Please note that the Google map below shows Brooklands Museum in the wrong place! It is actually to the right, on the other side of the river, just beneath London Bus Museum’s logo, which is in the right place.

At least in my country (Philippines) it seems that Bing Maps has added a whole lot of new/updated satellite imagery sometime within the last two days. The scale of the update is mind-boggling. It’s as if Microsoft went on a satellite image shopping spree! The added imagery seems to have more than tripled the area that is available for tracing. 2012 will certainly be a very busy year for OpenStreetMap in my country, and that’s not just because of the license change. ;-)

Can people in other countries confirm this development?

I've been slow to get around to this, but the next London OpenStreetMap pub meet-up is all set up for this coming Thursday. You can sign-up using a twitter account on Lanyrd.

...and look! There's a little OpenStreetMap image showing where the event venue is. This came about as a rather awesomely speedily pro-active response by lanyrd to my cheeky tweet this week. It's not a big switch to OSM. In fact it's quite a minor switch, only showing OpenStreetMap in place of boring old google maps if the a topic of 'OpenStreetMap' is set on an event. But this is some kind of milestone. Of all the websites I've tried using to pimp OSM London events on over the years... we finally have one which doesn't show/link the wrong map alongside our event! (It's literally been annoying me for years)

So yes. We'll be at the Penderel's Oak on Thursday, and having said all that, the OpenStreetMap wiki page is still the best place for directions to find us at the pub, and read all about what the event is (it's not complicated) So link people to that if you know anyone who might like to come along on Thursday.

Last time we were at the Monkey Puzzle and had a couple of new faces, Andy and Tom, who sat next to Andy and Tom in the pub to create some kind of crazy alternating Andy Tom situation. One of them... either Andy or Tom I can't remember... was telling me about his site Londinium.com which is a London related website directory, and we chatted about how OpenStreetMap could be mixed in to this e.g. using our data on POIs with 'website' tags.

Great to have Paul The Archivist along too. I met him at WhereCampUK in Nottingham a while back.

Of course we also had the mighty Richard Fairhurst along. Creator of Potlatch, and currently serving on the OSM foundation board. He was in town for a canal-related event, and I pictured him clambering out of canal barge in Paddington basin after an scenic journey along the great Charlbury to London canal, before joining us in the pub, but I'm not sure if that's quite what happened.

Overall we had a pretty stonking turn-out, and had to do some amusing chair swapping so we could all have a turn at eating our meal at the table!

more photos by Alex

We had some pretty interesting discussions about organisational structure of the OSMF, and particularly job titles such as "chairman" within in the board.

We talked about Andy's little scheme to sell SD cards containing OpenCycleMap maps for garmin. Currently he has to faff around a lot with envelopes and physically posting them to people. It's just a fun little side-line for him at the moment, but I'd love to see these in every outdoor shop alongside the other maps and gadgets they always stock. We were talking about how he do some sort of distribution deal, or just find someone to help him with "retail packaging".

We talked about the remapping. In London the bad map is looking a lot more clear nowadays, particularly after Ed Avis accepted (although I was secretly looking forward to deleting a lot of his low quality contributions in my neighbourhood, but I suppose his acceptance is good news) But there is some important data such as tube stations which are very old, and so are tending to be contaminated with non-CT-accepter edits. We should probably make sure those don't disappear! Contact and re-map!

If all that map-chat sounds like fun, or if you'd like to have some other techie-talk conversations with OpenStreetMap folks, or if you'd like come along as a newbie and learn some basics about OpenStreetMap, the pub is a great place to do these things! See you in the Penderel's Oak Holborn on thursday!

Last week I presented some slides on using a Garmin GPS. It is geared towards non-techie hillwalkers, but it has a few pointers to OSM, not the least of which is "how to put an OSM map on your Garmin".

The slides are at http://megarezo.org/~moltonel/Tyndall%20GPS%20course.pdf for anyone interested. I can make the original odp file available on request, and put an explicit PD/CC licence on the file if necessary.

Enjoy.

traveling for more than ten years, blogging for almost 6 years, mapping for two years

http://www.backpackingphilippines.com/2012/01/two-years-of-mapping-philippines.html

I exposed a couple of junctions I'd made in Delaware to scrutiny and got "gee, borders on vandalism", "I would revert on sight", "love the detail" and "looks ok, but maybe overly complicated" types of responses. My argument about detail mapping of US highway junctions is that markings on the pavement have the force of law in some states (including Delaware) and, therefore, are valid for interpretation through restriction-type relations. The difficulty comes in the actual junction site and the many way-crossings which result from interpretation of pavement markings as legally-enforceable restrictions. --ceyockey

Lately I've been working on merging my county's park data into OSM using JOSM (this is more technically known as conflation). I've also been modifying JOSM and some plugins to try and improve the efficiency with which I do this, considering the county has 22,500 acres of parkland in 416 parks, not counting the parks which the county does not operate, but for which the county still has boundary data. I thought I'd share my process so far, in hopes that others with similar tasks might find some useful tips, and perhaps learn how others accomplish similar tasks or how I might be able to improve my process. Be sure to at least have the utilsplugin2 plugin installed.

