OpenGeoData

You might be interested in the results of a meeting the USGS held on VGI and its implications. Minutes, presentations etc are over here.

For some reason … for whatever reason … the TIGER data has some entire ways marked as being bridges.  When examined, only a small portion of them is a bridge. I’ve been fixing them as I happen to notice them, but today I felt like seeking them out. I thought about writing a fancy program to parse the New York State section (as found on <a href=”http://downloads.cloudmade.com”>Cloudmade downloads</a>) to look for bridges.

I was reminded, instead, that the XAPI can do its own cut of OSM data. It’s fairly straightforward to do. The full XAPI documentation is in the wiki. All I did was fire up JOSM, and make a few bounding boxes around New York State. I did three: one for the southern tier, one for the adirondacks, and one for the NYC metro area. The first one’s URL looks like this: http://www.informationfreeway.org/api/0.6/map/way[bridge=yes][bbox=-79.6289,41.9677,-73.3667,43.3731]
I fetched it with wget -O southern.osm ‘URL’.  It’s only five megabytes and loads into JOSM easily.

Once loaded into JOSM, you can see the very long bridges. They stick out like a sore thumb. I pick one, zoom in to fill the screen with it. I have the Terraserver Ortho WMS layer turned on, so I can see where the bridge really should be. Two selects of nodes, split the way, and delete the bridge=yes tag. I’ll have New York State fixed up in about an hour’s worth of editing (not counting the time to write this blog entry).

The have been at least 400 OpenStreetMap editing sessions in Haiti since the quake hit. Mostly tracing Yahoo imagery, and gleaning information from old CIA maps. We also just received permission to use GeoEye imagery acquired post-event … that will allow us to tag collapsed buildings. Many relief groups are deploying now, many checking in with the CrisisMappers list (the main locus of the wider humanitarian tech community), and they are making inquiries into OSM data and requests for particular features. Dozens of mappers and developers are lending a hand, coordinating on the OSM Haiti WikiProject and IRC and the OSM talk list … standing up services, including 5 minute extracts in Shapefile and Garmin formats, and maps with hill-shading. Just the start to relief and reconstruction effort we hope to contribute to.

Two images to show how we’ve progressed … the first OSM Port au Prince just now, the second OSM before the earthquake.

I’ll be on twitter with updates … though I’m due to fly tonight to Ireland.

Next year, we’ll be lathering on sunscreen and eating tapas at the 4th Annual State of the Map Conference in Girona, Spain on July 9th- July 11th, 2010.

Girona here we come!

You can keep up to date with what’s happening with the State of the Map (SOTM) here.

For information on our host city, visit the wiki and travel wiki.

Our humble abode for three days, at the ESRI User Conference in San Diego in middle July. Emma Lyons (Cloudmade’s summer intern) and I had a great time running this booth. We put it together pretty frugally, with a table drape for a sign, a couple of photo frames cycling through Best of OSM images. We gave away huge numbers of buttons and pens, and after the first day, we had Cloudmade-sponsored OSM T-Shirts to give away. Oh, we surely got popular THEN! Talked to a lot of people about OSM. I used the line “Can I tell you about OpenStreetMap?” if anybody paused. Most people stayed to listen to my 30 second spiel. The booth cost us nothing because we were representing a non-profit, and given the contacts we made, was definitely worth the time. I encourage everyone to seek out opportunities to represent OSM at a trade show.

Where’s yours? Get one here!

I wanted to keep the community up to date on happenings with the SOTM committee meetings. Everyone, yes, everyone is welcome to join! Today we had a great meeting with fellow OSMers Ivan Sanchez Ortega, Will King of Geodata Solutions, Emilie Laffray, Richard Weiat just to name a few.

We talked about the current bids for 2010: both Spain and Italy are really excited to host the conference! It’s really awesome to see their enthusiasm.

As a committee we’re creating some criteria for the proposed host city. It’s not meant to limit the choices, but more help decide the best location. This makes everything very transparent and also lets unsuccessful bids figure out how to do better next time. It also lets SOTM organizers (and the OSM-F Board, if they want) to vote on the bids.

Some criteria could be:

* Easy access by public transport (plane, train, bus) with a maximum of 1.5 hour travel from major airport

* Availability of accommodation close to the venue

* Venue facilities (conference rooms, AV, WiFI, break out areas, right size)

* Venue catering

* Interestingness of the city

* How well the organizing committee will cope with the organization

* Outreach & marketing activities planned by the organizers

* Does the venue make SOTM accessible to a new group of OSMers (as opposed to the same people as last time)

With this in mind, the SOTM committee is extending the bid deadline another two weeks to December 1, 2009 and we will have a decision (drumroll please!) On December 7th.

We’re asking everyone to reach out in your circle of OSM friends to create new proposals. Twitter, FaceBook and the talk lists are just a few examples.

For information on how to write your proposal visit the the OSM wiki site here.

I’m SUPER excited about the Atlanta Mapathon being held this weekend. Not because I care about Atlanta all that much even though my in-laws are from Atlanta. No, because I suspect that a huge mapping party, like a code sprint, is the most efficient way to get an entire city mapped. There are only 30 big cities in the USA. If we can withstand the surge of new OSM mappers, and we have enough experienced mappers to be able to scale the process, we can get an (open) street map of the USA finished within a year.

Probably not necessary to explain why it’s so important to have it be open. Probably is necessary to explain why the public domain doesn’t suffice. There are maps of the US already, produced by the USGS, in the public domain. The trouble with the public domain is that it’s not enough. You need a community who cares enough about the data to keep it up to date.

I’m a board member of the Open Source Initiative. We spend a lot of time dealing with licenses, to ensure that the code is “free enough”. We actually have a definition of “free enough”, which is the Open Source Definition. But free isn’t enough by itself. We have over a decade of experience, all of which tells us that free isn’t enough. Free software, or free data, or public domain data, isn’t sufficient. You need an open community of contributors.

And hopefully this weekend’s Mapathon will jumpstart that community within and without Atlanta!

I’m trying an experiment with walking-papers. Get all my non-mapping friends to print out a map of their area, write on the print out the errors, house numbers etc and then I will do the rest. I’ve tweeted here:

“Help me make your map better http://bit.ly/B8F5X – what you think?”

You can too. Get your friends, family… even enemies involved. Re-tweet or facebook status update with that, or ask them to send you the paper yourself.

This is a great way to get lots more people involved, and spread your mapping efforts. For bonus points, next time you see your Aunt Ethel print it out for her, or get all your workmates to fix their home areas. Buy a pint for the person with the best map updates.