Popped along to the official launch of West Yorkshire Archive Service’s (WYAS) Tracks in Time website and their new online mapping application, held at the City Museum. Earlier the prototype was leaked onto Secret Leeds to an enthusiastic response. I’d always been interested in this project, having been made aware of it when I was asked for some advice about it in the very early days of the project, by me living in Leeds, and recently with our work with the New York Public Library georectifiying and digitizing their historical map collection – so it’s really good to see it out there and completed!

Its a nice application (even if it has a bit of an old fashioned/council GIS feel to it) and works well, that used the code from a similar Cheshire Project.  The project is the culmination of some Lottery funding and although the Archive service is for the whole of the county, the project was restricted to Leeds. Gardline Infotech were contracted to do the offline GIS portion, and the folks at WYAS, with Leeds City Council and Cheshire Shared Services who put together the online version.

The system has two map panes, on the left tithe maps and on the right some more modern reference maps.

There is also  layers for land use and who owns what. Users can search for people and get these selected on the map – it’s a great resource. Searches can be exported as CSV file, which gets marks from me. Unfortunately, both these exports and the maps miss out the land value data, which had been transcribed, apparently due to a technical limitation in the software, which is a great great shame. I’d love to be able to compare the price of land as it was then to house prices now.

I think it was Stephanie? from WYAS, who was describing how it was not only people that can be searched, but corporations or other owners. A search for “railway” for example gave results for all those portions of land taken for new railways. Railway companies such as Leeds & Bradford Railway Company and North & Midland Railway are recorded, with land also taken for railway stations. On the map we see that the present day lines of the railways, before the lines were built. Its a particularly good resource for that time of the industrial revolution, and is strong in the north of england where a lot of the industry was taking place.

The 58 hand drawn tithe maps were scanned, georeferenced and digitized. The digitized vectors were tied together with volunteer transcribed apportionment information – over 29,000 records!

The maps are hand drawn.
The maps were scanned by the Coal Authority in Nottinghamshire. They have the largest facility in its kind in Europe. Some of the maps took up the entire table – they were over 3m long!

Tithe maps were not meant to be definative maps of boundaries or for navigation, they were never meant to be a record of rights of ways and roads. As a consequence, these maps have parts where some areas are out by 60m or more. Its also important to remember that the maps are hand drawn. There were only ever 3 copies of each made – one sent to London, one to the Diocese and one to the Parish. The Archive Service had a copy of all of the maps but sometimes only one of the were found – and some were in poor shape.

We had a chat with the representative from Gardline Infotech whose name I didn’t catch and Peter Lythe, the project manager for WYAS – and discussed some of the challenges.

Georeferencing the maps proved troublesome – in particular where maps had folds and some where the original surveys were inaccurate. The side by side panes help to disguise some of the inaccuracies where they occur. They used the historical buildings data to help pin point some of the areas on the maps, and then used OS MasterMap to get the tie points. Yes, I can hear alarm bells ringing too – by using OS Master Map, the georectified maps are derivative works of Ordnance Survey, and so you’d need to have an OS license to use them.

Gardline used Cadcorp and FME mainly to vectorize the data, and they did a good job.  I don’t think the vectors can be downloaded either – if they were the digitized land parcels vector GIS files would also be under this same license. There was never a requirement to make available these files available to the public at large for free – so nothing wrong happened, just another missed opportunity. The good news is that the transcribed data is separate from the maps and can be accessed and downloaded (without the land values field) – and the scanned source imagery would be free of OS tie-in and it wouldn’t take too much to georectify the source maps (and even remaining ones for the whole county) and vectorize them in a collaborative and open manner, as we’ve seen.

Overall it’s a plus to the city and a marvelous resource of the past for the future.

Pawel Niechoda, the student I was mentoring as part of the Google Summer of Code OpenStreetMap projects, has passed with flying colours by developing a very cool way to put OSM maps on your website, quickly and easily and with no javascript!

The Static Maps API helps with embedding map images into any website, and it has a wide range of markers and configuration options.

Simple one-line example: http://dev.openstreetmap.org/~pafciu17/?module=map&bbox=69.2,-47.2,71,-50&width=400&height=250

For example: a map with transparent polygons:

and ones with markers

I think the scale bar rocks too.

