The last episode of FLOSS Weekly consisted of an interview with Steve Coast from OpenStreetMap. I knew about the project, but I was of the impression that it was in its infancy both content-wise and from a technical perspective.
During the interview I learned that it’s surprisingly complete (unless, of course, you need a map of Canada it seems) and highly advanced from a technical point of view.
But what’s really interesting is the fact how terribly easy it is to contribute. For smaller edits, you just click the edit-Link and use the Flash editor to paint a road or give it a name. If you need or want to do more, then there’s a really easy to use Java based editor:
First you drag a rectangle onto a pre-rendered version of the map which will cause the server to send you the vector information consisting of that part and then you can edit whatever you want.
If you have them, you can import traces of a GPS logger to help you add roads and paths and when you are finished, you press a button and the changes get uploaded and will be visible to the public a few minutes later (though one modification I made took about an hour to arrive on the web).
When the same nodes where updated in the meantime, a really nice conflict resolution assistant will help you to resolve the conflicts.
For me personally, this has the potential to become my new after-work time sink as it combines quite many passions of mine:
- The GPS tracking, importing and painting of maps is pure technology fun.
- Actually being outside to generate the traces is healthy and also a lot of fun
- Maps also are a passion of mine. I love to look at maps and I love to compare them to my mental image of the places they are showing.
And besides all that, Open Street Map is complete enough to be of real use. For biking or hiking it even trumps Google Maps by much.
Still, at least near where I live, there are many small issues that can easily be fixed.
As the different editors are really easy to use, fixing these issues is a lot of fun and I’m totally seeing myself cleaning out all small mistakes I come across or even adding stuff that’s missing. After all, this also provides me with a very good reason to visit the places where I grew up to complete some parts.
The whole concept behind being able to update a map by just a couple of mouse clicks is very compelling too as it finally gives us the potential to have really accurate maps in a very timely fashion. For example: Last October, one of the roads near my house closed and just recently the tracks of the Forchbahn were moved a bit.
Just today I added these changes to OpenStreetMap and now OSM is the only publically available map that correctly shows the traffic situation. And all that with 15 minutes of easy but interesting work.
For those interested, my Open Street Map user profile is, of course, pilif.
gnegg 