editor such as Adobe Illustrator or, even better, an open source editor such as Inkscape.
   Open the downloaded SVG file in your editor and you should see a nice pretty OpenStreetMap image there. To start to work on it, it's a good idea to 'ungroup' the items so that you can edit them individually (I had to do this twice to fully separate out all the objects). You'll notice that the map is made up of many objects, one for each node and way you'd normally see rendered on the maps at openstreetmap.org. You'll also notice that text annotations (names, road references, etc.) are all broken down to their constituent characters too.
4. Some time to do some (at times quite fiddly) image editing and map making.
   You can get some results out in a relatively short timeframe, but you'll likely want to improve the map over time as you become more familiar with the data and tools available.

What steps were needed to create the TT map?

1. Select all the items and fade them (I lowered the level of transparency, but there are probably better ways of doing it).
2. Select the text items, group each the characters of each name together to make it easier to edit them, re-emphasise them, and change their size if desired.
3. Select any other items that should be re-emphasised and do that (I did the sea and the land).
4. Select each element of the subject that you'd like to highlight (for me, this was each way that makes up the course) and change the styling of it (I increased the size, and re-emphasised the original colours). I also combined them all into a single 'path' and joined the end of each one to the end of the next (using the 'Edit paths by nodes' ad 'Join selected end nodes' tools) to make it fill in the gaps that appear between them.

Hopefully this short tutorial (well, documentation of my first steps) was helpful for other budding neo-cartographers out there. If you've made your own maps from OpenStreetMap data and have any hints and tips that may be useful, please feel free to add a comment to this post.

Change monitoring software has something that's long been desired in the OpenStreetMap community - the ability to easily see what changes have been made in your areas, and by who. I've been excited to see this week that it's finally come to fruition in the form of OSM Mapper from ITO World.

Their blog post gives some more information about what it can do:

Using this product you can set up one or more areas to monitor and analyse in a variety of ways. You can even establish RSS feeds to get alerts when other people make changes within areas of interest. You can also generate beautiful images to download and post anywhere as (CC-by-SA).

... plus all sorts of mapping products that highlight changes over time, changes by contributor, etc.

I've been trying it out this morning to try and identify people who have recently contributed to the OpenStreetMap dataset of the Isle of Man, to try and make sure I don't give anyone a big shock when importing the new dataset from CloudMade, and hopefully to encourage others to help out once it's imported, to identify if anything is still missing.

I have to say I've been pretty impressed at how well it works, and how quickly I've identified the major recent contributors and where they've been editing.

Map coverage of the Isle of Man has been slowly growing since I started contributing to OpenStreetMap in January 2006, spurred on at times by old Ordnance Survey New Popular Edition maps being made available to gather data from, and by the Isle of Man Government making some of its maps available too.

By this time last year the Manx map was looking in a pretty good state, though still lacking quite a lot of detail in the larger towns. The lack of detail was helped somewhat by the mapping party I organised at the end of last summer, but still didn't take the map to completion.

Around the time of the mapping party, little to my knowledge at the time, the founders of OpenStreetMap were making a concerted effort to map the island from scratch (under the guise of the startup map data company CloudMade) with the view of donating that data to the OpenStreetMap project. This method was in direct contrast to the piecemeal way the map had been growing up until that point and was more in line with the way commercial providers such as Navteq and TeleAtlas collect their data. With dedicated time, equipment and manpower, the methodology allowed for the map to be more accurately built up and methodically completed.

I'm happy to see that this weekend's State of the Map conference saw the release of that complete dataset. CloudMade's blog post and press release from yesterday give more information as well as a preview of the map.

Now that the data is available, I've agreed to lead the effort to import the data (licensed under a Creative Commons licence) into OpenStreetMap, likely replacing the existing maps built up by the piecemeal effort of a number of us volunteers with the results of the concerted effort from CloudMade, and afterwards adding back any of the original information that is complementary to the CloudMade map data (if any).

We should start to see the results of the new map over the coming weeks as I get time to import the data. I'm really looking forward to using this data in some of the web projects I've been doing in my spare time as well as maybe some others that have been floating around in my mind for a while.

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?

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:

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.