thinkwhere

Pre-pre-alpha and so likely to change from day to day, or break, here’s the project I started a while ago and have been working on getting usable, but you should be able to have a play on this sneak peek at least. It’s an open source map georectifier / warper, written in Ruby-on-Rails and using GDAL, Mapserver, and OpenLayers, and it’s provisionally called “Map Warper”. It can be found here: http://wrp.geothings.net

Inspired by Metacarta’s Map Rectifier, which I have written about here and here, it was originally primarily planned to be able to support the WMS plugin I developed for the JOSM editor, and also to assist OpenStreetMap surveyors who collect and want to use their own ground control points. (The other driving force was the desire for me to use some fine out of copyright maps and make a free geodataset of Roman Britain, and historical features in general)

It will have additional features in the near future, such as enabling TileCache for WMS-C/TMS, export to Google style tiles, GeoRSS and KML, amongst other things. As mentioned above, it is still unstable and in active development, so things will change and your data probably will be deleted!

We’re looking for a nice name for it, and a nice logo would be good too!

Where 2.0 has started, alas, I’m not attending in person this year, but Nick Black spotted that my image is there instead, on the conference programme!

Big big thanks to Seero.com who are streaming most of the sessions, plus are archiving a lot of them too if you miss them. Also, the irc backchannel is #where2008 on freenode. The current over-used and misused word is “open”. (last year it was “GeoRSS”).

For live blogging, John Mckerrell is doing exhaustive transcribes too.

Things of note so far:

google includes geosearch in it’s API, and tries to kill Mapufacture. People freak out about augmented reality enhanced police states. Dash opens their API, ESRI and google have a “partnership”. This partnership, basically uses google earth and Arc Server may give a push into good open source / Free Web Processing Servers, as more people see the value of real geographical and spatial analysis, and not wanting to pay tens of thousands for a paleo-program and a new server with ridiculous specs for the privilege.

Japan’s megacities are really 3D - they use the z-axis freely. The urban areas are high density, multiple levels, at high zoom - the cities provide a challenge to cartographers and openstreetmap. And then there are the underground streets!

Consider a normal 16 story tower block. In central London, we can expect these to be offices, no problem mapping these, representing the landuse. In Tokyo, or other large city in Japan, such a building will have multiple uses. Underground (Basement 2) shops and retail units as part of the underground street, leading to subways, still underground, Basement 1 may have restaurants and boutiques. Ground floor (1F) could be the building entrance, possibly a kiosk, bakery of cafe at street level. The remaining floors above ground: a university department, teaching area, library on two floors, three bars on another, restaurants on another. Offices on other floors, nightclub on another. Space is used. But it’s vertical. Even in smaller towns with shorter buildings, multiple uses on each floor is quite common. Signs outside showing whats on each floor are provided - but it’s still a bit weird going up four stories in a lift to a pub!

At the Tokyo micro mapping party at the IPA in Sugamo, we had a look at how openstreetmap can describe buildings. So for example “building:levels = 23″ ; “building:-1 = post_office” “building:1-15 = office”. How these can be shown on a map is another matter.

A few of the new mappers in Tokyo commented how everything around was so dense, there was so much detail, that they wouldn’t want to map everything, as it would become to messy. Perhaps an additional level of zoom for high zoom levels would help here - although it does become too dense for GPS accuracy too - with small shops and restaurants packed up, down and left and right to each other.

The underground streets are quite confusing, a maze, but full of shops, pubs, eateries, people going from office block to subway or train station, from subway to pub, entering an office block at basement level and ascending up to seventh floor, all from under the streets. Not surprisingly, navigation is quite horrid. Maps do exist and are shown frequently (see below). Mobile phones work underground. Theres talk of rfid at exits, one company (Navitime) is selling (expensive) pedestrian navigation for mobile phones, and they include all the underground areas too - this company is heavily advertising on the trains and on TV. Personal pedestrian navigation on a phone…. I wonder how many years it will be until normal people in the UK get the same service?

Navitime 3D railway buildings & transfer directions, on phone. (from here)

A side note: on maps in public spaces. They always have the North arrow. Its quite important. Even outside, you will see it on the floor.

However, the maps shown outside for navigation are not, in the main, orientated so that North is pointing up. Instead, the maps are orientated according to how you stand looking at the map. So if the map is on a sign at the edge of a road, as you face the map, the road going from left to right will also go from left to right on the map. The map below is a good example, but here, the map, written in English, for tourists, at a major tourism attraction, Ritsurin Park in Takamatsu, Shikoku, gives these instructions on how to read it to the reader. Look at this map while facing the mountain.