You can get the code here:
http://gsoc-os-static-maps-api.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

OpenStreetMap had 6 projects this year with GSOC:

• Preprocessor to add altitude info to OSM data
• Android navigation application using OSM data
• Profile based traffic routing
• OSM direction too for visually impaired
• Automatic street sign detection and reading
• Static Maps API

http://socghop.appspot.com/org/list_proposals/google/gsoc2009/openstreetmap

I really enjoyed being a mentor, and was very fortunate to have a very capable student to work with! Cheers Pawel!

Make a date for your diaries, 10th November is the Where2Now Conference in Harrogate. It’s being run by the AGI North Group. It will be well worth going to. There’s loads of excellent speakers and geo-luminaries (from such places as Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft / Bing, Ordnance Survey, OpenStreetMap etc) lined up:

• Chris Osborne - http://www.cloudsourced.com/
• Chris Parker - http://www.geovation.org.uk/
• Craig Moulding - http://www.calderdale.gov.uk/siteinfo/online-services/maps/index.jsp
• Dr Michael Sanderson – www.1spatial.com
• Dr. Andrew Hudson-Smith - http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/
• Dr. Richard Kingston - http://www.ppgis.manchester.ac.uk/
• Ed Parsons - http://www.edparsons.com/
• Gary Gale - http://www.vicchi.org/
• Harry Wood - http://www.harrywood.co.uk/blog/
• Jo Cook - http://www.archaeogeek.com/blog/
• John Fagan – www.microsoft.com / www.multimap.co.uk
• John McKerrell - http://blog.mapme.at/
• Prof. Henk Scholten - www.geodan.com
• Stuart Harrison - http://www.pezholio.co.uk/
• Tim Warr - http://blog.timwarr.net/

Keep your eyes peeled for ticket info. In the meantime there’s a linkedIn events page.

I’ll also be speaking: about Open Historical Maps & the MapWarper project and it’s application to the New York Public Library – here are some slides about it for a taster.

The AGI North Group runs free monthly presentations across the North. I’ve blogged about some here (Service & Suppliers), here (NHS Health & DMA) and here (OSM).  Last week we were rewarded with an excellent presentation by Dr. Alun Junes about UKMap – the product that seeks to beat Ordnance Survey’s hold on the country.

AGI North Facebook group and the main group pages within the AGI website.

State of the Map 2009, was probably the best conference I’ve been to all year. Full of energy, excitement, new things and drive, it felt like a BarCamp should do – one where all the conference goers contribute and give!

Yes, I got a bit emotional at the third OpenStreetMap conference, held in the CCC, Amsterdam last weekend – mainly because this globe we are on is the only one we know – we really are mapping our universe, doing it our way. Creating the world we want to live in. I thought it worth while to say “Thanks” to some people. Being British, the feeling of being a bit foolish stopped me from being too effusive!

Presented about Open Historical Map, as Shekhar and Schuyler couldn’t make it – which, given that my laptop was broken and I couldn’t take it with me to write it went okay. Thanks to Chris and John for letting me use their computers. You can get the slides to open historical map on SlideShare, and the video at Vimeo later.

Whilst the presentation didn’t shine much amongst a lot of other much beter sessions, it was placed within a good theme about history and temporal issues – a lot of people are thinking about these things now.  Repeating what I talked about at Wherecamp 2009 in May, Frankie Roberto showed us that mapping the past (buildings) is not easy – an object may have a start and and end_date, but is it always the same object. What happens when just the facade remains? If half of the building changes land use, if the building changes name? It’s a tricky subject! At the very least we can start mapping now to record changes later. On a walk over and beside canals, I chatted to Andrew Larcombe, also keen on solving these problems – he gives the example of “So you map the Twin Towers… then the next year, what do you do? Just delete them from the database?”. OpenStreetMap is gradually looking from collecting and representing Now, to storing Then, both in the Past for the Future. (If that makes sense!).

Andrew also talked about a geo-philosophical problem with tracing over old maps. Maps were made with a view of reality – not everything was recorded. And these views change over time. Recording changes over time by using different base maps therefore, may reveal less detail. We hope to form a little group to start working through these issues.

