I've put up a tileserver that renders OpenStreetMap in all 279 Wikipedia languages.

There's e.g. a German and French rendering of Europe.

See the Maps-l mailing list and the server setup notes for more info

The fun! project of getting OpenStreetMap maps deployed on Wikimedia
servers (e.g. Wikipedia) is grinding forward at a healthy pace. For those who have no idea what it is you can read the original announcement on the Wikimedia techblog.

Unfortunately the project has been somewhat delayed by the
Wikimedia.de servers mentioned in that posting taking a bit longer to
arrive than expected (the DB server is still not up).

I've personally had some much needed time to work on it recently,
right now I'm hacking static map generation as outlined in this RFC.

(see also this posting on wikitech-l)

If you'd like to help here's the bug list I'm working on.

There are lots of tasks to be done. One very interesting task that I'm
sure someone would be happy to work on is seeing how this setup scales
to >200 languages or so.

Ideally Wikimedia will have static map generation / a tileserver
that'll render maps in the locale of the target wiki, so it'll e.g.
use name:de tags for de.wikipedia.org.

I went out for a walk with my girlfriend today taking the GPS along. She ended up stealing it and obsessively mapped every footpath we walked on.

So far so good, but once we got home showing her how to post-process the data wasn't as easy.

She downloaded the experimental Windows installer for JOSM which doesn't default to Mercator for some reason, and Yahoo WMS doesn't work either for some reason, with no way to find out why.

Once she was running JOSM she had trouble with its interface, mainly the stickyness of it. She'd create a way neglecting to double click to explicitly end it. Or once the way was created she couldn't select it because you have to switch modes in JOSM (add -> select) to be able to do that.

Of about 3 hours with JOSM probably 1/3 of that was spent fighting the interface. I had very similar problems with my first 12 hours or so of JOSM myself. It's easy for me to edit with it now but getting good at it takes a long time.

"I would never have been able to find out how to use that program if you weren't helping me, it's completely unusable by default".

The only reason *I* know how to use JOSM was that I spent 2-4 hours of those first 12 hours reading online manual and experimenting with it.

Maybe we're just idiots, or maybe JOSM isn't very newbie friendly.

Then I thought I'd show her how to use Potlatch, at first the website yelled at her and once we opened Potlatch it showed giant black holes all over the Yahoo layer:

… See full entry

A new user has added the fictional island of Lummerland which appears in a German children's TV show to the map, quite an impressive feat of fictional mapping.

Here's a website that shows the island that was mapped, along with a bigger picture of it.

Today I cycled out to a beach by Groß Glienicker See. Noticing that the two islets around 250 meters from the shore weren't on my recently updated Garmin map, and incorrectly recalling that that area of Berlin didn't have Yahoo aerial imagery I decided to swim out two the two islands to record a track their dimensions.

As it turns out those islets weren't rendered on my map due to a missing multipolygon relation, there is Yahoo aerial imagery available for that area, and my Garmin 60CSx isn't quite as waterproof as advertised.

The two islets are more accurately traced now though, and I'll see if I can't get my GPS working tomorrow after drying it off overnight.

Update: I've written a follow up blog posting describing how I repaired by GPS.

I maintain a Garmin map export of Iceland which is updated daily. But I've had complaints from Windows users about the maps being hard to install, they expect to be able to upload maps from Garmin MapSource.

Unfortunately the only GUI MapSource installers are proprietary and seem to expect you to use cGPSMapper. To work around this other mkgmap exports have a .bat install script. That works, but not very user friendly for the general Windows userbase.

So I've started to write one, it's really basic at the moment but it's coming along:

And it can install maps that are viewable in MapSource later on:

… See full entry

Þórir Jónsson on the talk-is mailing list got Kadeco or the Keflavík Airport Development Corporation to release a PDF version of a map of Ásbrú.

Ásbrú is a new suburb of Reykjanesbær (previously Keflavík) on the site of the former Naval Air Station Keflavik. The site has been converted for mixed University & Industrial use.

I rectified the map using mapwarper and drew the road network/buildings/landuse that wasn't there already. And here are the before/after pictures:

Before:

After:

… See full entry

The tah-heatmap I made of the globe is the current featured image on the front page of the wiki:

Maybe I can convince the t@h guys to run a job on their servers to report tile sizes with more granularity than z12. That would make for a nice map at the country-level.

I've also been in contact with stevefaeembra who made some very nice heatmaps using flickr data overlaid on OSM maps. He's going to release the code behind it so others can render their own as well.

Getting access to OSM tileserver request logs and rendering heatmaps for requested areas and comparing them with heatmaps of our data would make for a very interesting project.

