maps

I was looking recently to see what applications were available for the iPhone (or iPod touch) relating to the Isle of Man, and was pleasantly surprised to see that a mapping application had been released.

The application, simply called 'Isle of Man', gives users a map of the Island for use on their iPhone while they are visiting. In addition to the map, it lets users find amenities and streetnames that have been added into the OpenStreetMap database. I decided this morning to pay the 59p to download the app and try it out, but beyond the initial excitement of seeing OpenStreetMap data being used for mobile maps of the Isle of Man, I haven't been so impressed with the execution of the idea for a number of reasons...

The Mobile-Streetmaps.com website promotes this app and hundreds of other similar ones from around the world, each just a download of OpenStreetMap data packaged into an application, for which they charge 59p. While it's not a large amount to pay, the company producing the applications is profiting off the generosity of the OpenStreetMap community (and in the case of the Isle of Man, Cloud Made as well, thanks to their donation of data) with little attribution, and no mention within the app itself of the license under which the data is available.

Hopefully the company will fix the attribution issue soon, by adding a mention to the pages in the iPhone app store that the data is from OpenStreetMap, and also by adding information about the license to at least the about page of each app, and to the side bar of the pages on their website.

The app itself could be quite useful if you're visiting the Island, but it has quite a few usability issues that hamper its use:

• Zooming in to the map, you are not shown beyond a certain level, leaving many streets in the center of towns and villages left without names.
• Navigation within the app could really be improved... there's not even a back button to get back to the map from various other screens.
• After searching for items, you're taken to the map, but you are left looking at the place you were looking at before, with no obvious indication that pins have been added to the map outside of your current view.
• There is no way of clearing the pins from previous searches from the map, leading to possible confusion when searching for other things.
• Clicking on the pins for search results doesn't give any more information to the user. It would be nice to be able to get contact details where available, what the nearest street is, etc.

If you would like to access maps offline for more than just a single place, and be able to take advantage of recent updates to the maps, you will probably be better off downloading the OffMaps app which I have yet to try, but costs just a little more at £1.19 and lets you choose the area and level of detail you wish to download, and lets you do it for as many places as you wish.

While free and open geodata from OpenStreetMap gives a great boost to these applications, it also has its downfalls in that it's likely not (yet) complete for any given area. To give an example, searching for 'cafe' amenities in the Isle of Man resulted in just the Silverdale cafe being shown on the map, where in reality there are many more cafes that aren't (yet) listed.

To help improve the amount of data in the Isle of Man that's represented in OpenStreetmap, in particular relating to points of interest (POIs), I'm planning to hold another mapping party on Saturday 1st August. I'll post more information about this soon, but put the date in your diary if you're interested in helping put some of these amenities on the map. If you'd like more information in the mean time, please get in touch.

Update: having contacted the author of the apps, he's already been working with the OpenStreetMap community and has agreed to improve on the attribution, which is good. I also tried out OffMaps and liked it, but one thing it doesn't give you that the individual place-based apps do, is the access to find the location of POIs and streets while you're offline (though it does work when online).

When I was looking for old maps of the Isle of Man a couple of years ago, I came across a great source of old maps of towns across Britain and Ireland (as well as a couple of the Isle of Man and other places in Europe). I didn't mention them in the post (I perhaps hadn't found them at that point) but I've recently had a bit of an interest in the history of the area around where I'm living, so went back to this supplier to order some old maps of the Elephant and Castle area of London.

Alan Godfrey has been building up an impressive collection of reprints of old Ordnance Survey Maps from the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. The maps, collectively known as The Godfrey Edition, are reproductions of original maps, often scaled down slightly, but printed in extraordinary quality considering the age of the originals.

As described on their website:

Most of the maps are highly detailed, taken from the 1/2500 plans and reprinted at about 14 inches to the mile. They cover towns in great detail, showing individual houses, railway tracks, factories, churches, mills, canals, tramways and even minutiae such as dockside cranes, fountains, signal posts, pathways, sheds, wells, etc.. Each map includes historical notes on the area concerned. Many also include extracts from contemporary directories. The maps are neatly folded, often with an early photograph on the cover. The maps are ideal for local historians, transport historians, and family historians, or simply those with an interest in the town they live in or have visited. The maps are very good value and cost just £2.25 each.

Whenever I've bought maps from them (their whole catalog is online in their map shop) I've found them to be very responsive, with the maps often arriving the next day. Alan Godfrey was also open to the use of names from old maps for the OpenStreetMap project (where they were still relevant, as they often were in Peel in the Isle of Man, where much of the historical street layout still exists).

So, if you're interested in the history of the area around you, I highly recommend these maps as a great start to learning more about how things used to be.

Did you know that you can list your business for free on Google Maps and have it highlighted to people who are searching the map for businesses like yours within a certain area?

When I was building the Cronk-e-Dhooney Cottage B&B website a few months back, I was looking for ways to promote it. I added it to TripAdvisor to give it some visibility in the world of travel (and it's recently had its first glowing review) and then tried to add it to Google Maps using the Local Business Center.

Trying to add it, I stumbled when it came to entering the address (which doesn't have a street name, and has a Manx postcode, which wasn't recognised by Google). Without a working address, there wasn't a chance of getting it listed.

When I saw today's release of Google Maps for the Isle of Man, I thought I'd give the process another shot this evening, and try once again to add Cronk-e-Dhooney Cottage to the map. This time it worked much better (though not painless, as it still didn't like the postcode) and I've managed to get the information (and a couple of the photos I could get it to accept) onto the map. For the extended profile that pops up on the map, you can add photos and a wealth of information about your business.

Now, do a search for bed and breakfast in the Isle of Man and you'll see the cottage come up in pole position. With free publicity like this, can you afford not to have your local business on the map?

Tip: When adding the address, type it all out except for the postcode, click the link to change the location of the pin on the map, move it to pinpoint your property, and only then add your postcode. That's the only way I could get it to accept the address.

It's taken quite some time, but it's great to see that Google Maps now has a map of the Isle of Man to go with the imagery they added a little while back. Thanks Google!

Just one day after I write about CloudMade announcing that they are donating their map of the Isle of Man to the OpenStreetMap project (see my post from yesterday), I notice today that Google Maps has added the Isle of Man to their list of places they have map coverage for (though no official announcement I can see on their LatLong blog as of yet).

I had my suspicions that there may have been an imminent release of maps for the Island when I noticed that it wasn't possible to add map data on the Island through their new MapMaker tool that allows you to add your own data to unmapped regions.

It's a shame that this data isn't editable like the CloudMade data that I'll soon be importing into OpenStreetMap though. Zooming into Castletown for a quick close-up look, I've already spotted an error (typo) in the naming of a road: check out Abrory road (should be Arbory Road) running into Castletown. If that was an error in OpenStreetMap data, it'd be a simple job to go in and fix that up so other users could benefit from correct data.

Update: In some places, it's just plain wrong, e.g. this main road in Ballasalla (A34) that has been re-routed down a footpath before joining up with itself again.

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.