Spotted two new articles on OpenStreetMap recently – one on the PocketLint site: “OpenStreetMap – Crowd sourced cartography set to re-map the world“; and the other on Wired: “GPS Hackers Blaze Own Trails With Crowdsourced Maps“.
They both mention how OpenStreetMap cartography is more detailed than the alternatives produced by Navteq, Teleatlas et al and the Wired article even goes to include at least four links to various parts of the OSM wiki and mentions some of the devices that our maps can be used on such as iPhones, TomToms and so on.
What with this and more OSM ‘love’ spilling into Episode 83 of Floss Weekly – Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap, was interviewed in Episode 81 it looks like activity is only going to increase.
Archive for the ‘openstreetmap’ Category
OpenStreetMap in the news again
Friday, August 28th, 2009OpenStreetMap at the Farmleigh Park Geeknic in Dublin, anybody?
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009There’s a Geeknic (picnic for geeks if you aren’t too sure) on in Farmleigh Park, Dublin in a few weeks time (on Sunday 2nd August @ 1pm). I can’t help but notice that the OpenStreetMap map of Farmleigh could do with a bit of attention – from what I can make out there are unnamed roads on the OSM map along with ones that aren’t there – and as we all know, we can add as much detail as we feel necessary 
So, anybody on for a bit of socialisin’, evangelisin’ and map making?
New Accessibility mailing list for Open Street Map
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009Lulu-Ann posted to the general Open Street Map mailing list an announcement of theaccessibility mailing list .
From her posting, this mailing list will be focused on the discussion of
- How to create non visual maps for the blind and visual impaired
- New tags that allow to map objects of special interest for disabled persons
- New maps that contain information about barriers like steps for wheelchair users
- Special routing, like wheelchair routing or pedestrian routing for the blind
- New maps that contain worthful information like theatres with subtitles for the deaf or braille writing signs or acoustic traffic lights for the blind
- Data exchange to the navigation tool “Loadstone-GPS” for the blind
All very interesting.
Reorganising the WikiProject_Ireland Page
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009I sent a post to the talk-ie mailing list wondering whether we should reorganise the “WikiProject_Ireland” page to be more useful for those of us that are interested with mapping in Ireland.
If you’re interested please chime in with your opinion so we can arrive something workable.
OpenStreetMapping Nenagh
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009So yesterday I had a quick interview with a journalist from the Nenagh Guardian – my local paper – about this OpenStreetMap (OSM) mapping malarky.
As most of you will probably know OSM is to printed atlases from AA, Ordnance Survery etc, as wikipedia is to encyclopedias. People can contribute data to the project through a variety of activities: going out and actually mapping an area with a sat nav or gps unit [even a mobile phone with GPS in it such as an iphone, nokia n95 or whatever], tracing data off Yahoo [and other] aerial imagery, filing bugs on the openstreetbugs website or literally drawing in information via the walking papers map making website. And better again, this is about providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them.
Anyway…I mentioned how the OpenStreetMap map of Nenagh is more complete than even the latest commercially available maps for Garmin and Google Maps and listed off a few ways how OSM could be used commercially: by real estate agents, courier companies, how being able to pin-point where all the amenities are would be useful for tourists, and so on.
Compare the Open Street Map of Nenagh with the Google Map of the area – as you can see, there’s still quite a bit of work to be done – Millers Brook needs to be marked as such along with the various groves, avenues etc that comprise that estate. Plus all the amenities, shops [perhaps even their opening hours] and the Shannon Development Industrial Centre still need to be added – as I’m sure are some other small portions of the town that I’ve unknowingly neglected.
It’s fair to say that this will never be finished – existing housing estates will be extended, there will always be urban development plans that when implemented would also need to be included on the map.
It would also be cool to have the new “Nenagh Cycling Hub” rendered on the opencyclemap.org website.
I discovered the OpenStreetBrowser site to be a great test of the data that myself and others have entered – it’s also a great way of demonstrating just what can be done with OSM data.
If you happen to spot something that I’ve missed please either drop me a comment or use the openstreetbugs website.
On a related note: it would be good to see a PEAR/PHP based client/component for interfacing with the OpenStreetMap server so that interesting apps utilising that data could be implemented on the LAMP stack – something to go alongside the Services_GeoNames package from pear