First of all, I converted the government-provided (and appropriately licensed) Shapefile to an OSM.XML file using ogr2osm and a simple translation script to set the name, operator, and leisure=park tags.

1. Create new layer (blank)
   


2. Open government OSM file
   


3. Select and zoom to a feature to merge (click and press 3)
   


4. Merge feature to OSM layer (Ctrl+Shift+M) and delete (D) from government layer
   


5. Switch to OSM layer (Shift+A, then 1)
   


6. Download corresponding area from OSM database (Ctrl+Shift+D)
   


7. The next step will vary:
   
   
   • If the feature doesn't exist in OSM yet, then you're done
     
   
   
   • If the government feature is of higher spatial accuracy, select the two features and run Replace Geometry (Ctrl+Alt+G), resolving any tag/membership conflicts
     
   
   
   • If the government feature doesn't have better spatial accuracy, but has better tags, copy and paste them (Ctrl+C on the government feature then Ctrl+Shift+V on the OSM feature), then delete the government feature
   
   
   
   


8. Switch back to the government layer (Shift+A, then 2)
   


9. Repeat with next feature, go to step 3
   

Note that the Replace Geometry action can "upgrade" a node to a way or to a relation, or replace a way with a way. It can't yet "upgrade" a way to a relation or replace a relation with a relation, but those are on my TODO list.

One obvious way to improve this include downloading a large area at once, though this may be problematic if the features are spread over a very large area. I really should get back to working on the conflation plugin I started almost a year ago, but got stuck on the design.

How many others are doing this kind of merging? Any suggestions?

Good Day from Temecula, California!

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across the Night of the Living Maps Project:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Night_of_the_living_maps

If anybody's thinking about jumping aboard an all nighter on OSM on Tuesday night, here's what approximately 8 mapping hours worth of JOSM Bing traces would look like in the open country for a single mapper (the area started off with TIGER and GNIS data):

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=33.5693&lon=-116.9703&zoom=14&layers=M

Sorry folks, this Temecula mapper can't be a zombie during the week...gotta work! But I've gave this countryside area east of Temecula nearly 8 hours of attention during last several days in dedication to Night of the Living Maps and plan to finish the rest of the Benton Road segment soon. Have fun on Tuesday!

Will be back in town wrapping up the detailed mapping of Temecula's Pechanga Parkway corridor once Benton Road is done.

Tip: Make sure you have an updated JOSM version with the 'F'-key shortcut feature which will make connecting the nodes of all of those natural areas much faster.

My goals are to update and correct the map of the Southern Peninsula of Cape Town which is a fairly high density tourist area.

Just around my own small suburb I have already done about 80 changes so this will be a long term project!

A questions:-
-I have found and removed about 10 "blank" nodes, is that OK?

The A96 bypass round the towns of Fochabers and Mosstodloch is now open, and its also now just starting to show up on openstreet map today. Still need someone to check what the old A96 is being now numbered as, I have removed trunk from the old A96 parts.

As mentionned e.g. in this article: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/france-finds-google-maps-guilty-of-unfair-competition-asks-to-pay-660000-in-damages/articleshow/11715378.cms

a French commercial court ordered Google to pay 500K€ in damages and interest to a small cartographic company who complained about the unfair competition.
A Google France spokesman said ""We remain convinced that a free high-quality mapping tool is beneficial for both Internet users and websites.".

GM "free", really ?

And what about OSM ? Is there a risk that in some days in the future, OSM will be guilty for the same reasons, offering for free what commercial companies are offering for a fee ?

I recently downloaded the free Iphone app Navmii Navigator and firstly was impressed with what it had to offer for free, but secondly that there are many short comings in map detail in my part of the world.

This is also a fairly busy tourist route in the South Peninsula of Cape Town and I have good local knowledge. It is important to get it right.

I decided to try to assist with this and did a few POI amendments and additions today as a test.

Some things I don't yet understand, one is at which point are issues with a navigation system map related and when are they navigation software related?

Hopefully this will become clearer as I get involved.

The one issue I really want to fix is sections where the road seems to run in the sea on the navigator, but on the map it seems correct. How is that possible or is it a problem of old map updates?

mimmmmmmmmm

My goal for 2012 is to map my home town, Zirl. Luckily many streets are already done (though the access attributes are often missing), but I want to go one step further and have every house with address and points of interest (shops, doctors, ...) mapped.

