OpenStreetMap
I thought it would be a nice demonstration of OSM's flexibility to produce a map of all the places in the world containing Darwin in the name - from Darwin College Cambridge to Darwin in Australia. Although this is a gimmick, it would be of some interest in 2009 as it is the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his work, ‘On the Origin of Species’ (see www.darwin2009.cam.ac.uk). The many organisations which will be staging events in 2009 might be interested in a map like this which they could freely use on their sites and this would showcase OSM to a wider audience.
Making such a map is slightly beyond my (very limited) abilities and making it look pretty might take a bit of time. I thought I would start by posting something here to see if anyone has an ideas / suggestions and wants to take this on. I am happy to help if I can, for example by trying to generate publicity once the map exists. If there are no takers here, I'll try the mailing list.
Oliver
Discussion
Comment from IgnoredAmbience on 1 January 2009 at 03:01
Maybe a namefinder query would be a good start?
http://gazetteer.openstreetmap.org/namefinder/?find=Darwin
I'm sure there's a nice feed for it somewhere that could be stuck onto an OpenLayers OSM map.
Comment from OliverLondon on 2 January 2009 at 10:27
Indeed, this generates lots of hits as expected. It did flag to me that some of these places may be named after other Darwins, but that should be a small issue and some could always be removed manually if they are obvious.