State of the Map 2009

17.7.2009 von plepe.

As announced on my blog before, last weekend I went to the OpenStreetMap (OSM)-conference in Amsterdam, called the ‘State of the Map‘. The schedule featured a dense program of interesting talks, and several coffee breaks for networking. This year the Friday was the business-day, filled with talks about data quality and using OSM data in applications. Saturday and Sunday were dedicated to the community, with talks about the state of the OSM in different countries, new challenges for the project as it gets bigger and bigger and applications, applications, applications.

Some of the things which were interesting to me on the conference:

Data quality is a big issue for most of the people I talk with, people just can’t imagine, that data collected by a community can compete with commercial data. It is true, that the OpenStreetMap still has big white holes, especially on the country side. On the other hand completeness in the densely built-up areas (especially Europe) is much higher than in commercial map data (points of interests, foot- and cycleways, …), although assessment of this data shows, that most of the data has been created by a couple of people. Still, comparison of the street data with commercial data (done in the UK with Ordnance Survey data) show a very high correlation. A big advantage of the OpenStreetMap is the high actuality of the data, data often gets uploaded as soon as changes in the real world happen.

One big advantage of the OpenStreetMap is the big community. In March of this year the 100.000th user registered, last week there were already 135.000 users. For sure not all users are really active in the project, but at least about 10.000 users were active during the last two months. The big players in mapping business (Navteq, Teleatlas) have around 800 employees. The next goal for the OpenStreetMap are 1.000.000 registered users, for this, the project has to become more user friendly and faster.

Talking about user friendliness, one very interesting project are the ‘Walking Papers‘, designed by Michael Migurski (who I unfortunately failed to have a chat with. I wanted to talk about another of his projects, Cascadenik, which is used by my project OpenStreetBrowser). The idea is as brilliant as it is simple - you print a map of the region you are interested in, as you walk around you mark missing details (points of interests, roads, road names), scan the papers back in and upload them to the server, where they became available as background in your (and everybody elses) editor, to be drawn after. You don’t even need a GPS for this, because you can guess the position on the map. If you don’t have a scanner, you can send your papers per mail to some address, and they get scanned in for you.

It’s not possible to fit all interesting things I learned on the conference into this blog post, therefore I recommend you the video site of the conference, where eventually all talks will appear (hopefully; from last year still some talks are missing). All pictures uploaded to Flickr got the tag sotm09, all twitter messages got the tag #sotm09. On more link: a new webpage showing some great examples of mapping efforts: bestofosm.org.

In total about 250 people (mostly male geeks) attended the conference. I had the opportunity to talk to some of them and present my project the OpenStreetBrowser. Most were pretty impressed - I still hope it gets famous ;)

A cake with a map (made from OSM data, CC-BY-SA)

people eating cakes, drinking coffee and networking

Group photo of most conference participants on Sunday afternoon

Geschrieben in Technix, OpenStreetBrowser, OpenStreetMap | Keine Kommentare »

How the Power of the Crowd could change Urbanism

23.6.2009 von plepe.

My studies in Sofia, Bulgaria, where I did my year of studying abroad with the Erasmus program, are finally over. Most of the things I did this semester were not so interesting, at least not for presenting them on my Blog. But one of my subjects, where I didn’t participate in the classes, but had weekly private seminar meetings, was really interesting. The subject of the class was “Environmental Policy and Sustainability”, and I was asked to write some essay about this topic. My first idea was to take some example about ecology in Austria and write about this, but then I decided, that this is lame and boring.

Prof. Elena Dimitrova, the teacher of the class, gave me some books as readings about Sustainability, the most interesting being “Earth at a Crossroads: Paths to a Sustainable Future” (read it online on Google Books) by Harmut Bossel (published in 1998). The theory behind the book: If you want to have a sustainable development, it’s not enough to just live ecological, you also need sustainability in the social system, in transportation, in your political system and in the economy. When I read the book I had to think about Linux, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, CouchSurfing and other initiatives all the time.

