Archive for the ‘Open Street Map’ Category

OpenStreetMap Editor Designed by MapBox Goes Live

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

OpenStreetMap Editor Designed by MapBox Goes Live by Caitlin Dempsey.

From the post:

A new easy-to-use editor for OpenStreetMap has gone live. Called iD, the development of in-browser data editor was coordinated by MapBox and funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. The Alpha version of iD was released in January of this year, but was only recently added as an option to the edit drop down menu on www.openstreetmap.org.

From the announcement on the OpenStreetMap blog:

The new editor, codenamed ‘iD’, boasts an intuitive interface and clear walk-throughs that make editing much easier for new mappers. By lowering the barrier to contributions, we believe that more people can contribute their local knowledge to the map – the crucial factor that sets OSM apart from closed-source commercial maps.

You really need to see this to appreciate the ease of adding information to a map.

Excellent!

Posted in Mapping, Maps, Open Street Map | No Comments »

Foundation grants $575,000 for new OpenStreetMap tools

Monday, September 24th, 2012

Foundation grants $575,000 for new OpenStreetMap tools

From the post:

The Knight Foundation has awarded a $575,000 grant to Washington-DC-based data visualisation and mapping firm Development Seed to work on new tools for OpenStreetMap (OSM). The Knight Foundation is a non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting quality journalism, media innovation and engaging communities. The award is one of six made by the Knight Foundation as part of Knight News Challenge: Data.

The funding will be used by developers from MapBox, part of Development Seed that designs maps using OSM data, to create three new open source tools for the OSM project to “lower the threshold for first time contributors”, while also making data “easier to consume by providing a bandwidth optimised data delivery system”.

Topic maps with geographic data are a sub-set of topic maps over all but its an important use case. And it is easy for people to relate to a “map” that looks like a “map.” Takes less mental effort. (One of those “slow” thinking things.) ;-)

Looking forward to more good things to come from OpenStreetMaps!

Posted in Geographic Data, Mapping, Maps, Open Street Map | No Comments »

Open Street Map GPS users mapped

Wednesday, April 11th, 2012

Open Street Map GPS users mapped

From the post:

Open Street Map is the data source that keeps on giving. Most recently, the latest release has been a dump of GPS data from its contributors. These are the track files from Sat Nav systems which they users have sourced for the raw data behind OSM.

It’s a huge dataset: 55GB and 2.8bn items. And Guardian Datastore Flickr group user Steven Kay decided to try to visualise it.

This is the result – and it’s only an random sample of the whole. The heatmap shows a random sample of 1% of the points and their distribution, to show where GPS is used to upload data to OSM.

There are just short of 2.8 billion points, so the sample is nearly 28 million points. Red cells have the most points, blue cells have the fewest.

Great data set on its own but possibly the foundation for something even more interesting.

The intelligence types, who can’t analyze a small haystack effectively, want to build a bigger one: Building a Bigger Haystack.

Why not use GPS data such as this to create an “Intelligence Big Data Mining Test?” That is we assign significance to patterns in the data and see of the intelligence side can come up with the same answers. We can tell them what the answers are because they must still demonstrate how they got there, not just the answer.

Posted in GPS, Mapping, Maps, Open Street Map | No Comments »