OpenGeoData

All eyes are on Tehran right now. As the center of the Iranian election protests the city has become increasingly important to websites this week. To keep their site up-to-date with this latest crisis area Flickr switched out the Yahoo road Map with Open Street Map. When I heard about this I wondered how other major mapping sites faired.

link

Caught this on BBC news being shown on the Heathrow Express a few weeks ago. It’s the future.

Saw this in Italy – a car park with little LEDs above each space showing green if the space is free, red if not. So you can drive around the aisles of cars and easily see if there is a space. Now for integration with your TomTom…

I had a chat with Dave Hansen of TIGER import fame at todays Portland mapping party. You can listen to the podcast here.

Short mention of OSM about half way through. Check out the article and the podcast itself

There’s not long to go until the State of the Map 2009. Here’s a quick update on places you can find out how to participate in the greatest open geo bonanza in the world:

• Register – Don’t leave it too late to get your ticket
• Check out the schedules – There are over 60 talks and workshops to choose from
• Propose a lightning talk – Lightning talks are short, sharp bursts of geo enthusiasm on any topic related to OpenStreetMap
• Participate in the #GeoMob OpenStreetMap App Challenge – Tell the crowd how your start-up or small business is using OpenStreetMap data.
• Sign up for the OSM-Foundation – The State of the Map is organized by volunteers the OpenStreetMap Foundation. By joining the OSM-Foundation you can show your support for the volunteers who make the State of the Map possible. Membership is only £15 per year.

OpenGeoData now automagically twitters its posts to @openstreetmap!

You climbed up a mountain and took a photo:

And that’s very pretty. But it’s 2009! Why doesn’t it have all kind of magic over the top of it. Enter Marmota. You tell it where you took the photo (maybe your photo has a GPS attached anyway) and it generates a simulated panorama 360 degree wraparound of what the landscape looks like from height field data. It then matches your photo’s pitch, yaw and roll and lens angle against this virtual panorama to figure out exactly where you were pointing it. It uses computer vision techniques to figure out the outline of mountains in your photos to do the matching. Here it’s matched it to pointing at these mountains:

And now you can fade between the computer generated hills and the image itself:

Finally because it knows the height and location of each pixel in the image, you can now in 3D overlay OSM data (such as rivers etc below) on to that picture. You’re augmenting it with things much as wikitude does, but at a higher resolution.

Now of course the output can be played with and overlaid in proprietary and closed projects like Google Earth. Here we’re looking back from a distance toward the location from which the photo was taken. The black areas are hidden shadow areas where hills block the view from where the picture was taken:

These ortho rectified images can be played with in any GIS. Neat huh?

Here’s a short podcast with the projects creator.

OSM gets a brief mention in this article about PNDs in my faveourite newspaper, The Economist.

I’m on a open call on yi-tan today. Dial in details below:

Yi-Tan is a small, independent company created to help everyone understand the changes underway now and learn to thrive in them.

Conversations are a necessary element for change. To that end, we host the Yi-Tan Weekly Call as well as the Yi-Tan List, both of which anyone can join. Change also requires continuity. To keep event attendees connected with one another well after their events have ended, we run the Yi-Tan Alumni List.

On Monday: Please join us for the Yi-Tan Weekly Call,
1:30pm Eastern, Monday June 8, 2009

Our topic: OpenStreetMap

Date: Monday, June 8, 2009
Time: 10:30 PST, 1:30 EST

Dial-in Number: 1-270-400-1500
Participant Access Code: 778778