So I decided to write about sustainability in digital culture and gave it a spin to politics and urban planning to get back to the topic of my studies. It took me a long time to research for this essay and to write it (even if my English is pretty good now, it’s still not my native tongue), there’s already a lot of information on the internet, but urbanism is still an unexplored  field. In the process I learned a lot, and I found many ideas which I would be interested to implement. If you are interested in this topic you should definitely check out the literature references in the end of the essay. I hope you will like it, I think it got pretty good in the end.

	As you might see, the essay is available under a Creative Commons license, so please take it and do something interesting with it.
	This is the presentation to the subject, that I gave in a class (in front of a handful of people). There are two black pages, which should hold videos. The first is a great music video of a guy called Kutiman who remixed Youtube-videos. The second is a beautiful animation of the edits in the OpenStreetMap in the year 2008.

Geschrieben in Culture, Urbanism, Politix, Studies, OpenStreetMap, Erasmus | Keine Kommentare »

Good times in Austria and Bulgaria

17.6.2009 von plepe.

Sorry for not posting a long time, but I’ve been very busy in the last four weeks. After a weekend in the Rodopi-mountains on a trip with the Erasmus Network (nice mountains, gorges and caves but stomach problems and bad organisation) I went to Vienna by bus (~13 hours each way) for a spontaneous visit (to help with the elections at the university and to join some parties which were going on that time). I finally even stayed a day longer and went to my home town Graz, because a friend, Peter, celebrated his birthday. In the following week I tried to finish my projects for university, there was still a lot to do. And finally three friends came for visit, Babsi for two days and Sub and Argyll for more than ten days. We had a good time together, in Sofia, on the mountain Vitosha and also some more places in Bulgaria, Veliko Tarnovo and Plovdiv, were we stayed for two nights each and short visits to Stara Zagora and Asenovgrad. These days I’m finishing my studies here in Sofia, after this I will enjoy my last weeks in Bulgaria, e.g. on a CouchSurfing-meeting this weekend on a beach near Varna on the Blacksea Coast. Here you have some impressions from the last weeks:

View from the Asenovgrad fortress on Asenovgrad	Trigrad .. it’s like in the merry tales, isn’t it?	The head of the devil in the cave “the Devil’s throat”
Election compaign for the students association in Vienna	The museums quarter on a warm evening in Vienna	On the small mountain hut “Esperanto” on Vitosha near Sofia with friends
The view from a waterfall on Vitosha on Sofia (and the shadow of Sub)	On the mountain hut: repairing the car	Astonishing view on the town of Veliko Tarnovo
Tsarevets, the old castle in Veliko Tarnovo	The view on Veliko Tarnovo	Tracian excavations in Stara Zagora
Argyll, Sub and Babsi sightseeing in Sofia	The view from NDK (an event centre) on Sofia	The amphitheater in Plovdiv
View on Plovdiv from Nebet Tepe, an excavation site on top of a hill in the old town	Houses in the old town of Plovdiv	View from Asenovgrad on the Asenovgrad fortress

I hope now I will find some time to concentrate on my project, the OpenStreetBrowser, the “State of the Map”-Conference in Amsterdam is coming close (9.-12. July in Amsterdam). Yes, I haven’t announced it yet on my Blog, I’m going there, I hope it will be very interesting! During the last weeks I even had time do some OpenStreetMap-mapping in Bulgaria.

Geschrieben in Friends, OpenStreetMap, Travel, Erasmus, Eastern Europe | Keine Kommentare »

Again OpenStreetBrowser

5.5.2009 von plepe.

As I told I’m gonna present some features of the OpenStreetBrowser from time to time. It’s also a good documentation for the project.

Routes of public transportation

Routes of public transportation are still not being displayed on the main Mapnik and OsmaRender renderings, although they are very important in my opinion. For me this was actually the start of the project, I had planned to make a nice map with public transportation routes. Now they are only an overlay, as they would clutter the main map too much.

There are two noteworthy features: The references of routes sharing the same way get collected and separated by ‘,’, which looks much better, and stops with the same name get combined and get a box drawn around. Both of these features improve visibility.

