OpenStreetMap
Oggi abbiamo lanciato l'iniziativa M(')appare Milano. Una serie di micromapping party per completare la copertura di Milano.
Con la collaborazione di Radio Popolare e del programma MenteLocale.
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Today we launched the M(')appare Milano initiative: a series of Micro Mapping Party to complete the Milano coverage.
With the collaboration of Radio Popolare Mente Locale talk show.
Mappare means to map but m'appare means it become visible to me, so this is a word joke :)
I love when you are looking around the far flung corners of the globe that you've traveled too and you see that there are high resolution Yahoo Images of the area. This means you can start tracing and getting some basic road layout of an area done.
I recently discovered that Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania (pop 2.5million) is almost completly unmapped but has high resolution Yahoo imagary available. :) Time to start tracing out some road networks!
I just started mapping arround Espelette, based on registered tracks I already made and verified several times.
[En Español abajo]
I very long trip today and lots of ways to process. But i noticed a lot of new things.
-Im planifying my route trying to avoid places already in the map
-After a change in the way back I went back using OSM map instead of Google Maps on the Maemo Mapper, and using a lot of ways not mapped by me.
-The paper maps were obsolete, a lot of recently built highways were not present but OSM rules
-And lots of new places to add, now without dragons, leprechaums and other stuff.
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Una excursión larga hoy para ver a mis padres y un montón de ways para procesar, pero lo más importante, he visto que han cambiado muchas cosas.
-Ahora planifico mis rutas tratando de esquivar las rutas que ya están en el mapa.
-Después de alterar mi camino de vuelta a última hora volví usando los tiles de Mapnik en vez de Google Maps en el Maemo Mapper, y usando muchas muchas cosas no hechas por mí.
-Los mapas de papel estan obsoletos, muchas autopistas de reciente construcción no estaban reflejadas, sin embargo OSM mola.
-Y lo más divertido, gran cantidad de sitios nuevos que añadir en los que podemos afirmar que no hay dragones, leprechaums u otras criaturas míticas
It's difficult for the renderers to do justice to a junction like this, where the right-hand lane of an elevated trunk road just disappears into the earth, emerging at ground level in a different direction.
In fact, this whole section of road is a nightmare to navigate around, where an incorrect lane choice can send you in unpredictable directions. The 'sliproads to exit and normal lanes to continue' convention doesn't apply...
I've traced some buildings on the University of Nottingham main campus from Yahoo imagery, filling-in names from memory (and with a few hints from the Wikipedia article)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Nottingham_Halls_of_Residence
It adds a new tag:
which may be worth rendering on campus maps.
In the meantime, I've lablled the residential buildings with the name of their hall (e.g. 10 buildings all with name=Lenton and Wortley, which shows-up on the map)
There are parks and woodlands marked inside the campus. The area tagging causes some problems:
To make a woodland appear above the generic "landuse=university" purple area, we have to use the layer attribute. But that makes some paths disappear 'under' the woodland. I don't want to put a higher layer on those paths just to make them render, since technically they're ground-level paths.
Multipolygon relations are being used for courtyards within buildings.
I'm used to getting puzzled looks while mapping, but perhaps none more so than today, when there were several stares of utter bafflement as we drove down the A361 in the Pluriel, with the roof open, with two bikes sticking out the top. In the rain.
After a few days of "shall we / shan't we" as the weather forecast remained resolutely crap, we decided to say "sod it" and cycled NCN 45 from Swindon to Kemble. It's a really nice route, sort of.
There was one forest of pedestrian crossings over the Swindon bypass (Thamesdown Drive, I think) where the signs were unclear and we ended up cycling down a very muddy path then retracing our steps; then the short bit alongside Thamesdown Drive itself was particularly uninspiring, to the point where Anna yelled over at me "Sustrans really ought to get a clue"... just one second before we turned a corner to find a magnificent new cycle bridge over the road, with a swooping, smooth tarmac path down the other side.
The railway path from Cricklade was interesting, in that when they said "this route goes through the Cotswold Water Park" I didn't realise they meant it literally. The puddles were enormous, and enormously muddy - the bikes needed re-WD40ing every five minutes. I suspect it's not always been like that, but today's lousy weather coupled with last year's flood damage made for pretty crap conditions.
