Open geodata
The State of the Map
This year will see the third anniversary of the OpenStreetMap project. It started as a rather ambitious undertaking, something which many didn't believe in, yet three years on it's thriving (as I may have alluded to previously).
Coverage has been steadily spreading outside the project's roots in Britain, through Europe, to a number of other corners of the world, and hopefully will continue to spread as word gets out about the advantages of open geodata.
The project has grown considerably in size, from just a few people back in the day, to over 6000 contributors today. Last year saw an anniversary party to celebrate the project's second year, with around 30 people turning up to celebrate.
Meanwhile, the first official OpenStreetMap conference, aptly named The State of the Map, will be upon us in just a short time and has a great lineup of speakers from academia and the geographic information industry as well as people from all sorts of other walks of life.
The State of the Map conference in July will be keynoted by Ed Parsons, ex-CTO of the Ordnance Survey and now Geospatial Technologist at Google. Other speakers will include the founder of Multimap, the chair of the Society of Cartographers, the architects of the current map visualisations, those coordinating the Dutch and Spanish mapping efforts, and still many others.
From a personal point of view, it's great to see that Muki Haklay - my old MSc in GIS course tutor from the Department of Geomatic Engineering at UCL - will be presenting, and that the conference is being hosted by the University of Manchester's School of Environment and Development, where I did half of my BSc in Computing and Geography.
Anyway, enough of my waffling.
14-15 July in Manchester is shaping up to be a great weekend, showcasing the bleeding edge of geographic information creation (and I don't just mean from the blisters you can get from walking around a city with your GPS).
If you haven't reserved your place already, admission is cheap, so register today for your chance to see the future of mapping you'll actually be able to use. See you there!
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?
Google Maps vs OpenStreetMap
Some of the cartographers on the OpenStreetMap project (which includes the chair of the Society of Cartographers in the UK) got together a few weekends ago for a cartography discussion day to try and clean up the rendering of free geodata from the project. The results of that day are now starting to appear on the maps, with much of the extraneous detail being stripped until you zoom further in, revealing more on each zoom level so as not to clutter the smaller scale maps.
With the changing of the maps I wanted to see how the Isle of Man was looking. I have to say, it's looking even better than the previous big update to mapping.
When I first learned about OpenStreetMap at the Open Geodata Forum I wasn't entirely convinced it would take off, though I was intrigued by the concept. Almost two years down the line and my opinions have definitely changed on that, as have the opinions of many others, including people in the geographic information industry.
To see why my opinions have changed, just compare the open street map of the Isle of Man to the Google Maps version which shows nothing except its name and an outline of the Island (with the Calf of Man joined at the bottom as if a bridge had been built to the islet).
With open geodata anyone can just go in and add new information or alter existing information if there are errors in it (like the link between the Calf and the mainland, for example) but you can't do that on Google Maps. Admittedly the Manx map is still somewhat lacking in certain areas, but it's a work in progress and it's getting there, slowly.
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