thinkwhere

Heres a little online utility to help make custom j2me GpsMid midlets for your phone. GpsMid is a vector based tracker and viewer of OpenStreetMap data, I’ve covered it some more here, it’s rather good.

I like how you can search for streets and places, and it adds it as a virtual waypoint to help you navigate to that street. It also has good zooming support.

For my phone Nokia 6023i, I choose the no-obex option, and turn the routing off (it’s not quite working correctly for me).

http://www.geothings.net/gpsmidmaker.html

Note:
Code is available on request, written with python, it’s designed to run the java conversion on the server. However, Java is quite memory intensive, and my host (dreamhost) hasn’t enough to run it. Offers glady received

The second of my Japan blog posts: A couple of weeks ago, we had a mini mapping party at Tokyo. My hosts were Hiroshi Miura from Openstreetmap.jp and the Kodeo (Little Edo) Linux User Group, a great group of people, professionals and enthusiasts. We met at the IPA (the IT Promotion Agency - a kind of governmental centre for promoting excellence in IT), near Sugamo. Hiroshi Miura, who recently has started openstreetmap.jp invited me to give a talk and demonstration about OpenStreetMap (slides) and then afterwards we walked out to map a local famous garden. Unfortunately, I may have gone on a bit, as by the time we got there, Rikugi-en Garden was closing (4:30), so instead we journeyed out to the more complex streets around probably better for giving a more representative view of osm mapping, if less pretty!

Most of the folks had GPS, after Miura-san introduced the OSM project to them earlier in the year. Many different types of GPS were present, a few built into phones, bluetooth, loggers, and one person even had a PSP with GPS unit (he said that the quality was quite poor, plus the only application that it can be used with, only works in Japan). Part of the afternoon was meant to be an exploration of the various quality of GPS receivers.

Road signs are different in Japan, many roads are not named - instead, the block that the road goes next to are marked, blocks of houses become the address, rather than the street the house is on. More details can be found on the wiki for mapping in japan (in english), and http://www.openstreetmap.jp (in japanese). The ward boundaries are apparently available from the government under a similar to CC-by-A licence, so work could be done to help import this into the osm database.

This is “hatochan” Kentaro Hatori - the organiser of Kodeo LUG, pointing out local landmarks! In this case the very famous Anpanman, outside a childrens creche.

Here are the initial results from that day (click map for big):

We noted many things, such as a difficult five road junction, with various types of roads. Junctions, parking, amenities, restrictions and buildings were among the things mapped. We also encountered a special form of police box a “Koban” - different from a police station (we came across one of those as well). Japan’s cities, and Tokyo is a good example are very compressed and dense - something that was mentioned a few times by those mapping- which brings certain problems and opportunities, but I’ll talk about these in my next post.

After heading back to the IPA we extracted GPX tracks, and started to do some editing using potlatch and JOSM. Then it was off to the pub. I’m pretty sure we ended up at Akasaka Gorou Hazime, for beer, shochu, dried & fresh fish & other tasty morsels. Much laughs, and cultural understandings were exchanged about the world of otaku, and things geek! I found out about bash-on-rails (apparently it works really well), and some of the activities of the LUG, including selling “attractively covered” linux mags at the huge twice yearly Tokyo Comic Market. We ended up at a famous pig back-fat ramen shop, for a bowl of oishii-delicious noodles. I think we all enjoyed ourselves! Thanks to Hiroshi and the folks at Kodeo LUG!

This is a great application from Martijn (his blog) - it’s a style editor for Mapnik - one of the renderers used to render Openstreetmap data.

It goes a long way to helping differentiate the map from the data, as I discussed in this post “a manifesto?“. OpenStreetMap’s power is the data. It also shows the flexibility of mapnik, and the Freedom in being able to have the map you want.

http://tile.openstreetmap.nl/~panman/styledit/

Have a go by selecting some of the predefined styles.

Come to Bradford, West Yorks, tomorrow for OpenStreetMap’s first ever Mapping Pub Crawl, courtesy of the West Yorkshire Linux User Group. It will be very casual, and informal, no GPS needed. From the email:

We will rendevous at the following locations and times:

6.00 p.m. ‘The Cock and Bottle’ BD3 9AA

7.00 p.m. ‘The Beehive’ BD1 3AA

8.00 p.m. ‘The Fighting Cock’ BD7 1JE

The idea is to plug a hole the map, and get fairly inebriated at the
same time.