OK, back to Megacity mapping. The mapping in Japan for OSM is gaining velocity. There was a genuine opinion from several people that their country would be completed soon, and quickly, and personally, I would not be surprised. Not only are there chizu otaku and enthusiasts getting involved, the government is showing positive signs, and characteristic of the project, there’s something for everyone to do.

Below is an animation of progress to date in OSM in Japan. Click on the animation for bigger better quality animation. Gives a good overview, I think.

In summary, I hope to see more attention applied to how we can capture, edit and make good maps of a proper three dimensional super detailed city. Otherwise, our maps will be just street-level maps, and will be unsuitable for normal people living and navigating these complex, dense places. Japan’s megacities and mappers could be a driving force.

EDIT: Kamakura Mapping Party (map) - First proper mapping party for Japan, probably later this month (May) - mapping Kamakura, a lovely town, by the sea, about an hour by train from Tokyo, and one chocked full of history, temples and atmosphere, and where I spent an afternoon seeing a couple of sights and adding a few things to the map. A great choice to have a mapping party!

Back from Japan, and warming up for a couple of big posts, I notice from the Telegraph that the Tories want crime maps published to the public (youtube video). Some people might know that in the past, I was working on crime mapping, and crime perceptions hence my interest. Also good to see the release of geospatial data becoming a political issue.

Over in Kyoto, Japan, I spotted a map, published and displayed in the subway station:

and

Which, is the hotspot map (just number of incidences) of one particular type of crime. Perhaps someone could tell me what it is its mapping exactly (robbery / theft from person is my guess) big pic is here. But I was happy to see it there, as it might be an indication that they have my belief that access to accurate information and data about crime would actually reduce the fear of crime, and inform people that the streets are really quite safe and not full of danger.

Back to the UK. The Conservatives “Giving the Public a Crime Map” (pdf) is worth a look. It looks at existing sites, including the quite good site from West Yorkshire Police Authority, BeatCrime.info. As currently, although there is a requirement to communicate to the public, and produce figures, there is no requirement for the police and councils (they are meant to work in partnership with each other) to produce maps, and maps which show crimes at a high level of detail. Also, each partnership seems to be doing their own thing.

They reckon the costs would be quite unbelievably cheap “just £20,000 to cover the website and an official to make sure the figures were accurate and up to date”. Triple that, at least, a one site fits all approach probably will fail, as each authority and division works in a different way, they have different software, servers etc, but they may be hinting at a central website.

For the mapping side of things, the issue of privacy comes up. Nice to see the idea of highlighting a road, or part of a road, instead of randomising a point location (for more sensitive locations).

They also say that they would be able to release the data for third parties to use, hinting that we would be able to make map mashup. But I bet they will say “oh sorry, it’s crown copyright afterall, as we use a geocoder using the postoffice address file”, you cannot use it. Thus making the benefits marginal, and keeping the data centralised and controlled, something the tories criticise the government of doing.

OK, I’ve been in Japan for about 10 days now, so will relate some of the events in chronological order, over the next few posts. In short, I decided upon a short spell of travelling to Japan, and noticed at the time that openstreetmap.jp had just been formed, and the community was starting to come together, so sent a couple of emails out, asking if anyone would like to meet up, for a mini-mapping party or something. Was invited to Osaka City University to talk about OSM, and take part in a short mapping party to a local shrine, and invitied to Tokyo (where I am currently) to talk at a Linux User Group, and a mapping party around the area.

Professor Venkatesh Raghavan and grad student Diasuke Yoshida, invited me to Osaka, to give a talk. David Hastings of the UN ESCAP also spoke on sustainable tourism via the web. Before we talked the geo phd and masters students walked to the nearby Sumiyoshi-shrine, together with multiple GPS devices, paper pen and digital dicataphone. We walked along an ancient road to the shrine past ancient buidlings, amazing gardens, shrines and cemetaries.

The talk went well, with interesting discussion about integrating other VGI information, harnessing the power of people (as typified by wikimapia), about how to utilise osm for pedestrian navigation. There is a great deal of enthusiasm for openstreetmap, and there is a feeling that the country will be mapped quickly by a growing band of mappers! In Osaka, the students are involved in a number of interesting projects including automatic feature extraction from gpx, live streaming of gps nmea to server, using differential GPS, forecasting (futurology) of geospatial (GPS was sucessfully predicted by japanese in 70s). Fascinating stuff.

Some general notes about mapping in Japan, from a westerners point of view:

Railways and subways have been privatised, and are often run by different companies, however they use colour for identification of these.

Tall buildings in city centre, not good for those old GPS units, but elsewhere, in the cities, there houses are about 3 stories tall, and smaller in Kyoto, for example.

