OSM Topo maps
I love topographic maps. They’re often the most detailed maps, and are useful for discerning details that no other map has. Lars Ahlzen also loves topo maps. He’s created toposm.org. It uses MassGIS topographic data and hill shading, so it only works in Massachusetts.
April 29th, 2009 - Posted by Russ Nelson | 0 Comments
River Rafting: bringing rivers and campsites to life
Last week I enjoyed 6 days navigating a section of the Yampa River. I’ve uploaded over 70 miles of traces from the Yampa River as well as campsites to the OpenStreetMap!!
Map before
After trace addition!!
Soon to come are traces of the Amtrak track from Glenwood Springs to Denver, which was my route back home after a wicked April snow storm last Saturday when the Rocky Mountains received over four feet of snow!
This is ‘Happy Mapping’!
April 24th, 2009 - Posted by Hurricane McEwen | 0 Comments
Geospatial Olympics
What do you get when you combine a game of geography and GIS based Jeopardy, free pizza, a bunch of college students and awesome prizes? The annual Metro State College Geospatial Olypmics of course!
Yesterday was a blast at the Tivoli Center on the Auraria Campus in Denver, Colorado.
GIS Metro Club Geospatial Olympics
It’s an event hosted by the Metro State GIS Club for GIS/Geography students to show off their know-how as well as a party as the academic year winds down.
The jeporady teams were: The Bobcats, Team “Iembracethat!” and Team “I WIN!” .I was recruited to be the buzzer girl (hit the buzzer when we had the answer i.e. be the first every-time) for team “I WIN!” and how could we lose with a name like that? 
Well it was an entertaining game as Team “Iembracethat!” took the lead early and held on to it. Team “I WIN!” had an unfortunate time of answering at least one question per team member wrong (go ahead, blame it on the trigger finger reflexes of the buzzer girl) and at half time had half the points of the leaders. Personally, I think team “I WIN!” was saving the best for last…
And it worked for us! In the final bonus round where teams gambled away points with their final answer, we pulled ahead for the WIN 
But everyone is a winner at the Spatial Olympics as the SWAG is plentiful, thanks to donations from mapping companies like USGS, GITA and Cloudmade.
There was also an Oopsie Art competition. Who knew mistakes could be so cool! The Oopsie Art competition is based on maps and renders that go all wrong and end up a work of art. All the artwork was spectacular and I am encouraging a bigger submission for next year! I would totally hang some of the artwork up on my walls
Until the next mapping adventure–
Happy Mapping!
Hurricane
April 24th, 2009 - Posted by Hurricane McEwen | 0 Comments
Blame the puke yellow in JOSM on me
Please blame the nifty new puke yellow background on most ways in the USA on me. I submitted a patch to JOSM which caused all unreviewed ways to be a fat puke yellow. That is, any way with a tiger:reviewed tag.
You may be asking yourself “Self, why did Russ do this? What did I ever do to him?” Nothing! You’re totally innocent! I take all the blame. But, see, here, the thing is that we need to get all of the TIGER data reviewed. There is exactly one way to indicate that a way has zero errors in it: remove the tiger:reviewed tag (or set it to yes, but since absence means yes, you may as well save some space in the database and delete it).
So when you see a way with a fat yellow background that you know is correct in location and tags, delete its tiger:reviewed tag. Then you can smile, knowing that you’ve done your good deed for the day. Or maybe a fractional good deed, depending on how high is your threshold for “good”.
April 24th, 2009 - Posted by Russ Nelson | 0 Comments
Presentation to Stanford’s GISSIG
This past Monday I presented an OpenStreetMap introduction to the Stanford’s GIS Special Interest Group. GISSIG attendees are cross-disciplinary, and include people from the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences, engineering and many more. Members included Stanford staff, sucha GIS professionals, as well as professors and grad students.
During the meeting we discussed ways OpenStreetMap is being used, and how it can be adapted. Questions centered around privacy issues, technical formatting, and ways to get more students involved. So far the OSM Stanford Map looks pretty good, but discussions arose around making it even more complete!
Stay tuned for a Stanford mapping party sometime next semester.
April 21st, 2009 - Posted by Sarah Manley | 0 Comments
Pedaling around the Prairie
This past weekend I had my first get together with Chicagoland and Wisconsin cyclists along the Long Prairie Trail in Poplar Grove, Illinois. It was great getting out of the city for a warm and (mostly) sunny April day spent amongst the fields, farms and friendly folks in Boone County, Illinois. The Chicagoland Cycling Meetup (CCM) had planned a ride to coincide with a clean-up effort along the trail.
Running through the Northwestern Illinois hamlets of Caledonia, Poplar Grove, and Capron; the Long Prairie Trail is a paved 15-mile stretch converted from a former rail corridor. Located about a hour and a half northwest of Chicago, and within shouting distance of Rockford, IL and the Wisconsin border, its a slice of prairie paradise for city-dwellers like me.
We met up Saturday morning at the Trail Stop Cafe in Poplar Grove for some early morning doughnuts and coffee ahead of the day’s adventure. After fueling up a bit, our group of pedal pushers adorned ourselves with gloves and trash bags and began the task of cleaning up after litterbugs along the Long Prairie Trail. The work of picking up garbage flew by quickly as our group of bicyclists/environmental crusaders soaked up temperatures in the 60’s and some good conversation.
