[OSM-talk] (1) news on mapping campaign in Milano and (2) check for procedure to generate complex statistics on portion of OSM planet

Andrea Giacomelli (pibinko) postdadaismo at libero.it
Fri May 30 16:15:36 BST 2008


Hi,

A long e-mail for (1) an update on what goes on in Milano and (2) one technical question.

I don't read the talk list every day, but I noted that after our March 18 thread on this we provided no updates, so I guess this may be of interest to you.

Also, we are dealing with a technical task which may or may not be easy....
We have talked about the issue with some of the Italian mappers, and I understand this can be done, yet I'd like to hear about this from a more open audience.

UPDATE ON MAPPING CAMPAIGN IN MILANO
====================================

Some of you may be aware that in mid-March, following the inspiration by our Edoardo "Mad Mapper" Marascalchi, we have set up a three-month mapping campaign in Milano, Italy, to push on the completion of the open street map in this relatively small (population approx 1.2 million) but important town in Italy.

This campaign has been designed as a joint operation between GFOSS.it (the Italian OSGEO Chapter), some of the Italian "free mappers", and a local radio station.

Since March 17, we have been receiving a MON-FRI radio coverage, together with advertisements on our progress and announcements of mapping events in town (we had four of these in total).

More details (for Italian readers) are on http://www.mapparemilano.com and http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Milano/Micro_Mapping_Party

This mapping campaign will close next Tuesday, June 3.

Once the operation is closed, we are going to present the result of this activity in a small (yet to be advertised on national scale) workshop. 

This will be sometime in the second half of June.

In the context of this workshop, we are going to summarise two aspects of the  M(')appare Milano experience: social and technical.


1. "social" - 

the collaboration with a radio (and specifically with a show that is focused on the city and its traffic conditions during rush hour, from 5 to 6 PM) has brought OSM, and more in general concepts related to free geographic information to people that would never have considered it otherwise (and they enjoyed it)

...on the other side "people" provided insight that "we, the technologists" would never have considered.

This is extremely interesting, and is leading to new ideas and projects that will take place South of the Alps during the year.

2. technical

2.1. working with an "open audience", who may bring their own generic GPS, does lead to some issues in running a mapping party. We are learning from this to propose more structured activities in the future

TECHNICAL ISSUE
===============

2.2. we would like to show various statistics of mapping activity deriving from our project.

We know the dates, times, and areas of interest where we held our micro-mapping parties, and we know who are the "power mappers" who are mapping every day, independently of our awareness raising activity.

I wonder if there is some kind of "data mining" utility that would allow us to generate different cross-tabulations by user name, date-time and GPX coordinates.
This would be used to generate representative breakdowns of how the map in Milano has been evolving in this period. 

The visual change is very clear (and quite impressive) but I am curious of exposing an additional level of detail with statistics of this type.

Edoardo, Niccolò and others are on top of this, but I'd like to learn more myself (I am quite active on the promotion of the project, but less on the technicalities)

Thanks for your attention on such a long message, and regards.

Andrea Giacomelli,  aka pibinko
http://www.pibinko.org
http://www.gfoss.it








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