OpenStreetMap auf den Linuxwochen Wien 2011

2.5.2011 von plepe.

Diese Woche, 5.-7. Mai 2011, finden wieder einmal die Linuxwochen in Wien statt. Ich wurde, wie letztes Jahr, dazu eingeladen etwas über die OpenStreetMap zu erzählen, und zwar am 5. Mai um 18:00. Vielleicht ist ja jemand meiner werten LeserInnenschaft interessiert, und beehrt mich mit ihrer/seiner Anwesenheit. Ich würde mich sehr darüber freuen :)

Hier der Abstract zu meinem Vortrag:

Neuigkeiten in der OpenStreetMap

Die OpenStreetMap, die Wikipedia für Landkarten, entwickelt sich stetig weiter. Inzwischen sind über 350.000 MapperInnen registriert, von denen im Schnitt 6.000 jede Woche aktiv sind und Änderungen an der Karte vornehmen.

Immer mehr kommerzielle Firmen entdecken die OpenStreetMap und verwenden sie als Datenquelle für ihre Services, sehr oft in Kooperation mit der OpenStreetMap-Community. Da die Lizenz CC-BY-SA für manche kommerzielle Firmen ein Problem darstellt, wurde ein Lizenzwechsel auf die selbstentwickelte ODbL (Open Database License) initiiert, der im April in die dritte Phase gegangen ist.

Auch in Österreich tut sich auch einiges. So hat GeoImage.at - eine Kooperationsgemeinschaft der österreichischen Länder und dem Bund für Orthophotos - seine Photos zum Abzeichnen freigegeben. Der Verein OpenStreetMap Austria wurde gegründet, mit dem Ziel die OpenStreetMap in Österreich zu bewerben. Seine erste Aktivität ist die Organisation der “State Of The Map - Europe” Konferenz, die im Juli in Wien stattfinden wird.

Über all das wird Stephan Plepelits berichten, aber auch über sein großes Projekt - den OpenStreetBrowser - der auf Version 2.0 zusteuert.

Geschrieben in Announcement, OpenStreetBrowser, OpenStreetMap | 1 Kommentar »

OpenStreetMap Mashups & Open Data

31.8.2010 von plepe.

Ich wurde eingeladen einen Vortrag zu “OpenStreetMap Mashups & Open Data”  auf einem Meetup der Vienna Semantic Web Gruppe zu halten. Der Vortrag ist heute abend in Graz. Die Folien sind bereits (fast) fertig:

http://prezi.com/cpjkflxqcoou/openstreetmap-mash-ups-open-data/

Hier übrigens ein Video von meinem Vortrag: http://vimeo.com/14612713

Geschrieben in Politix, OpenStreetMap | 1 Kommentar »

OpenStreetMap - Eine Einführung

8.5.2010 von plepe.

As I told you, I’m giving an introductory talk about the OpenStreetMap on the Linux Wochen in Vienna today. Here are the slides (in German for sure):

Geschrieben in Project, OpenStreetMap | 1 Kommentar »

Linuxwochen 2010

4.5.2010 von plepe.

The coming weekend there are the “Linuxwochen” (Linux weeks) again in Vienna. It’s an exhibition of several free software / open source initiatives, there are also a lot of talks. One of those talks will be about the OpenStreetMap, held by me. The date: Saturday, May 8th, 10:30 in the Festsaal. So if you haven’t heard of the OpenStreetMap yet (which I doubt if you know me), there’s the place and time to go :) You can also meet me at the OpenStreetMap-stand in the exhibition area (Thursday and Friday afternoon, Saturday more or less the whole day).

Geschrieben in Project, OpenStreetMap | 1 Kommentar »

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 | 2 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 | 1 Kommentar »

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 »