Link to Wikipedia

In the OpenStreetMap it’s possible to link to the Wikipedia. The key is “wikipedia:language”, e.g. “wikipedia:en” or “wikipedia:de”. If such a link exists, the OpenStreetBrowser displays an abstract of the article and an image, when it finds one (it has to be before the first abstract … this is something still to improve).

Stylesheet for the Overlays

The last feature for this time is the newest feature. The styles of the Overlays “Food & Drink”, “Shops”, “Culture & Tourism” and “Services” is generated from a page in the OSM-Wiki. So if you find something missing on these overlays, or you have better icons (many objects don’t have an icon or share icons with other features), feel free to upload them there (the new style sheet will be used after the next database reload, so typically after 1-3 weeks).

If you have suggestions for new feature, complaints or praise, feel free to leave me a comment :)

Geschrieben in Project, OpenStreetBrowser, OpenStreetMap | Keine Kommentare »

Some Features of the OpenStreetBrowser

13.4.2009 von plepe.

This time I want to show you some features of the OpenStreetBrowser. One of the goals of my project is to display as many information as possible in a simple and understandable way. Sounds like the quadratur of the circle? Maybe it is :)

Housenumbers

The first feature I want to show you are house numbers. Sounds rather boring, isn’t it? The default Mapnik and Osmarenders styles don’t rotate the numbers, so it’s hard to say where they belong to. It’s also a problem of the software (I can only speak for Mapnik, because I’m using it too), there isn’t really a possibility to rotate texts and icons. So you have to use crude workarounds, which are a pain in the ass. But I think I’ve done a pretty good job … although ideas for improvements are always welcome! The house numbers are also being listed in the details of the street in the side pane.

More informations about entering house numbers to OSM.

Cemetery

I don’t know about you, my precious reader, but I like visiting cemeteries. Maybe it’s a Viennese thing, they were always crazy about their afterlife. On cemeteries you can visit all these graves of famous people. Even better if you can see them on the map, isn’t it? The important graves on a cemetery are also listed in the side information pane. Time to visit your local cemetery!

What is still missing is the background of the cemeteries, at the moment there are theses crosses, which is not really appropriate for graves of other religions.

There is no approved method for tagging graves in OSM yet, the OpenStreetBrowser currently accepts cemetery=grave and historic=grave.

Borders

Places (Countries, Regions, Cities, Villages, …) are only entered as Point (Node) to the OSM right now. In many cases you also have borders, but it’s hard to see them and the information which border belongs to which node is missing. The OpenStreetBrowser combines the borders and the nodes and shows both of them if you see the places’ details.

The border is a relation of the type boundary or multipolygon, the tag admin_level matches more or less to the place-tag. To help find the correct border add the node to the relation and give it the role ‘label’ (which is a proposed feature).

These were just three of the features of the OpenStreetBrowser. I will show you more another time.  If you have some ideas or questions, you can post them as comment here or to this page.

Geschrieben in Project, OpenStreetBrowser, OpenStreetMap | 1 Kommentar »

*drumroll* The OpenStreetBrowser

24.3.2009 von plepe.

I’m very happy, that I finally can publicly announce the project I was working on the last months. I already told you about the OpenStreetMap, this astonishing project with the goal of creating a free map (as in free speech and in free beer) of the world. The great thing about it … you can take the data, use your imagination and think of better ways to visualize the data. And I used my imagination and creativity and created the OpenStreetBrowser.

On the webpage you have a “Slippy Map”, as you know it from the OpenStreetMap Homepage or commercial services like Google Maps. But on the left side you can investigate the current map view. Get a list of Pubs or the Public Transport routes or a list of street names. When appropriate a thematic overlay is displayed. Just play with it, you will see you can’t stop :) If you want to get more information about an object, then just click on it on the map.

So. I don’t want to go into more detail here. Just give it a try. If you want more information there’s a page in the OpenStreetMap-Wiki for the project.

Disclaimer: The project is not finished yet, it’s still a big construction site. So, please be patient if it gets slow or if you find bugs (please report them here) or something is still missing.

I want to send special thanks to Manuela for talking and encouraging and for sure for the web design. I’m looking forward for further co-operation. And I also want to thank Monika for mental assistance :)

Geschrieben in Project, OpenStreetBrowser, OpenStreetMap | 3 Kommentare »

Teaser for my OpenStreetMap-Project

17.2.2009 von admin.