SOTM: Presentations, Vimeo, Slideshare

Some general notes and highlights:

• The Secret Geo Celebrity was “us”! Here’s some slides of #LazyOSM
• Peter Batty: Navteq 18M km roads. OSM 24M km.
• Aaron Cope, Flickr – Wishes to make the locations into a “blunt object”
• German work map, “I certify that this square is complete”
• Peter Stoner, Peter Miller Traveline & ITO – Lovely PDF bus stop maps. OSM teaches them about their own stuff.
• James Rutter. Inertia in mapping in UK. 
• Michal Migurski – Walking Papers. Plus a UNSDIT form?
• Nick Black, Editors for vertical. i.e. an editor just for skiiers.
• GeoVation – champions@geovation.org.uk
• geobabes
• Steve in Antigua
• Geocommons releasing their geocoder. V. Cool.
• Conflux festival – map warper as tool for art.
• Muki Haklay – OSM quality evaluation. Better than meridian. Participation inequality. OSM  = £500
• Motivations of OSMers. Values, fun, exercies, ideology. similar to wikipedia.
• Gary Gale – Yahoo going open source for place data for 2010.
• Lulu Accessiblilty – map ramps, features. Also tactile maps!
• Cartagen & general Jeffery Warren stuff, nav by stars, sun.
• R. Soden – AFRICOVER africa imports. data silos bad. OSM maps organisations more effective.
• Egypt – mapping slums is tricky
• Geowiki, halycyon, potlatch, tufte.
• Italy – mapped Pompeii, better than anywhere else.
• Kiya’s beautiful castle maps and funny presentation
• 3D Mapping in Japan.
• Cake
• “The Romantic Mapper”!

The day after UnSheffield (which was very good,  some people have some further thoughts on the format) I popped along to the launch of Our City Our Music, rather embarrassingly still wearing my large-logo’d OSM t-shirt!

The Our City Our Music launch comprised of the Saturday night with bands playing (which I missed, due to Sheffield) and on Sunday, the tour, at NTI Leeds / Old Broadcasting House.

Our City, Our Music will be a location-based album on the streets.  Its first project will be realised in Leeds and experienced using Global Positioning enabled handheld devices.  It uses mscape software developed by Hewlett-Packard, which packs up audio and media files with GPS into one platform.  Therefore it provides the opportunity for located experiences, in our case music videos filmed on location, re-experienced in situ using a handheld device.

The goals of the project are to support emerging musicians and filmmakers to create the content of the album, to create an archive of  local talent, and to encourage people to explore the city through music and narration

Using HP Mscape platform, and some nice headphones, people could wander around two areas of Leeds, and discover the sounds and watch music videos. The music were written with the locations in mind, and can only be seen on the devices, when you are in the very same locations where the music videos were taken. V. Good.

Two tours were taken during the day, I went on the one through city, which lasted a good hour, and we walked throughout the City. It was quite a nice wander, chatted with a fellow geographer and had a bit of a psychogeographical look at this City.

They plan on porting the software to run on windows mobile devices, and possibly make a web based version of it too.

The team, Ben, Ben and Megan were supported by the b.Tween. They used OpenStreetMap  on the units themselves, and on the supporting paper map guides.

In June, at a special Reuters AlertNet workshop, designed for (mainly UK based) humanitarian organisations, I  presented about OpenStreetMap and was on the panel for a discussion. The talk was an introduction to OSM, followed by announcement of the Africover import from DevelopmentSeed, a detailed look at Gaza and a talk about the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.

The theme of the day was “looking at how the aid world can use maps to communicate, advocate and plan for disasters.” – and was a general and gentle introduction on how geographic information, mapping and maps can help “showcase their work, advocate around areas of need and plan during emergency responses”.

Organisations such as Mines Advisory Group, UNHCR, Save the Children were present, and on the panel there was Nick McWilliam from MapAction, Vincent Casey from WaterAid, Herbert Hansen from KeyObs and me representing OpenStreetMap. Attendees could tweet us questions, and one was asked about “What moral obligations do data collectors have when they encounter human rights abuses”….The moral maze being, by keeping quiet and collecting data, the map can be completed, and possibly help those in need. By making noise, the map may not be completed and thus, less help may be applied.