Once we’d collected the remnants of the litterbugs, we set out for a cruise of our beautified trail. As the newly appointed Mapping Ambassador within CCM, I brought along a couple of Garmin Legends to introduce riders to creating bicycle-friendly maps with OpenStreetMap. Judging by the GPS equipment that Ron (the uber-friendly ride organizer) and others already had mounted to their handlebars, these riders were already a tech-savvy bunch.
Happy trails cyclists!
I managed to plot out some points along our route, and am looking forward to sharing some of the newly captured features on OpenStreetMap and its sister site, OpenCycleMap. I hope they will be of great use to the members of the Chicagoland and Wisconsin cycling meetups.
Glad we were able to get out for a ride on Saturday, as Sunday’s bike ride in University Park was hampered by rain and temperatures dropping back into the 40’s. But as spring and summer start to show up around these parts, I hope this is the first of many rides for myself and OpenStreetMap alongside Midwestern cycling groups.
April 20th, 2009 - Posted by Dirk Munson | 1 Comments
Spring has sprung in NYC
Spring has sprung in New York City, although you’d have trouble convincing the people who live here that it’s warm enough to go around without a coat yet. I’m here for my mapping party over in DUMBO on Saturday and Sunday. The API is down for the 0.6 upgrade, but that doesn’t scare me. We had to do offline mapping in Somerville because the venue’s wifi signup process wasn’t working. And … it worked quite well. I had OSM files downloaded already, covering the area of interest, so we were able to edit in JOSM, saving the file to disk. I’m similarly prepared for this party. I expect it will go well.
I’ve been told that the process isn’t that simple, and that the uploaded data needs to have a version number one higher than the existing version number. I’ve done some testing, and uploading with version=’1′ on all entities seems to do it. One way or another, I will figure out how to make it all work.
April 18th, 2009 - Posted by Russ Nelson | 0 Comments
Mappy Hour!
Ok, so any combination with beer seems to be a winner– and what could be better than maps and beer!
Last night I hosted the first Mappy Hour at The Baker St. Pub and Grill in DTC.
We had a great turn out– over 17 people came to find out what OpenStreetMap is all about. We also did a bit of ‘live’ editing by putting the pub on the map and other points of interest around town. It was a great start to what will probably be a monthly party.
It was great to see Clark Couture again (the famous lifesaver from the “Elk Mountain Grand Traverse” episode) and he’s jonesin’ to get out and map his mountain biking trails!
Also joining us for some great conversation was Alan Hergert, Craig Gallagher and fellow classmates from Metro State GIS Club and also students from DU and CU-Denver.
Ken Turnball, organizer of the Rocky Rogues, joined us. New to the group is Bob Prehn who has over 1400 MILES of GPS Biking trails!!! Visit his site at GeoBiking.org
Yes! We will be adding Bob’s work to the OpenStreetMap database 
See you all next month!
Happy Mapping,
Hurricane
April 12th, 2009 - Posted by Hurricane McEwen | 0 Comments
Looking for a social event with a geo-focus? Then join us for mappy hour!
The cloudmade team has started a new series of social events, called Mappy Hour! Starting in San Francisco, and now spreading to Chicago and Denver, Mappy Hours have started out with great success. These social events allow both new and experienced mappers to get together to discuss mapping in OSM, as well as other open source, geo-focused projects and trends. Attendees have come from a mix of backgrounds and interests including GIS, engineering, software development, cycling and much more.
The events also serve as a great way to network with professionals in the mapping and location sector. Keep an eye out for upcoming mapping parties on the OSM calendar, or contact an OSM community ambassador with proposals for a mappy hour in your city!
Interested in attending an event tonight? Check out all the details for tonight’s Denver Mappy hour here.
April 10th, 2009 - Posted by Sarah Manley | 0 Comments
Baltimore or less
Visited Baltimore for the first time, which finishes out my first cycle of visits to all the cities in my region. Woo hoo! Met Umar, who maps on crutches. Really! Met Kate, who drove up from Washington, D.C., and wants to run her own mapping party in the capitol region (yay!). She blogged about the Baltimore mapping party. I also met an interesting character name of Alan Grover. Seems to know everyone who does anything. Has been a great help with suggestions for people who can help us improve the map of Balto. And a handful of other people, but this paragraph is already full.
We met at Red Emmas, which is a leftist anarchist bookstore and cafe, not to be confused with an anarchocapitalist bookstore. I’m sure that the folks there are so far to the left, they BLEED red. Hehe. Anyway, enough anarchist jokes. They have a very nice wifi setup there, and they invited me back to give an OSM presentation next time I’m in town. Cotey makes a bitchin’ hot chocolate, complete with a cinnamon stick. I think, though, that it’s best to move the venue around, so that people aren’t walking over already-well-mapped territory.
People drove, bicycled, and walked to make this animation:
In my off hours I mapped successfully with my Columbus V-900, so I’m starting to trust it again.
I’ll next be in Baltimore on May 29th and 30th. Save the date.
April 9th, 2009 - Posted by Russ Nelson | 0 Comments
