Oakland mappers improve the downtown map
June 26, 2009 June 30, 2009
This past weekend’s Oakland Mapping Party showed what a difference a weekend of mapping can make!
On June 27th and 28th, OSM experts and newbies joined together at the Rock, Paper, Scissors Art Collective, to work together to improve the Oakland map. Mappers concentrated on adding details to the downtown map, showcasing where restaurants, galleries, bike parking are located, as well as many other amenities. A couple of mappers focused on improving the cycle map, helping to ensure OpenCycleMap of Oakland is a reliable resource for Oakland cyclists.
A group of mappers also took up the challenge of mapping the local parks, including Lakeside Park (which is almost complete), Washington Park (in Alameda), and the Jack London Square district. There is still more detail needed in the Oakland park system, but our efforts have made a lot of headway.
New mappers learned how to use GPS units, as well as Paper Maps with the Walking-Papers.org project. You can check out some of the paper maps scans here. Paper maps are helpful in mapping dense urban environments, such as downtown Oakland, where there are lots of points-of-interest and addresses to collect.
Between the attendees, there was lively discussion about ways to grow the OSM community, with ideas on sharing GPS units, potential collaborators and new event activities, locations and partners. Overall, the Oakland Mapping community is alive and growing, so please join us for an upcoming event!
A big thank you to the RPS Collective, who were great hosts! We highly recommend attending one of their upcoming events (as well as making a donation) !
June 30th, 2009 - Posted by Sarah Manley | 0 Comments
TIGER data in OSM
TIGER is the USA Census Bureau’s street map dataset. David Hansen imported it into OSM at the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008. Took about five months. Lots of data there. Now, TIGER has a somewhat tattered reputation amongst the geo-cognoscenti and deservedly so. Take a look at this screen capture from a JOSM session northwest of Shippensburg, PA:
Notice how the error vector isn’t constant. It’s not like the data has been misprojected, which would result in it being off in one direction by a constant amount. Instead, the error vector wanders all over the place. It’s … as if the data was truncated at some point to a fixed number of bits or decimal points. So rather than all the points moving in the same direction, they all move to the nearest point representable by the truncation. I haven’t verified that that’s actually what happened, but that’s what it looks like.
Also, note that this is only true for some counties. Shippensburg is split between Cumberland and Franklin Counties. Cumberland is just fine, but Franklin is this horrible mess as pictured above.
June 26th, 2009 - Posted by Russ Nelson | 2 Comments
Kickapoo
You would think that the community ambassadors at CloudMade are full time geeks. And you’d be right! But some of us are geeky in passions beyond programming and gpx.xml formats.
For example, Russ loves to bike. Everyday. I think he should be sponsored by TREK for the miles and publicity he could get them in rural New York! And Dirk, well, this is his favorite time of year! It’s baseball season, yo!
And me, well, I a still discovering what I’m geeky about (dude, I totally worked with code on the terminal yesterday! It was epic) …but I will always admit to an obsession with horses. Once you’ve fallen in love with an equine, it’s in your blood. So let me introduce you to my best bud, Kickapoo. He’s a spoiled rotten (in the best of ways) six year old mutt. No, really, we don’t know his bloodlines for sure, but he’s probably a combination of percheron and quarter horse. i.e. he’s perfect.
Up close and personal with Kickapoo
If you think I don’t map while I’m riding, you’d be wrong. The ranch I am lucky enough to ride at has thousands of acres to explore and I definitely drop bread crumbs so I can find my way back. Yes, it’s true Kickapoo would always be able to find the barn (z.B. they know where the treats are!) but I carry the GPS just incase he decides to leave me up in the hills 
Happy Mapping,
Hurricane and Kickapoo
June 18th, 2009 - Posted by Hurricane McEwen | 1 Comments
Open Source Bridge Conference
Hurricane is heading to Portland, Oregon for the Open Source Bridge Conference. Over the weekend we will be hosting a mapping party at the downtown library in Portland and Sunday, Father’s Day, we’ll be hiking in the famous Forest Park! For details, be sure to visit theCloudMade Calendar and you can always check out the wiki for OpenStreetMap ;)
This is what Hurricane says:
I hear Portland is a great city and I can’t wait to explore! I also hope to meet up with my favorite rafting buddy, Joshua Rafkind. We can laugh and cry about the life changing trip we took last winter– Lava Falls! I’ve been told to visit Pendelton for great wool wear and if there’s time, a jaunt down to Mount St. Helens will be in order. A full report to follow!
June 18th, 2009 - Posted by Hurricane McEwen | 0 Comments
Park City, Utah: A network of trails
Okay, so being a community ambassador to OpenStreetMaps is like the best job in the world right? I mean, it ranks right up there with Mike Rowe’s job, professional ice climbers and salsa dance instructors… our jobs rock and so do the locations!
