thinkwhere

Google has released MapMaker. Now you can fill Google’s databases with information about the world that they do not already have, and for your efforts, you get a map on a website that you cannot download to your computer, or put in your school’s magazine, or make a paper tourist map from, and you would probably get more spam (”targeted advertisements”), all for your hard work!

I’m pretty sure this software was what Michael Smith was talking about last year about India. The main shift, the main point that was missed by that last post by O’Reilly is that no GPS were used, it’s all about local knowledge on top of areal imagery.

So MapMaker, a nice idea, it’s an attempt by them to fill in the gaps of their maps, by getting people to do the work for them. At the moment, it’s mostly open for some small islands, around the world like Cyprus and Antiqua, and larger countries like Pakistan. (edited to separate Pakistan from smaller islands, thanks Golod!)

But, contribute all you like, you will never own your data you make, and will be held responsible if it’s wrong.

You will be stuck with the default road-centred view of the world that Google decides works best (it’s nice cartography, it is just inflexible). No exporting the data we can make, no seeing the map as a non driver may like to look at it, no footpaths, no cyclepaths, no special Greek language map of Northern Cyprus, and no making maps in countries that do not allow it, of course! Sjors thinks that it must have been rushed through as if it must be a mistake that Google is so closed.

However, have a look - it’s nice to be able to keep an eye on an area, moderation works nicely, and feedback about edits is well thought out. There some intelligent feature snapping going on too, and map edits are rendered quite quickly onto a transparent overlay, giving good feedback - but, I always thought that I was doing something for free, for very little reward. Afterall, Google pay Teleatlas and other mapping agencies / companies for their data… soon they may not have to.

Now, this posts title is a bit ungenerous! Google maps are not just web maps - as Nash writes, he’s excited about getting Pakistan on the map. “Imagine being able to access full maps on your cellphone, on an Android application, Location Based Services, local business search”. Unless there are alternatives in these spheres, and not just mapping, Google will dominate.

Of course, OpenStreetMap is an alternative and comparison of choice, with it’s Free and Open Source approach leading to better quality, nicer more flexible maps, and a good active community. With OpenStreetMap, You can download the data and do stuff with it, you can make a tourist map with it, you can put it in your school book, etc etc. Blinkgeo asks “what about openstreetmap?”, and hopes to see Google enabling export of the data. Steve Coast writes some more about mapmaker and openstreetmap. And highlights how Google is competing against the big data providers now.

Perhaps the big G will spark something new and creative in OSM in response? Perhaps mapmakers users will demand more for their work, or better tools? We will wait and see. Perhaps people will be happy spending time for minimal reward on data that will never be theirs?

Perhaps if making a is ok if it’s made fun enough, made into a game? Troq writes that they would love to take part in openstrettmap if there was some kind of a gaming competition around it.

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!

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

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!

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!

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.

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…