Despite that, and the rain, the ride itself was generally really enjoyable: fairly gentle, a couple of startling sights (like an infilled Thames & Severn Canal lock and cottage), and an interesting chance conversation with the chairman of Cricklade's chamber of commerce about the benefits that cycle tourism has brought to his town. And best of all, it ended at a really friendly pub next to Kemble railway station, where a pint of Stowford Press (me) and Arkells 2B (Anna) were the perfect accompaniment to watching Wales beat France at rugby as we waited for the train home.
Bei einem kurzen Besuch in der Nordheide die paar Straßen von Oerrel abgefahren. Die Feldwege leider nicht. Und da die Gegend dort nicht so kahl wie die Karte ist, ein wenig Wald ergänzt.
Added some more detail to the area around Nottingham Trent University whilst staying at a hotel nearby before going to cross country race at Wollaton Park.
In the Villages Stutensee-Büchig and Blankenloch north of Karlsruhe, some streets were already mapped, but mostly without name and correct type. Today i started in the south, completed Büchig and continued with the south-eastern part of Blankenloch. In Blankenloch still remains a lot to do, i hope tomorrow the weather will be as fine as today so i can continue with that village.
The mapping of lakes in western Sweden is coming along just fine. Adding a few each day.
I recently went back and looked at an area of Hillsboro, Oregon, USA that I had mapped before, and found all the street names changed in the development. In the county's GIS the names were all new (which I confirmed on a subsequent reconnaissance mission), but in Google the names were old.
After a few minutes' thinking, I realized that the development had been a trailer park (i.e. a lot for "manufactured homes"), but the trailers had been evicted several years ago and permanent housing is now being built. Although this area was still empty lots, all the street names had been changed from the old days, and Google Maps had not caught up.
I fixed the Henry Hudson Parkway, Henry Hudson Bridge, exits and crossovers in Bronx NY
Having systematic plans for a half-hour lightning mapping session and then finding streets and alleys and dense little time-consuming conservation areas in areas you just meant to de-maplint sucks. Finding C. S. Lewis's grave after a hint from a passer-by and being able to evangelise a bit about OSM helps make up for that, though.
This is my first attempt. Hopefully I did a reasonable job. I mapped all the major parkways/highways in Westchester County between the NYC line (which had been mapped) and I287 the Cross Westchester Expressway.
Following the day before's surveying jaunt, I headed out after work today and ticked off some missing streets, some missing onramps, and cleared out one more small neighbourhood.
Another nice big complete swathe is now ready. Still needs things like shops and churches and schools, and particularly on Öskjuhlíð, it needs some sort of marking for the forest and the cemetary.
Suburbs Palmerston & Nichols in the north of Canberra mapped
I've now got contours rendering on http://openpistemap.org thanks to the very helpful Contours wiki page created by Gravitystorm (of cycle map fame) (osm.wiki/index.php/Contours).
I've taken a slightly different approach, which I think is a bit neater - instead of leaving the contours data as shapefiles I have imported it into PostGIS. I've updated the Contours wiki page with this alternative method.
The piste map is now rendering the whole planet data set rather than just one resort (but it won't update regularly yet), and it will render contours for most of the European ski resorts. I need to work out which bits of other continents I should be including contour data for (let me know if there's anywhere I've missed).
So now I'm back from the Linuxtage in Chemnitz. All in all there were very interesting lectures and stalls. I got to know lots of knew projects according the openknowledge- and linux-world. And one of these things was OpenStreetMap, which I first ignored. But at home I got really curious and found out, that there are lots of white dots on the map in my hometown Lübeck, what has to be changed ;). Well, at least the maping of my small estate Rangenberg, which is a part of Lübeck's city-district Kücknitz.
I hope that this won't be that difficult as establishing a WLAN-mesh-network (see Freifunk + B.A.T.M.A.N. (+ OLSR)).
I've been spending a lot of time with mom lately - mobile open map.
This is a mobile phone application for viewing OpenStreetMap, tracking a Bluetooth GPS, making and following routes, finding and saving places, saving tracklogs and even taking photos!
It is working now but not yet thoroughly tested and I am inviting people to try it out, try to break it, and let me know what they like/don't like, what improvements/features they suggest.
Anyone interested should contact me for a trial copy.