I have created a plan for when I want to do what. During the month of February I will use the currently drawn streets and my GPS tracks to align Bing maps and then use that to draw every house. I will just tag them as building=yes and not add street or housenumber tags, since it is hard to tell from aerial view. As you can see, I have already started with this.

In March (as temperature permits) I will begin walking every street. I will correct wrong street paths, add access=* tags and add information about building type and address. I will also use my hiking tours to get a (hopefully) complete view of the hiking trails around Zirl. This will go on until the end of July, only interrupted by some time after the license switch where I will remap nodes that had to be deleted (though that should not be too many). I do not plan on remapping before the switch.

I hope to be done in August, when I will start my second ground survey and will go around and make sure that all data is correct, especially addresses and house shapes.

I hope that I will be done with this before it gets too cold to run around with a GPS (can't use gloves because then I can't take notes), so that I can spend the rest of the year checking the map from my computer.

It will be an interesting year for OSM and Zirl!

Amazing, bing seems to be completely up to date in the south west of UK - bridges that were only built last year show up

Hi, does anybody know how you submit a business listing to this maps site?

Tryin to get my andriod tablet to work

Weet iemand hoe een 'voorde' kan getagd worden (doorwaadbare plaats in een rivier)?
Is a OSM-tag available for a 'ford' -a fordable place in a river-?

I normally blog about the previous OpenStreetMap London pub meet-up, before announcing the next one here, but due to an intense time at work at the moment this process has gone right out the window. That's a bit of a shame because the previous meet-up was a corker... Apologies. I will get to it. But in the meantime, OSMLondoners, a couple of other events:

Tonight! Open Knowledge Foundation Event - It's a get together for all things Open Data. Given my OpenStreetMap and placr.co.uk open data campaigning connections, it seemed rude not to go along. In fact if anyone else would like to help me represent OpenStreetMap. Please come along!

This Wednesday! - Royal Hollow University Mapping Event. Dr. Patrick Weber is hoping to repeat some of the sucesses of previous mapping workshop events at UCL. They need volunteers! Anyone who knows how to do OpenStreetMap mapping can help, but he does need people during the working day, and the university campus is out near Egham. Interesting spot actually. Please reply to Patrick if you are available to help with this. I'm sure he'd most grateful.

That's it for the short term things. As I say, we need to get another OSM pub meet-up happening some time very soon too. Also on the not-too-distant horizon are these events:

dev8d workshop - Wed Feb 15th - dev8d is a three day conference for developers in the education. They'd like to run a workshop on OpenStreetMap use, possibly on the Wednesday. Details to be finalised

geomob - Thu Feb 16th - This one will surely feature some OpenStreetMap in the actual presentations, with Matt talking about MapQuest stuff, and Ed Freyfogle of nestoria. Looks like there's more than the usual number of London OSMers in attendance too.

AGI geodrinks - Feb 23rd - Geo industry folks (and some OpenStreetMap trouble-makers).

The event this Wednesday is particularly short notice because I only just got around to reading about it. Sorry about that. Otherwise I am normally quite good about slapping things on the London wiki events list... and of course follow @OSMLondon on twitter

At the weekend, I got on my bike, and cycled from London to Oxford. Take a look at a map, and there's a road that starts in London, and goes to Oxford. It's the A40.

Since the M40 was built, much of the A40, certainly from Denham Roundabout to Wheatley has most of it's former traffic on the motorway. This makes it an excellent route for keen long-distance road cyclists.

However, from the Marylebone Flyover to White City, that stretch used to be the A40(M), an urban motorway. Nowadays, it's just the A40, not a motorway any more. Being an intrepid cyclist, I set out to see if it could be cycled along. Technically, and legally, the answer is yes. There are no signs along there saying you can't cycle (or walk, or ride a horse) along the elevated sections.

However, the Marylebone flyover doesn't have a hard-shoulder, nor does the White city flyover. Technically, even cyclists shouldn't be cycling on the hard shoulder, but I doubt that police would stop a cyclist for that.

The speed limit along much of the Westway is currently 40mph, which doesn't make it any worse than cycling along the North Circular Road.

The only other cycle-hostile parts of the route were from Uxbridge roundabout to Denham Roundabout. Though technically legal to cycle the A40 there, there's a sign saying 'Unsuitable for cyclists'. Quite true. Fast moving traffic, a 70mph speed limit, and no hard shoulder.

This leads me to ponder if cycle route planners might want to have a tag for roads that, while technically legal, are termed hostile, and not recommended for novice cyclists eg. bicycle=hostile, or whether this could be implied by the speed limit and other factors?

I've just removed bicycle=no from the Westway, because it was untrue from a technical and legal standpoint. Suggestions welcome from anyone involved in cycle routing using OSM data.

Added the Wal-Mart location in Harker Heights, TX