Mapping Hacks

Last Wednesday, Shekhar Krishnan and I presented a talk entitled Open Historical Maps: Crowdsourcing, Open Source GIS, and the Research Web to the ABCD GIS working group at Harvard University. Here’s the abstract from Shekhar’s announcement:

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I confess to reading the American political blogs as if they were a distributed “Hello” magazine.
I enjoyed the coverage of Sarah Palin’s benediction by the witch-hunting pastor Thomas Muthee. The Christian Science Monitor reported in 1999 on Muthee’s efforts at Targeting cities with “spiritual mapping”
“Spiritual Mapping” is the collaborative mapping component of militant evangelism […]

I have been perhaps a bit remiss in not mentioning this here sooner, but Mikel Maron and I are currently engaged in facilitating a series of mapping workshops all across India, informally known as Free Map India 2008. So far we have met with Indictrans in Pune, and organized two-day workshops focused on seeding OpenStreetMap […]

Despite the fact I understood no more than one word in 12, I enjoyed FOSSGIS.de 2007, a long month ago now, a great deal. The “Freie Geodaten” movement here in Germany is the most active and developed I have seen. I spent an enjoyable afternoon talking with Jochen Topf about everything under the Sun related […]

The recent UK Geospatial Mashups event hosted by the Ordnance Survey provoked in me some reflections on business models for the production of open geodata which I have belatedly written down.
It was good to see old friends at the event - Mikel holding it up for GeoRSS, Raj on the stump for the new WFS-basic […]

During my recent month on the circuit I had the chance to run a couple of open mapping tools talk/workshops; I need to write up a narrative or schematic soon. One tool I showed a lot of and have become increasingly impressed with its solidity and functional simplicity, is JOSM, the Java-based offline OpenStreetmap editor […]

“Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.” AJ Liebling
Jo Walsh, our co-author on Mapping Hacks, has never forgotten this. Sometimes it is annoying. I want to say “but look, you can do all this cool stuff with this free (but not open) API? Why struggle to reinvent the map […]

On the Geowankers list Andrea Moe made a query
> I have an existing collection of lat/lons, each representing a place where a
> photo was taken. I want to computationally find the geographic clusters in
> this collection, i.e. the geographic areas with the densest concentrations
> of points. (So it sounds like Andrew’s “location-closeness clustering” […]

Public Geodata is sending another Open Letter this time to Ministers in the Council before the conciliation and third reading process on the proposed INSPIRE Directive establishing a spatial data infrastructure in Europe. If you are in Europe it is still very much worth signing the petition and also trying to write to your national […]

I was talking with Marc about a mutual friend who had moved from Bernal Heights in San Francisco, to Jamaica Plain near Boston. I remarked how much JP had reminded me of Bernal when i visited there. He said, “JP is one of those connecting neighbourhoods for Bernal Heights… Hackney is one too, i think”. […]