As I got stuck in Bulgaria, looking for flat-mates, I continued my work on my OpenStreetMap-Project, I was mentioning earlier on my blog (in fact I was not talking about this project since beginning of November).

As I already said, the OpenStreetMap is the Wikipedia of geographical data. The data is collected by volunteers or imported from free data sources (e.g. gouvernmental data if available or free satellite images). In Austria a company - plan.at - donated their data, as mapping is not their main business anymore. This improved the Austrian part of the OpenStreetMap greatly, especially on the countryside (although the import is not finished yet).

My project consists mainly of two parts. The first - and main part - is an interface to browse the available information in the OpenStreetMap. E.g. if you are looking for a pub or the nearest fuel station. But this is not the part I want to talk about this time.

The second part is an improved rendering of the OpenStreetMap. I’m not very satisfied with the default rendering, it looks very pale. I decided to make it more flashy. Additional various overlays can be displayed, e.g. the routes of public transportation (which none of the default renderers of OpenStreetMap do yet).

Attention, technical details: I’m using Mapnik as render engine, the same as the default view of the OpenStreetMap uses. To make developing of the new style easier, I’m using Cascadenik, a kind of CSS for Mapnik.

As I don’t want to announce my project here (it’s still quite buggy and slow), but I want to talk about it, I will show you some example renderings:

In the first example you can see a part of Bulgaria. As you can see the country borders are clearer, and the names of the Cities are displayed in the country language and in the English translation (as available).
In the second example you can see the surroundings of Schottentor in Vienna. Buildings have different colours, depending on their function and a little border.
The last example shows the inner city of Graz with an overlay of the routes of public transportation.

I’m busy developing on my application, I hope to be able to show you more of it soon.

Geschrieben in Project, OpenStreetBrowser, OpenStreetMap | Keine Kommentare »

A lot of things …

6.11.2008 von plepe.

I really have to excuse, now there was a really long time without an article on my Blog. It’s not that there’s nothing to talk about, for sure I’m not getting bored that easily.

As I already announced I’ve been to a CouchSurfing-Meeting in Borovets, a skiing-resort in the Rila-Mountains at the weekend of October 24th-26th.
The Meeting started on Saturday, but I wanted to go there on Friday and use the whole weekend, especially as I was told, that this place is very good for hiking. I finally found some fellows - two more Erasmus students from Germany and Latvia and a CouchSurfer from Bulgaria (who did Erasmus at Vienna University of Technology some years ago and was studying at the same university here in Sofia too). We started our trip with an evening hike. We met in Sofia shortly after 6pm and travelled to Боровец (Borovets) by bus and taxi and started hiking around 8:30pm. So it was already really dark and we had to use our head lamps. After about two hours we reached our place for the night … a mountain hut. We were welcomed with a burning oven and candle light. We had some dinner and spend the rest of the evening playing cards.
Most of the next day we spent hiking, we hiked to one of the next peaks, Шатар (Schatar), with about 2500m over sea level. Unfortunately the weather was not very nice, it was very foggy and it even had some rain.

The mountain hut

The stony way to the top

In the days after I got a nasty diarrhea with stomach cramps and fever … not very funny, but after three or four days it finally got better. So I spent a lot of time at home, in my bed or in front of the TV.

On the weekend I joined my first Critical Mass in Sofia with a borrowed bicycle. You know, this is this an international movement of cyclists who meet and cycle through town to fight for more rights for cyclists and other alternative forms of transportation. Here in Sofia we are still a small group, we just were like a dozen people or so. Afterwards I was invited to the national radio for a concert - some psychedelic underground rock band was playing there, which was pretty got. I met the husband and a flat-mate of Rossi, the CouchSurfer where I spent my first two weeks. I had thought I might meet him there, because he is working at this radio.

On Sunday I went hiking again, this time on the Vitosha, the mountain close to Sofia, to it’s highest peak, the Черни Връх (Cherni Vrah). This time we took it easy and used a chair lift for a part of our tour. Unfortunately the weather was again not very good.

