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Last week we had a London Summer OpenStreetMap event near smithfields. Although close to my office, it was a great urban explorational experience for me again. I was mapping St Bart’s Hospital (here), which I hadn’t particularly ever noticed before. A mix of old buildings around a nice square in the middle, a new bit with a sneakily hidden cafe, and lots of big new construction.

Actually I wasn’t mapping it, I was remapping it. It’s easy to forget that though, if you delete the red data in separate operation beforehand (which feels quite destructive), then later come back and imagine it was never there. You’re left with a nice new patch, and it feels like new mapping.

Of course there’ll be plenty more “nice new patches” pretty soon, when the license change redaction bot does it’s thing. With Andy Allan and Matt Amos both in attendance at the pub, redaction bot development was a top topic. It’s become a bit meaningless to say “it’s nearly there”, partly because we’ve always been wrong, but partly because we can break down the development and testing of this thing into many stages. But Andy’s been making some great progress see rebuild list posts and we’re expecting to be running the bot on some real data imminently. In the pub we were discussing this, but Andy was also cautioning not to get too excited. There’s plenty of things which could go wrong requiring some re-coding.

We had along Mike (user ViewFromTheBoundary) who is interested in using OpenStreetMap for a website about opera houses. He had done some rendering investigations, but was confused by the project documentation and the confusing array of alternative approaches. Coming along to an OSM meet-up is a great way to cut to the chase! He had been experimenting with a thing called “Generic Mapping Tools”, a set of tools with a bad name. Looked like he’d had some success with basic zoomed out road maps. We were chatting about various map display options. The basic markers/mash-up approach versus raster tile rendering versus static map images. Andy Allan was offering advice. Since he’s been providing the transport map and setting up thunderforest.com, he’s now happy to be known as “the guy that does worldwide custom OSM tile rendering”, rather than just “the guy that does OpenCycleMap”.

At the data end of this problem Mike was encountering familiar problems of tagging inconsistencies. I think arts venue tagging isn’t all that well decided. Heck there isn’t even a properly documented tag for an art gallery at the moment (due to too many tag ideas rather than too few). Mike was saying he has some datasets which could be imported. I suggested the “community import” approach, presenting the data and letting mappers to decide how to merge it in on a case by case basis. Shaun used to have a nice example of this with “Bike Shop Locator”. Seems to be offline at the moment though.

Speaking of Shaun (the excessively bearded man in the above picture), he’s taking a new job at itoworld and it sounds like he’s going to be working on “the fun stuff”, OpenStreetMap and their work with map renderings and data QA tools. Awesome! But it means he’s leaving London and heading to that mysterious place at the start of the 2008 year of edits video. Shaun seems to cycle the length and breadth of the country twice a week anyway, so I’m sure we’ll be seeing him.

Paul the archivist is also leaving London. He’s done some great detailed mapping in his time down here, but his archiving contract came to an end so he’s heading back home to Derby and searching for archiving pastures new. If you have an archiving opportunity, Paul the archivist is your man! Maybe he’ll find something in London again, or hopefully somewhere which needs lots of mapping at least!

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It’s been rainy as hell in London lately, but we were fortunate to hit upon a warm (humid) evening last Wednesday. On Saturday 4th August I’ll be having a BBQ round my house. By then we’ll surely be having some summer weather right? So keep that date free, and I’ll give you some more details. But let’s squeeze in another pub meet-up / mapping evening between now and then. How about next Thursday 19th? Suggested locations anyone? Details will be announced on the wiki page.