Mapping Hacks

The recent floods in Mumbai provoked a crisis in government geospatial data distribution in India. Coordination between emergency services, identification of local residents, modelling for future flood vulnerabilities; open exchange of geospatial information is crucial, and this has impelled the Indian government into liberalising geodata access policy. Shekhar Krishnan of the Mumbai Free Map project […]

Open Access to State Collected Geospatial Data states the case, and calls for an open license (Creative Commons style, with a ShareAlike clause for commercial use.)
If you suffer from lack of open access to geospatial information collected by National Mapping Authorities in your country, or would like to show your support for those who […]

I was pleasantly surprised to see an article in the Guardian about the delays to the UK national street and address database that i mentioned here recently. It alleges that horsetrading and disputes over intellectual property rights in spatial information is holding back e-government infrastructure efforts.

The New York subway map fascinates me with missing pieces. Why should it be so hard to get from Queens to Brooklyn, without going through Manhattan or, off-peak, waiting an hour for a slow old G train? (The G line is the only one that doesn’t pass through Manhattan along its length, and has suffered […]

Seen on the OpenStreetmap list amidst a long discussion about proprietary postcode and address geocoding data sets; the OpenGeoDB. It’s a German-language project to create a free-of-cost, free-to-access dataset of address and postal code data including German-speaking regions of Austria and Switzerland.
Next to a open base map, a free geocoder is the next most important […]

I’ve been lucky enough to be asked to speak at the Society of Cartographers Summer School on September 6th. Steve Chilton, the organiser, has a sharp eye for the edge; my longtime collaborator Saul Albert spoke there on art and mapsploitation two years ago, after we held the Cartographic Congress in Limehouse.
This year, they’re running […]

We have some experiments and demos for Google Maps hacks here. This is a ‘not really’ ready for prime time directory. You are welcome to check it out-but I make no claim that any of it actually works.

And if using this code gives your camel spots, well, I don’t want to hear it…