OpenStreetMap

Edmontorcouver is a lovely place full of lovely, intelligent, generous people. That is not the tragedy of Edmontorcouver open data.

The mayor of Edmontorcouver realized that it would benefit the people of Edmontorcouver to have good data about their city widely available. That is not the tragedy of Edmontorcouver open data.

Edmontorcouver hosted a wonderful gala to announce the generous release of great quantities of data. That is not the tragedy of Edmontorcouver open data.  read more »

OSM user Rejo Zenger just made it a lot more fun to put OSM maps in my articles. Have a look at Rejo's method and tools to embed an OSM and display your GPX trackfile. Very nice, Rejo!

Here is a look at the newly released Toronto Transit Commission data in the context of OpenStreetMap.

The city of Toronto released a bunch of data last week at the Toronto Innovation Showcase. The data was published under a homegrown open data license as part of the OpenTO initiative. I applaud this move towards openness and this support of open data.  read more »

I've only recently joined the conversation over at the OSM Newbies mailing list. Common threads of discussion from new OSM users include, I'm enthusiastic; there is so much to read on the wiki; is there a short-cut document for newbies?.

Some reference material for new contributors include the beginners' section on the wiki.

Dan O'Hara has helpfully compiled some pointers he calls:  read more »

OSM Mapping for Dummies

We discussed previously how to import a single OpenStreetMap extract and avoid processing the huge, complete OSM dataset. What if your area of interest is smaller than the whole planet, but larger than a single extract?

This is what the Luxembourg extract from the previous article looks like.

But what if we want Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg?  read more »

The OpenStreetMap database gets bigger every day. The dataset is freely licensed and available in what we call a planet file. This means that if you want the OpenStreetMap dataset, you can have it. This also means that you are dealing with the entire dataset, for the whole planet, even if your interest is limited to a smaller area. If your interest is geographically limited, pushing around 6G¹ more data than you need to push around seems wasteful.  read more »

We had a great time celebrating the 5th birthday of the OpenStreetMap project. We even had map cake.  read more »

There are fewer than 24 hours left to vote for the OSM Foundation board of directors 2009-2010 and something ugly has just come to light. It appears that as many as twenty employees of a company have just registered as OSMF members in that last few hours.

In spite of calls for a voluntary limit or one OSMF candidate per company, employees of one company maintain more than one candidate and insist that the membership voices be heard.  read more »

Telling people about OpenStreetMap is fun. Seeing the lights come on when somebody gets it is gratifying. And that sort of face-to-face advocacy has been the most effective way to add new mappers to the community. That has been the case since the early days in English pubs and it is still the case now.  read more »

In July 2009, Peter Miller wondered aloud on the OpenStreetMap-talk mailing list, if detailed rendering of golf courses was coming to OpenStreetMap? It's a fair question and one that has run through the mind of any OpenStreetMap enthusiast who has spent an afternoon at a good walk ruined.  read more »