The event was webcasted, and archived, and you can access it by clicking the image at the end of the post summarising the mapping workshop from AlertNet. You may need to register quickly to view the video.

If you want to use  GeoExt widgets BaseLayerContainer and OverlayLayerContainer in the same tree, like this:

GeoExt BaseLayerContainer and OverlayLayerContainer

var layerRoot = new Ext.tree.TreeNode({
text: "All Layers",
expanded: true
});
layerRoot.appendChild(new GeoExt.tree.BaseLayerContainer({
text: "Base Layers",
map: map,
expanded: true
}));
layerRoot.appendChild(new GeoExt.tree.OverlayLayerContainer({
text: "Overlays",
map: map,
expanded: true
}));
var layerTree = new Ext.tree.TreePanel({
title: "Map Layers",
root: layerRoot,
enableDD: true,
collapsible: true,
height: 200,
expanded: true
});

GeoExt is now at 0.5RC1 and it is rather good!

Well over a month ago I went over to the Bay area for Where2.0 and Wherecamp 2009.

Presented at the Ignite Where on the Thursday evening, after the workshops, about Map Warper.

Map Warper Ignite Slides on slideshare.

Video is here!

I’m near the end at 34:15 minutes in.

In fact, http://where.blip.tv is where to go for all the presentations.

Ignite format was fun, the lights were quite bright on stage so it appeared that I was scowling!

Scowling, and not from slagging off the Ordnance Survey too. Rather I think the OS deserves the love that it’s maps generate – it’s the people who use them that deserve the criticism.

I gave the example of an anti-pattern used in local governments in the UK:

• Councils have old map archives.
• Councils have Ordnance Survey mapping.
• Councils have statutory obligation to look at contaminated land, and the history of land for planning and development etc.
• Councils use OS mapping to georeference and rectify old maps using OS mapping. Often at great expense, sometimes outsourcing to other countries.
• Resulting rectified maps are derivative works from the OS, and cannot be shared, or given away for free because of this.

As a response to this, and knowing that all the councils probably had digital collections of (unrectified) out of copyright maps, I am proposing “Free our Old Maps” project.

Lets use crowd sourcing techiques to free these old maps get layers and layers of old historical maps for the UK.

–

The rest of the conference was good.

Michal Migurski had a nice slot entitled “Flea Market Mapping” where he  showed off his own attempts at a map warper, but was mainly highlighting the love of old maps. He was unaware of and didn’t see Map Warper or my talk before at the very same conference! (But liked it when he did see it later)

Wearabale Haptics talk captured my imagination.

The horizonless map from Autodesk was v. cool too. Can’t find the relevant link though…

Ugotrade writes up a nice review: http://www.ugotrade.com/2009/06/02/location-becomes-oxygen-at-where-20-wherecamp/

OpenStreetMap was a given, no longer a new thing that people didnt know about, it was pretty much mentioned casually throughout. The Stamen fellas did a nice workshop with mapnik, cascadenik and OSM data, which was very well attended.

Also over from Leeds was my buddy Mohsin, fresh out of Leeds Met, and presenting at Wherefaire his Snapture project. Using Leodis images, location on a mobile app, we can view Leeds through time. V. cool project.

Just a quick note to say that I’ve been to and will be blogging about:

• O’Reilly’s Where2.0 in San Jose, USA
• Wherecamp 2009 in Palo Alto, USA
• Humanitarian & geo coworking, San Francisco, USA
• Maker Faire in San Mateo, USA
• Alertnet’s Mapping Workshop / Webinar, in London, UK
• Pateley Bridge OpenStreetMap Mapping Party, North Yorkshire, UK
• Unsheffield (Barcamp), in Sheffield, UK
• First UK Open Source GIS Conference in Nottingham, UK.

So that’s quite a lot of stuff for my brain to digest… expect to see a stream of posts starting shortly.

Major stuff this:

White House uses OpenStreetMap maps, rendered with Cloudmade custom styles to match their design. Also, OpenLayers. Now that’s Change.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/change/