thinkwhere

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!

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.

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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.

The Lucky Penny map, (I’ve talked about it here) has won an Honorable Mention award in the StoryTelling category from Platial. Cheers guys!

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)

Was fortunate to be at the launch of Ordnance Survey’s OpenSpace - their slippy mapping API, last Friday. Here are some impressions, and an example for you to play with! My OpenSpace demo allows you to zoom in, out, etc and draw around the generalised buildings and then save the polygon as a GML file. It uses FeatureServer and the built-in vector drawing tools of the OpenLayers/OpenSpace API. Nick from Free-map has a example that loads in GeoRSS feeds.

Yep, currently it is closed alpha, but those who attended didn’t have to sign any NDAs, indeed, the OS took the open and honest approach and even admitted that they were not “going to pretend to now be one of the good guys” as Peter ter Haar, Director of Products said. Peter, I think, before joining the OS, was instrumental in getting Mapguide open sourced with Autodesk and OSGEO, although, this wasn’t mentioned during the day, or on any press releases about OpenSpace. Overall it is reflected of the tone of the day, that there are people doing good stuff, but that the organization has issues, but that these could be changed.

So, it’s taken two years, and a Cabinet report (Power of Information Review) for the Ordnance Survey to release this - but it’s not without it’s limitations. OpenSpace does in their eyes address the OS mandate to maximizing use of geographic information, allowing non-commercial use whilst also providing a way for them to generate some revenue for the future.

Most of the discussion was about the licence and limits. It’s free for “non commerical experimentation” and non-commercial is quite a strict term - no little ad’s, no paypal donate link, nothing. The basis of this is that they don’t want to annoy their partners, and that they want to have an “upgrade path”.

The API is OpenLayers based, with additional goodies such as gazetteer search and a “momentum” drag-and-let-go effect on the map. However, the gazetteer doesn’t do postcodes! Also, it is in OSGB coordinates, so there is also some helper functions for translating to and from lat lon. However, this basic client side conversion can lead to errors, apparently, and in some places they can be out by tens of metres. The OS developers said that if users think that a server side conversion is better, then that could be accommodated.

The coverage is just England, Wales and Scotland (not NI). I asked if the coverage was going to increase, or if other National Mapping Agencies were interested in adding to it, and possibly in the next couple of months, something will be announced. Oh, and no Isle of Man (just like Google, but unlike Openstreetmap), or the Scilly isles.

There was a big discussion of commercial and non commercial use. They said that most NGO’s, charities and small groups would, in the majority of cases be able to use OS maps, because they would be working as agents of other partners that have OS agreements, i.e. local governments. So, in a sense, the types of websites I can see ideally suited for use of OpenSpace, already have access to OS maps.

As you can see from my demo, there are no 1:25,000 maps - (1:25,000 are the same as the paper Explorer maps). The reason why there is none, is that they currently do not offer these to their partners anyhow for use in other mapping systems. Fair enough, but the 1:25,000 would be great to have. The StreetView layer seemed to have been edited for colour. Footpaths are not present, however the generalised buildings are unique.

Licence: Here, they’ve gone out of their way to clarify the position derived data, something that Google and the other web mapping providers haven’t. Basically Google could say “you know all those pins you’ve been putting on our maps? Well, they are ours, and always have been!”. The OS are basically saying, if it’s derived, then it’s ours but we give an permanent licence for you to use it, and also a licence for us, the OS to use it too. If it’s your own data, then it’s not derived, and it’s fully your data. If it’s derived, but is a “severable improvement”, i.e. if it can stand alone from the map, then it’s yours but you grant the OS the licence for them to use it. There was a long (lunch-turning-cold) discussion about derived data, copied data, substitutability, etc… Thus in my example, it’s a non commercial application, it’s most probably derived data, so it belongs to the OS, but you can use it, for non-commerical purposes only.

Limits, currently 30,000 tile hits per 24 hrs, and 1,000 gazetteer hits. It seems very low, and is. It’s for “experimentation” with a “growth path” in mind. I.e. if you want more, or want to make some money, then you gotta pay for it.