—

Special mention has to be given to Prof. Raghavan, Diasuke, Sensei Minami, Akiko, and Danielle for their overwhelming hospitality in Osaka and Kyoto. An open invitation is offered to the UK to them!

next post will detail Tokyo, Openstreetmap, LUG, and some more observations about mapping such a dense place as Japan. Sorry if i’ve forgotten stuff, I’ve a horrendous cold (gotten from walking up a mountain in the rain!). Will try to update with more info.

Crossing the Pennines into Manchester brought the train from sunshine into drizzle, a drizzle continued all day, typical of the grim North (and especially the city of Manchester). But forgetting the rain, the North is the opposite of grim, as yesterday there was a furnace of activity, discussions and networking at BarCamp that made the North a shiny positive place to work.

Taking the title from the KLF track “It’s Grim Up North” (worth watching to the end -The North Will Rise Again”) my talk was a rapid discussion in the hottest room at the tiredest part of the day. You can get the slides here at slideshare, or view it below. Basically the slot was about vague vernacular geographies (the way normal people talk about areas), and working towards new tools to help capture, analyse and use. Good feedback was had, and the project shall be developed upon anew.

Here’s a map we made showing where some of the participants thought Wilderness was in the UK.

Full marks to Paul, the sponsors and organisers. It went really smoothly. (I won a book). There was much talk about similar events, alternatives, formats etc. I think that they get better and better as time goes on. Sheffield is the next (woefully, hugely unpublicised) barcamp up north, back across to the drier side of the Pennines.

Way back in september, we had the Leeds mapping party, and I produced a nice animation from the traces.

Now, with some more traces, and a nice animation script here’s a new one hosted on motionbox (hoping to convert it into a flipbook… watch this space when I get one)

you can download the bigger original here:

http://geothings.net/osm/leeds/leeds_mapping_party.mp4

NEW: Got the FlipBook today from Motionbox! It is really cool

EDIT: http://geothings.net/osm/leeds/flipbook.mp4 for video of flipbook

Gedit is my editor of choice at the moment, but, with all it’s great plugins, it was kinda lacking when working with Mapserver map files. So far vim, textpad and notepad++ have syntax support for map files, and now I’m happy to announce, Gedit does!

There’s a bit of tweaking to get it working.

1. First, we need to tell gnome to associate the .map file with the syntax, by giving it it’s own mime-type (you could skip this, but then you would need to manually select the highlighting mode for each file).

Download this file: http://geothings.net/thinkwhere/mapserver/mapserver.xml and copy it to /usr/share/mime/packages/ directory

Then, update Gnome’s mime database:

$ sudo update-mime-database /usr/share/mime

2. Next download the syntax lang file: http://geothings.net/thinkwhere/mapserver/map.lang and copy it to the /usr/share/gtksourceview-1.0/language-specs directory (or gtksourceview-2.0 if you are using Gutsy)

3. Restart gedit, open up a .map file and voila!

Thanks to the vim, notepad++ and texpad syntax files that I used to write this. Tested with Ubuntu 7.04 (Fiesty) and gedit 2.18.1 - let me know if it works, or doesn’t with Gutsy.

For Gutsy, gtksourceview2.0 .lang files have a different syntax - but it is meant to work with 1.0 version files. There’s also a conversion utility convert.py that could help.

EDITS: See comments for a way to get it working with Gutsy, thanks Michal!

NorthPack was launched yesterday at Leeds geekup last night, the monthly gathering, with talks, beer etc, made by the NorthCrew, who also do the NorthCast, a podcast for the north. I think its a great idea, and am 100% behind them.

NorthPack is an ambitious project which aims to unite web related professionals based in the North of England and shine a spotlight on the Northern community, providing a showcase for talent and the great work that goes on “up North”.

Good to see some people just going out there and doing it.

Just developed a plugin for JOSM, the OpenStreetMap editor to help work with authors/ users. Has some basic functionality at the moment, but will get more stuff, especially as more of osm work is quality control, and networking with nearby users.

It has three actions, at the moment, 1)Opens up the built-in author panel, if it isn’t already visible 2) Open browser showing the openstreetmap.org user profile page for the selected user. 3) From all the map data in josm, just select all the data that belongs to the selected user. Also on the list is to improve the way it searchs and selects by user (it is quite dumb in the way it does it at the moment), so if there was a load of fish and chip shops tagged with chippy=yes, then these would also be selected if you asked it to search for the user called “chippy”.

Plugin: http://geothings.net/osm/usertools.jar

Source: http://geothings.net/osm/usertools.tar.gz