Beautiful Bluebells and white Columbine!
Point in case is Park City, Utah. The spring weather was not in our favor to do a nice long hike as we had planned (I’ll go up against most forces of nature, but I won’t mess with lightning). However, we got a start on what will soon be a complete hiking trail system in the Canyons area.
Joining us on the first of many OpenStreetMap hikes was Cara Wieser, Patrick Murphy, Ted Percival and Irie the dog. It was great to find some avid hikers who weren’t afraid of mud or rain
Cara and Patrick hiking Spiro Trail
We met up at Park City Roasters and then hit the Spiro trail south of town. The Spiro trail also connects to a whole network of trails open to mountain biking, horses and foot traffic. And slugs. OMG was there an abundance of slugs!
Ted is helping coordinate the next event. He’s in charge of perfect weather, as I seem to not have anything so say about it. 
But keep your eyes peeled as this will be a bigger and better ‘connect the canyons event’!
June 17th, 2009 - Posted by Hurricane McEwen | 0 Comments
Count down to SotM ‘09!
The 3rd Annual State of the Map Conference coming up on July 10-12 in Amsterdam.
A great destination to meet other people who work, live and otherwise love everything to do with maps!
There is a great line-up of presentations and super fun evening events to attend…
check out–
www.stateofthemap.org
www.openstreetmap.org
Below is information from the SotM Landing Page:
ABOUT:
The State of the Map is the world’s leading OpenStreetMap community event. You can join participants from all around the world in Amsterdam to hear talks, participate in workshops and hang out with OpenStreetMappers from around the world. If you are involved with any aspect of OpenStreetMap from mapping to coding to campaigning, or if you want to hear more from the global mapping movement that is changing the way maps are made and used, the State of the Map is for you.
The State of the Map is the perfect opportunity to meet the people who share your passion for OpenStreetMap. In one room you have the people who run the servers, write the editors, design the cartography and some of the most dedicated mappers on the planet.
This year’s event will feature talks from a host of favorites, including OpenStreetMap Founder and OSM-F Chairman, Steve Coast.
Past conferences, in 2007 in Manchester and in 2008 in Limerick, attracted a crowd – OpenStreetMappers and others – from all over the world and renowned speakers from the likes of Google, Multimap and AND, to name a few. This year’s conference will see an extra day – Friday – dedicated to the theme of commercial viability of OpenStreetMap. Prominent professionals in the GIS and general IT industry, as well as politicians, will speak about and discuss current questions relating to this theme: ‘What is the real value of geo-information?’; ‘How can crowd-sourced initiatives like OpenStreetMap compete with commercial offerings?’. This will make for an exciting conference for anyone involved in geographic information.
June 17th, 2009 - Posted by Hurricane McEwen | 0 Comments
JOSM tutorial on saving and loading
Bob Hawkins asked, on the Newbies list, how to save and load edits. Good question! There’s lots of reasons why you might want to save something in JOSM and load it up again later. I made a tutorial video on saving and loading OSM data from and into JOSM.
Right-click to save.
Also posted to Vimeo. Please comment here if you would prefer to have them on Vimeo.
June 14th, 2009 - Posted by Russ Nelson | 0 Comments
JOSM: non-tutorial for merging two parts of one road
In a previous video, I gave a tutorial for merging two parts of one road. It may also be instructive for me to show you how I really would do that edit if I weren’t trying to be obvious and deliberate in what I do. In other words, here’s a non-tutorial for doing that edit.
Here’s the sequence of actions that I took: I clicked on Berkley, hit ‘d’ to delete, hit ’s’ to go back into select mode, moved the lower node up, drew a box around the two, hit ‘m’ to merge the two nodes, clicked on Marie, shift-clicked on the other Marie, hit ‘c’ to combine, clicked on Berkeley, shift-clicked on the other Berkeley, hit ‘c’ to combine, shift-clicked on Marie, selected tiger:reviewed=no and deleted it. Et voilà!
Right-click to save.
June 8th, 2009 - Posted by Russ Nelson | 0 Comments
JOSM tutorial for merging two parts of one road
I was born and raised in Baldwin, Long Island, New York. Thought I’d go check out the roads in that area. Oops! The corner around the corner from my house is, well, “botched” is the term that comes to mind. First, there’s a little road segment which is mis-spelled “Berkley” like the school of music, whereas the correct spelling is “Berkeley” like the uni in California. Second, that little segment shouldn’t exist at all. There’s no offset to those two roads. Marie Avenue just has a bend in it.
Right-click if you want to save.
June 8th, 2009 - Posted by Russ Nelson | 1 Comments