Which I managed even though I suck at RoR

But check it out on the dev server. I'd be especially interested in any practical applications of the georss tag. Do any RSS readers support this?

I moved from Reykjavík, Iceland to Germany on Sunday. I'll be in Gatow for the next 6 weeks but somewhere else after that.

Hopefully I can map Gatow better, and maybe meet up with some OSM-ers in Berlin.

A while ago there was a thread on talk-is (partially in English) about creating a party render with all the GPX tracks recorded in the Greater Reykjavík region in Iceland.

To that end I wrote a tool to download all the GPX tracks a given user has created by screen-scraping the OSM site, this can be used along with the Planet dump extracts to get (approximately) all the GPX tracks for every user that contributed to a given .osm file.

In the case of Iceland that resulted in 1.4 GB of GPX tracks, which were further extracted to create a party render of the capital region.

After writing this tool I'm mostly using it to make sure I've uploaded all my GPX traces to the OSM server, I keep my GPX traces in a Git repository and sometimes I've forgotten to upload them, but no more!:

$ perl get-osm-gpx-tracks-for-user --debug --download --out-dir=tmp "Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason"

$ perl diff-gpx-directories ~/src/gps/gpx tmp/
== Files in `/home/avar/src/gps/script/tmp' not in `/home/avar/src/gps/gpx':
== Files in `/home/avar/src/gps/gpx' not in `/home/avar/src/gps/script/tmp':
2008-12-20-Protesting-at-Austurvollur-photomapping-at-laugarvegur-and-biking-down-saebraut.gpx
2009-01-25-Bus-to-Althingi-and-walking-about-in-Althingisgardurinn.gpx
2009-03-25-Walking-in-Ellidardalur.gpx
2009-04-09-2009-04-10-Driving-from-Akranes-to-Akureyri-via-Egillstadir.gpx


Well, almost.

I'm attending the 2009 Wikimedia developer meet-up where, amongst other things, there are people interested in getting OpenStreetMap integrated into Wikimedia-hosted wikis, hereafter referred to as Wikipedia, which is the most known incarnation of it.

Everyone in that group has been or is interested in working on making map data a first-class feature on Wikipedia, at the end of the day we had some notes about what we want to implement.

The stuff I want to work on is getting the required infrastructure in place to be able to display inline mapnik-rendered OSM maps in Wikipedia articles, once we have that working and our foot in the door it'll be very easy to add more mapping features, like finding nearby articles or doing custom renderings. But the results from today's talks (including with Brion Vibber) are to try to get the following operational:

1. Wikimedia's own updated Planet.osm mirror & importing of the Planet file into PostGIS


2. Tile rendering infrastructure, i.e. Mapnik rendering from aforementioned database


3. A program to stitch the tiles together into a single map image, something like MapOf (which appears to be t@h only) but for tiles in general (so we can stitch the mapnik tiles), maybe bigmap could be used? Maybe we could just render a custom image from Postgres itself using Mapnik like the OSM site does it instead.


4. An extension to display maps inline in MediaWiki, like Simple image extension and maybe the Slippy Map extension for JavaScript enabled browsers.

… See full entry

My patch to add fullscreen support to JOSM has been commited to trunk

There are some caveats with it as Java's setFullScreenWindow doesn't work properly on all platforms. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but in the meantime it works on Ubuntu 8.10 under Compiz at least.

I've made a set on flickr with edits by users in Iceland as rendered by itoworld's osm mapper

I gained access to the 2m aerial imagery of the Gaza Strip since I signed up for it.

The WMS that has the data is closed however, but it's in 2m/pixel resolution which gives us opportunity to map residential streets, alleys, buildings, fields, playgrounds and other features like that which we can identify.

Some of that stuff I have no idea what is though.

Sadly due to the contract in place to get the images I can't include any screenshots of editing it.

I surveyed Hlíðarfjall on Sunday and added the first aerialways mapped in Iceland in the process. Analyzing the GPX trace it turns out that my top speed was 78 km/h.

I managed to map a few places in London in the time that I was there, named a previously unnamed street, added the Mile End Climbing Wall, added the National Express bus stop at Stansted Airport, a taxiway and a few other things, mostly based on Yahoo Aerial imagery.

And of course I showed up for the Drayton Arms OSM pub meet-up, which was fun.

Which was pretty damn fun. Too bad it's not rendered yet.

After a discussion on talk-is I contacted Íslandspóstur and requested permission to use their postal code records under an OSM-compatible license.

They said yes, which means we just have to write an importer for their data and survey the rest of the streets in their database before Iceland has complete postal code coverage.

My Garmin map of Iceland is now routeable thanks to mkgmap. It still doesn't seem to do address finding however.