Summary: The maps, as we know, are lovely, the interface works well, the licence on derived data is at least clearly defined, but the limits and non commerical-ness will put off small websites. It’s limited to the UK only (in coverage) so no global / European use (yet?), NGO’s and Charities already can get OS data without going down a “growth path”. I find it hard to think who could be using this, but think it’s a good start - they make no bones about being the Bad Guys, but at least the bad guys want to bring something to the party.

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!

If web 2.0 was all about users generating content, and folksonomies, then Openstreetmap would fit very snugly into web 2.0, just like Wikipedia. But it’s much more, and I want to help more people to see the potential.

It’s web 3.0, where the view and interface becomes less important, and the data and the interpretation becomes central.

OSM is different from Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s data and the data’s interpretation is one-to-one. One view of the data, you edit the page, and it’s shown on that page. OSM is different, you can edit the data for an area, and different renderers, interpretators can show (or not show) that in different ways.

This thinking was inspired by recent mailing list discussions [here and here] about an “edit war” over placenames in Northern Cyprus, and by some talks at BarCamp Leeds. I won’t go into the details, but will quote (very heavily edited) some old OSM thinking here:

OSM should present a snapshot of the state of play at the time a mapper maps an area… After all, OSM is used is a navigational aid.

OSM is a navigational aid rather than a history book.

Whoever tags a place first gets to keep their name in first place.

Are there any lessons, learnt from wikipedia?

OSM is for english speakers.

The future will see me hosting the map itself in a non editable form

and some future thinking ideas:

OSM should accurately represent all legitimate points of view. While at the same time, fairly and without provocation.

isn’t the real issue that there’s really no “fundamental truth”.

Does osm have the ability to present multiple views of the database, for a given region? rather than try and put all the (variant, disputed) data in one place, perhaps the data should be (effectively) put in two (or more) places/views, and when such a region is requested, the user should be forced to choose which view of the region they wish to see.

OSM is a break with the past. There is the possibility to somehow represent all points of view.

the decision needs to lie with the renderer (or other user) and not with the mapper - what we currently see is mappers trying to force their world view onto the renderer (or user), instead of allowing him to chose; this is wrong.

Editing OSM is at the moment, mainly done using a google maps model of mapping. Linear editing, change something using the editor, and it’s reflected on the Map.

Editing OSM with web 3.0 model. Multiple possible paths, change something using the editor, and it may or may not be reflected on multiple different Maps, according to the interpretation / rendering rules.

So some notes for a manifesto:

• One to Many - One database - Multiple views.
• Tagging system accommodates multiple representation.
• Whoever renders (interprets) the data (map) should have the say on what is rendered.
• Encouragement of alternative views, renderers, servers. We need more custom map servers. This is not forking, as it’s the same underlying database, but the interpretation is different. Here’s a real example: Cycle Map for OSM: http://www.gravitystorm.co.uk/osm/
• Maps are representation of reality. Community should debate folksonomy, correct tagging procedures as before, allowing for alternate representations of the same object, as before.
• Example, an Ethical OSM map, showing recycling, cyclepaths, and names of buildings, business according to their ethical behaviour.
• Example, Roman OSM map, showing places and roads, ruins, temples, that only existed during Roman times.
• Example, a insert-country-here OSM map, showing boundaries and placenames that the Country’s administration consider authoritative.
• Example, already up and running, the Cycle Map, renders the data for cyclists, and publishes guidelines for contributors, on how to edit OSM so it will show up on their Cycle Map

Note, I have not touched on how, technically, these things can be solved (the threads linked to above have some suggestions) but they are something to reach for.

For one, I welcome more edit wars - they shake up old “OSM as a wiki” thinking, and I welcome more servers showing different views, as a starting point.

valleywag has the scoop - looks like the first Android / googlephone wireless application is whatsopen.com - with a (google) map view showing nearby open stores, helping find local open business, one click to call, etc..