Mapping Hacks

This OpenStreetmap article on easter egg streets and geographic data; things that don’t exist inserted into maps, in order to pursue anyone who might copy features from those maps, for intellectual property rights infringement. A fake street, “Lye Close”, identified by heath bunting, is illustrated with pictures.

Fake street features are fairly hard to find,
and we […]

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 […]

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 […]

Part of the Southern border of the Netherlands, with Belgium, has a certain,
shall we say ‘complexity.’

Orange portions within green portions represent exclaves of the Netherlands
completely surrounded by Belgian territory which are in turn completely
surrounded by the territory of the Netherlands:

Traditionally, the nationality of your house is determined by the country where your ‘front’ door opens, […]

We’re pleased to announce that mappinghacks.com is hosting a tracker for
free sources of geodata available through BitTorrent. Supported by the
community, the tracker is already hosting torrents for VMap0, TIGER/Line 2004
FE, and SRTM 30, with more in the works. The UO Faculty of Cartography GeodataTorrents has links
to the available torrents. (There’s also a link to this […]