FindMyPast Tech Blog

Trees

I like trees and I like maps. How can I contribute to detailed mapping on osm of the UK’s champion trees (as listed by the Tree Register www.treeregister.org)? I have emailed and then written to the Tree Register with a tentative proposal to help them present a portion of their comprehensive database on openstreetmap, but so far have had no response. Not sure of my next move here, need to think about how best to approach them. Maybe I need to approach a more direct contact?

Are there any tree experts within the OSM community? I guess there must be, but no idea how to get in contact with them. Trees + maps = yum.

Tilemill

I’ve had a go at using Tilemill to make a custom map of the champion trees in my local park (Tilgate Park in Crawley). There’s an enormous amount of CSS required to make stuff look good, and am therefore doubly impressed by things such as the awesome runkeeper presentation at www.mapbox.com/blog/runkeeper-routes/#13/51.0960/-0.1660 Need to find more hours to play with this more. Am currently watching the GitHub feeds of mapbox carto and openstreetmap-carto with one eye.

Regarding the other type of trees, I’ve uploaded my gedcom wikipedia.org/wiki/GEDCOM (with lat/longs via gedgenie gedgenie.co.uk/) as data into Tilemill. Haven’t tried to make it look good yet. Later. More pressingly, I need to formulate some ideas regarding visualisations of locations in family history data with maps, eg, diaspora, timelines, spread of names, families, & etc for my work at www.findmypast.com

Open Historical Map

Think about what I’d like to do regarding OHM www.openhistoricalmap.org How does it fit in with family history? Might we (as in www.findmypast.com) be able to partner or join in somehow? Very pertinent conversation over this past weekend on the OHM list lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/historic regarding recording and storage of family and local histories that might get lost. A colleague has just been given a booklet by a relative, written by her great-great aunt, that was published by Haverhill & District Local History Group - just the kind of thing that potentially gets lost in the mists of time, and has oodles of location based data. Also, backwards-projected dates of planting of champion trees could be plotted?

HOT - Humanitarian Openstreetmap Team

Been to two HOT/MSF/Red Cross map evenings, need to set aside regular time each week to get some squares done. Also thinking about doing a start up HOT mapping event at brother-in-law’s pub, to get the handful of regular Crawley OSMers and also some newbies interested in HOT.