Episode: 56
Title: HPR0056: Open Street Map
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0056/hpr0056.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 10:50:16

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Up.
Hi and welcome to Acro Public Radio. My name is Ken Fallon and today I'm doing an
episode on a project that I think is really rather cool. I first come across this project
last year at the Linux World Expo in the Netherlands and I commented on deviates to show
about the project and it's called OpenStreepmap.org. Now the idea behind the project is to
do for mapping what Wikipedia has done for the unsightly media and that's to generate
an open database of free maps around the world. Now you might ask yourself why are the
bothering when you've got APIs available for Google Maps and Yahoo and all the other people
who are offering mapping? Well the simple answer is that data is copyrighted and if you
look on Google Earth and the bottom right hand corner you can see who the particular
map data is owned by. Okay so let's talk a little bit about the maps. The process involved
in doing the maps is five step process. The first being collect the data, two is upload
the data, then you create and edit the data, you add labels and add details to it and then
step five is you render the maps. Now if you've got a device with a GPS unit in it you
can help the project by collecting some data and uploading it to the website. It's very
simple, you just go and create yourself an account and as you travel your GPS units will
give you your position along the road which is essentially nothing more than a whole
of points with a latitude, longitude, elevation and probably time. Now at the end of your journey
you should be able to export out your data and upload it to the OpenStreepmap project and
if that's all you want to do with project you're adding information for the mappers to
create their mapping data. Okay let's move on to the next one. That's creating an editing
OpenStreepmap data and the OpenStreepmap has three elements, an old, ways and closed ways
and an old is a point in space at latitude and longitude. So think about it as donating
postbox or a signpost or something like that. A way is a series of nodes ordered in one direction,
a one way street for instance, or a bicycle path or something of that nature and a closed way
is a loop of a way, something like a park, a lake or an island. So if you think of it as a bit
like a vector drawing, an old is a point, a way is a line and a closed way is an area. I'm not
actually going to go into too much detail here on how to edit them up because it's a little bit
outside the scope of what I can do here in an audio podcast but there are two tools that are
available to you. One is a Java application called port latch. She can use to join the dots
essentially and the other is a Java application called Java OpenStreepmap editor and they're both
available on the OpenStreepmap.org site and I advise you to read a little bit more
about both of those before you go creating some maps and then the final process of this is to
render the map. So if you want to get involved with the project, the easiest way to go about that
is probably uploading DSM data. If you're interested into in vector drawing or use of packages
like Inkscape or AutoCAD or something like that then the mapping and tagging features might
be of interest to you. The project itself has met some inroads in getting map data and here in
the Netherlands the map data has been donated. A lot of the map data has been donated at least.
However, even though the map data has been fairly comprehensive in all the streets and towns
there is a project going on to add the cycle paths for the Netherlands in and the cycling is
very popular here so that would be actually quite useful. But if I just look around the neighborhood
here myself I can see that in the time since the survey was done for the roads and streets around
there has been several auditions and changes in the area that would necessitate
somebody going in and modifying these maps and that's the main benefit of the open street map
project that when the data is there should be very easy for people in the locality with local
knowledge to go in and change things. For instance they've blocked off the streets to make it
inaccessible by cars and it's now only accessible by bikes. They've put an audition round about
that moved, they've rebuilt the swim pool and they've moved the recreation area and they've
blocked off certain things and this is all just in within 500 meters of where I'm living at the
moment. So there's definitely a lot of work to do even in areas where there is complete
and airports there are complete mapping data. Just a few weeks ago I was went back home to Ireland
and a lot of the areas in Ireland haven't been mapped at all so it really is an opportunity to go out
and get your hometown and put it on the map so to say, forgive the pun. So actually that's quite
interesting just to see people coming who probably work in towns and cities, drive down the motorways
down the local roads and end up going up some boring somewhere for the weekend to visit the family
to bring the GPS with them and then they upload their data. Now when that data gets uploaded it's
essentially like a transparency that the mapping person would use and you can turn it on and turn
it off in your mapping data and then the actual drawing of the roads is done on a different layer
so that's kind of how that whole thing operates. A few little tips here if you're going to be getting
involved in some mapping is the coordination, if you've got a camera that has a GPS in it,
as you go along you can take photographs of streets, points of interest like street names,
their type of road, if it's a bicycle path, if the road is a bicycle path, if it's one
bicycle path on either side, if it's the bicycle path on the pavement, if it's paved road or whatever.
And it's important to do this ourselves and not pick up information from copyrighted maps because
that kind of defeats the whole purpose. And it's important for us to take that information in and
not be tempted to use actual maps that we've purchased our data from other locations because very
often that information is copyrighted and very often they will have easter eggs stored in the maps
so that they can prove in the court that the map data was taken from their data set.
And some very interesting things on the wiki there describing how fake roads and churches have
been added to make their data set unique. If you are going to be going taking photographs as you
go along and your camera does not have a GPS unit in it, a very simple tip is to take a photograph
of your GPS unit showing clearly the data and time on it. And then later on the JOSM
application, you can drag in the photo and correspond the time on your GPS unit and the time
on your camera so that the offsets are correct so that all subsequent photos which have a time
in the XBIF data are corresponded to a physical time on your GPS plot which corresponds to a
latitude and a longitude. Anyway, I'm going to think you're going to wrap it up there. Thank you
very much for listening to this for the episode and come across something that's interesting
or that tickles your fancy so to speak, grab your microphone, record a little podcast about it and
submit it. Thank you very much for your time and have a nice day.
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