It’s entirely informal, with no planning and no expectations.

See you there!

WYLUG seems to have been bitten by the Open mapping bug, recently, they had a very good presentation and talk about OSM, then they organised a micro mapping party last Sunday for Leeds. Eight enthusiastic folks turned up, myself included, and I helped map the famous Jimmy’s Hospital, and the area towards town, see it on the map (when it recovers from the ongoing slashdotting!), now Bradford, which is disgracefully empty in coverage, hence no links to the pubs. Wonder if any of my mapping ex-colleagues from the Council will come…

Wow, now that’s an acronym filled title! Way back last summer, I shared my impressions about a range of J2me software for your mobile phone, that did GPS stuff, with Openstreetmap. GpsMid has improved since then, and works lovely. Highly recommended!

Vectorised, compressed, it can also record tracks from bluetooth GPS. In active development, so get involved with it. Also there is a routing engine built into it, that shows nice blue turn arrows, which may work for you (I had some trouble using it, or perhaps I didnt read the doc)

Here are links to the precompiled jar and jad file, of Leeds centre, so give it a go, or compile your own, if it doesn’t work. http://geothings.net/osm/leeds/GpsMid-leeds-0.3.01.jar
http://geothings.net/osm/leeds/GpsMid-leeds-0.3.01.jad

Also, in the pipeline is a simple app to make compiling the files much easier… watch this space.

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

Get ready to be followed and spied upon for creating a free map.

Superintendent Brett Lovegrove Head of Counter Terrorism for the City of London Police at the “Project Griffin Conference” in Edinburgh, talked about “hostile reconnaissance” to help spot potential targets:

“This means noticing people who suddenly start appearing at a café and perhaps draw maps of the surrounding area.

Understandably, this is bad news, as we love going to cafes and making maps! Here’s a photo of us at a Starbucks during Leeds OpenStreetMap mapping weekend:

image copyright kevin whitworth

Kyle Gordon from Openstreetmap has penned an open email in response to Lovegrove’s advice.

We are in danger of being arrested and unfairly held for a 4 weeks (possibly 6 or 7…) under anti-terrorism laws, just by doing our hobby

I really like this great animation showing the growth of OpenStreetMap over time, from a few squiggles in europe to the world!

(from opengeodata)

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

The Mayor of Brighton toasted the completion of the map of Openstreetmap, alongside Mikel, Chris Corbin, the Fire Brigade Commander, myself and about twenty others. It marked the successful completion of the Openstreetmap map for Brighton and Hove.

With perfect timing, it also saw at the same event, the launch of a new book, the first commercially published book (for sale) with Creative-Commons licensed, Openstreetmap maps in the back!

The book is entitled, “The Deckchair Guide to Brighton and Hove” by Queenspark Books. In conversation with the QueenSpark book folk there, they said that the cost of other maps meant that they would have not been able to include good street maps in there, then along came Openstreetmap, and they were able to include (full colour) streetmaps.

Next thing, would be a nice way to produce a list of street names, points of interest to help make an index/gazetter (i.e. South Street, Page 233, col2, row D), if more people were wanting to include a collection of free, high quality maps in their books.

It’s a great use of Openstreetmap data, and something that can be championed for other areas! As Mikel says, holding a “1.0″ completion event is a great way to increase visibility, and encourage discussion of *uses* of the map with the community.

The other first was the public unveiling of a locative Locomatrix Fruit Chaser game (PacMan in other words) for mobile phone and gps. Richard Vahrman took us around the block in the search of fruit! The idea is to get kids out and about running around. Although there were not enough for teams, the game is meant to be played with teams, and can also be played over other geographic areas, so people running around in San Francisco, and Brighton, hunting for the same fruit. It also comes with an api so its easy to make your own games! Something to looks out for. (It was my first time playing a locative game)

So, full kudos to Mikel and Chris and others who mapped Brighton, and great news that people are using it, and getting engaged with it, lets look forward to seeing more Mayors toasting more completed towns throughout the world!