Mapping Hacks

Since i cracked and installed java on my laptop, i’ve become addicted to the openstreetmap editing applet. Right now it allows you to trace over the top of GPS tracks that you upload in GPX format; create nodes, and make them into street segments.

I found it terribly addictive in a slightly Tetris-like way, which is a great sign; that free-of-cost map creation can be ’sticky’ and absorbing.
There’s a lot on the openstreetmap Roadmap left before all-singing, all-dancing 1.0, but i’m starting to get a lot out of it now.

I’m using the streets on the Wireless London based map (testing version); streets collected from OSM’s API and reannotated with RDF properties, which go with short names back into OSM.

I search interestedly for patterns and significances in the London data thus far collected, mostly Steve Coast’s walks around West London and Schuyler and my cycle rides in the north and east. The two bodies of tracks barely met up at the edges. At the centre of london is a hollow core; a kind of exclusion zone mapping roughly to the congestion charge zone; where no-one can afford to live, or run a small business or a freenetwork node, where many londoners only go in order to pass through. There are a lot of ‘GPS canyons’ in this area, too.

I really look forward to seeing the applet hooked up to different base map images; the out of copyright New Popular Edition, better resolution satellite photography than landsat. We joke about ‘outsourcing’ to volunteers in Mumbai, but the thrill of drawing the map of somewhere you’re familiar with, should perhaps be experienced.

Posted in data |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.