OpenStreetMap
From What The Wiki?!
|
To view the full lecture on video, click "Here". |
Collaborative vector mapping the world OpenStreetMap is a collaborative website using wiki-like techniques tomake maps of the world. GPS traces made by physically travelling onroutes and aerial images from aircraft or satellites are used as a baselayer upon which streets and features are drawn. Out of copyright mapsfrom the 1950's can also be scanned and used. The data and softwareproduced by individuals is released under free licenses for all to rip,mix and burn.
DescriptionOpenStreetMap is a collaborative website using wiki-like techniques tomake maps of the world. GPS traces made by physically travelling onroutes and aerial images from aircraft or satellites are used as a baselayer upon which streets and features are drawn. Out of copyright mapsfrom the 1950's can also be scanned and used. The data and softwareproduced by individuals is released under free licenses for all to rip,mix and burn. Openstreetmap was born from the desperate state of geodata (street maps,postcode locations and more) being unavailable to anyone with littlemoney in the UK, as the Ordnance Survey holds an effective monopoly ondata. This is opposed to citizens in the USA where practically theentire country is available in electronic form for free use.Openstreetmap was envisaged as a collaborative environment where anybodycould contribute local knowledge toward a map of the UK, Europe andbeyond. Present and future (ben): Our recent work on OpenStreetMap has targeted the ever-creeping version1.0 release, which will address a few lingering (and gaping) issues: The dynamic nature of OpenStreetMap's data model has been a bittersweetfeature, since so much effort has been spent on writing reasonablyefficient SQL for database queries and updates. We'd happily avoidreinventing the wheel, but Free technologies like PostGIS only solvepart of the problem; most of our difficulty and complexity rests inenabling a journaled view of the model. And so to supportOpenStreetMap's Wiki nature, our SQL zen is a necessarily-awful nest oftable joining and timestamps. The culture of OpenStreetMap is one of code now, ask questions later."Real artists ship" and all that. So our codebase has not always beenthe most loving beast, with a goodly amount of recent effort going intoa gradual rewrite. Our editing applet does an admirable job of journaling all datamodifications in a rollback-able Wiki format, but we do not currentlyoffer enough facilities for adding and modifying street metadatainteractively. Our data model and XMLRPC API cheerfully provide thesekey and value pairings, but our applet does not yet have the GUIwidgetry to enable the non-'bot user. Where next for OpenStreetMap?* more datao aerial data, scanned map data, etc.o better management/ownership of data sources, and mapso postcode lookupo placename lookup* more eyeballs, more footsteps,o easier ways to help out (location-based changelogs, digests etc. email/RSS)o location-based discussion / issue resolution* keep building on top of it
Speakers
Schedule
Informations
|
[[Category: ]]
