[Openstreetmap] introduction
Schuyler Erle
schuyler at nocat.net
Mon Nov 22 18:42:50 GMT 2004
* On 21-Nov-2004 at 10:15AM PST, SteveC said:
>
> The current applet download is 2.1 meg, almost all of it in openmap.
> Which is crazy for what it does. Time to think about mapserver type
> solutions.
I suppose this would be a good time to introduce myself. My name's
Schuyler Erle. I'm a recent American expatriate to London, interested
in GIS, wireless, free software and the Semweb. I co-wrote a book
with Jo Walsh and Rich Gibson for O'Reilly Media called "Mapping
Hacks" which hopefully will be out in February or so.
Jo & I have been skulking about east London more or less with the
intention of mapping the heck out of Tower Hamlets with GPS receivers,
so it's great to be able to jump right into a community already
wrestling with the issues.
Jo, Steve, & I gave a brief presentation at last week's Dorkbot
meeting at Limehouse Town Hall. You can guess the content of the talk
if you're already on this mailing list, but for the benefit of those
who weren't there, I'd like to share the demo that Jo & I put together
for the talk, with the help of Saul Albert. It's based entirely on
UMN's GPL-licensed MapServer, and incorporates normalized GPS traces
with 30 meter Landsat-7 imagery, a hand-scanned OS map from the 1860s,
and some layers of point data. You can find it at:
http://locative.us/freemap/map.cgi?layer=landsat
I'll put the link on the wiki as well. As you can see, this demo is
pretty rough, but on the other hand it only took a few hours to
marshal the data and get everything set up from scratch.
I've also added a link to some notes about a "LondonFreeMap" project
that we conceived before discussing with Steve and Matt the notion of
collaborating on Openstreetmap. Although little described there will
probably be news to you, I would enjoy hearing responses and
discussion.
Basically, I feel that if we can agree to pool data under a
CC-ShareAlike or similar license, and share code similarly, then we
can sketch out the best practices in this emergent "Civil Survey" as
we go along, giving people the opportunity to experiment freely and
see what works best. Pretty exciting stuff!
SDE
More information about the talk
mailing list