The band at the radio

It was supposed to be a short cut

Heavy clouds on Vitosha

Most of the last days I spent with my computer, because I’m working on a new web application (I also should study, I will do it tomorrow, promise!). I told you about the OpenStreetMap (OSM) before, which is a free alternative to Google Maps (and similar applications) and consists mainly of user generated content. I’m not very satisfied with the default view, as the public transport routes are not being displayed (at least not if you enter them in the preferred way). I was thinking about generating an own map style for a long time, and now I decided to just do it. The project is progressing quite nicely, and I think the OSM community will be quite excited about it. But at the moment I can’t show you anything yet, I will write a special article on my blog when it’s ready to be announced.

I could actually need some help with this project. I’m not very good at drawing and I need little icons for train, tram, bus and some more things. So if you want to help the open source community, this is your chance. :)

So, thanks for patience. Have a nice weekend!

Geschrieben in CouchSurfing, Politix, OpenStreetBrowser, OpenStreetMap, Erasmus, Travel, Eastern Europe | Keine Kommentare »

Compare Google Maps and OpenStreetMap

12.9.2008 von plepe.

I’ve already told you about the OpenStreetMap Project before. To understand why OpenStreetMap is better or will be better as Google Maps soon, one Frank Sauter wrote a tool to compare these mapping services: http://sautter.com/map/. Both services will be displayed as transparent layers and you can change the transparency with a slider. Here is an example:

I’ve also been mapping in Бургас (Burgas), most ways in the parks and of the district Лазур (Lazur) are my work (but not yet finished):

Also in Burgas the Google Map is way from perfect, even though it is more complete. It looks as if a large part of the town is flooded and the Lake Atanosvko is missing.
If you are not satisfied with the OpenStreetMap in your neighbourhood, than become active yourself … The community will be thankful. (I got a message this week from an OpenStreet-Mapper from Bulgaria who thanked me for mapping in Burgas).

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The OpenStreetMap

21.8.2008 von plepe.

This time I want to tell you something about a project where I’m participating lately. It’s called the OpenStreetMap. The idea behind OpenStreetMap is to build a free map of the world.

When Google introduced its Webservice Google Maps and and their software Google Earth everybody was excited what you can do with that. The most important thing: You can share geographic information with others. Like geotagging your pictures on Flickr and displaying them on a map, or describing all your favourite pubs and sites.

Now there are several drawbacks with Google Maps (and similar services like MSN Live): It’s copyrighted data, you can’t use it for everything because you have to sign a License Agreement. And you can’t change the data itself. Furthermore, Google Maps is not ideal for me, because it’s optimized for car users. There are even maps for all the underground parkings in Vienna but no Cycle Routes or Public Transport routes.

Now, there’s an alternative: The OpenStreetMap (short: OSM), a free editable map of the whole world. The availability of GPS receivers made it possible, because volunteers record their tracks and draw the map by tracing the tracks and adding additional information like street names, road types and amenities (like shops, post offices, pubs, cycle parkings, …). Additional to volunteer work some other information sources has been used, like governmental databases.

The result: A yet far from complete but usable map. And it looks nice. And you can access the raw data which is available under a Creative Commons Licence and even allows commercial usage. Here’s an example from Vienna’s city centre, you can see the the area around the Imperial Palace and the Museumsquarter. The first picture is taken from Google Maps, the second from MSN Live (how comes the name “2ER Linie” is used - that’s a commonly used but unofficial name) and the third from the OSM (rendered with the preferred renderer Mapnik).

Google Maps

MSN Live

OpenStreetMap

Which is really exciting about the OSM are the projects that emerge from it:
* The Cycle Map: A special view of OSM optimized for cyclists.
* OpenPisteMap: A project to track skiing pistes and all things that are important for skiiers like lifts, restaurants, shops and so on.
* OpenRouteService: A route planner using OSM data.
and there’s much more …

If you want to learn more about OSM than take a look at their Wiki. There are some howto’s how to contribute to OSM … you don’t even need a GPS receiver for this.

Geschrieben in OpenStreetMap | Keine Kommentare »