A few weeks back (Thu July 19th) we had a little London Summer evening mapping session around Chancery Lane and a pub meet-up at the Penderel’s Oak. I probably should’ve written about some of the conversations closer to the time because the timing was interesting, but things have moved on. We were right in the middle of the redaction bot run at that point. Up until the the day before, I had been assuming that the redactions wouldn’t have reached London by this date. In my slice of the cake I had already deleted bad building outlines data and remapped them from bing, just in time, it turns out, to give the bot a little less redacting to do. By the time we were out mapping that evening, the bot had aleady delt with the whole of the UK, most of europe and the U.S. (it’s now complete of course)

This was the top topic of conversation in the pub. There was some relief and satifaction that things were going smoothly and the bot was running quite quickly. It had been widely predicted that speed was going to be more of an issue. We might have been watching my progress map for months and months, but by this evening it had become clear that the we’d be finished in a matter of days not months. It had also become clear that my progress map was going to be showing rather too many vector objects for most browsers to cope with. I had spotted this flaw from the beginning, but was expecting to have a week or so to figure out a solution!

While the bot was running there was a danger that it would whip up a frenzy of pointlessly alarmist complaints about things like which order it was processing the world in, so it was a relief that these were rendered mute by the speed of the bot’s progress. Haiti was granted a special delay for a few days because people asked nicely, but even there, the editing community probably came to a realisation that actually remapping gets a whole lot easier when it’s just a matter of filling in gaps. At this stage Poland was also being delayed because of a glitch with the whitelisting and blacklisting there.

In the pub (The Penderel’s Oak big wetherspoons in Holborn) we had quite a big crowd, so lots of other topics of conversation. Thanks to Alex for getting some photos

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Steve Chilton was there. He’s organising the Society Of Cartographers annual conference in London in September. I went to one of these down in Plymouth. Very friendly and enjoyable conference for anyone interested in map making. I recommend it! And it’s coming to London (Hosted at UCL)

Martin Cyclestreets was there (not his real name) He was chatting to me about the latest cyclestreets developments. Some frustrations with OpenLayers and things which seem to be a whole lot easier in leaflet (popups were mentioned in particular) He’s hoping to drum up some more support for the England Cycling Data Project and he’s made a nice screencast of the fat lines merging feature. Maybe we should all chip in and work on improving OSMs cycling data in the UK, because the big G have very recently announced new support for cycle routing in the UK using data given to them by sustrans. On the other hand their routing is a bit lame. What a shame they don’t use OpenStreetMap data. What a shame the very large and well funded UK cycling charity sustrans, pay no attention to OpenStreetMap and OpenCycleMap whatsoever.

We had a new chap along in the pub whose name I forget, but he was interested in tube transport data, something I do a bit of work with myself. He was asking, could OpenStreetMap (or something) be used to build up a 3D picture of underground tunnels, including pedestrian access tunnels? I did show him this nifty 3D underground thingy, which is not OpenStreetMap powered. Not open data at all in fact. boo! But it is really neat. Could be done with OSM, but putting this much underground detail (and levels/depth info) into our map data would make for some confusing clutter.

He was also talking about measuring crowdedness on tube trains by firing lasers through the carriages. He was imagining a project TfL could do, but I was already plotting a more grassroots “unnofficial” laser data gathering project :-)

So this was a little catch up on a previous London event. There is another one I’m still to catch up on, and there’ll be more news of…

The OpenStreetMap Anniversary Party plans for London (just as soon as I’ve thought what those plans might be) . This is the BIG pub meet-up of the year. Keep the date free (Sat 18th) and make plans to travel to London if you’re within range. If you’re not within range, head to the Toronto one, or maybe you need to throw your own OpenStreetMap Anniversary Party in your corner of the globe!