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23 January 2007
Making a free map of London
Posted by Paul Miller at January 23, 2007 11:42 PM
Steve Coast over at the OpenStreetMap project just IM'd to draw my attention to the 'London mapping party' they're planning for this weekend. Multimap are helping out with office space, and nestoria are rewarding everyone's efforts with post-mapping drinks.
If you're in or near London, why not pop along and help out with this great effort?
OpenStreetMap has made something of a name for itself - including frequent mentions in the mainstream press - with its efforts to build a free and open set of mapping data in the UK and elsewhere. Their best-known efforts have tended to be based upon sets of points derived by people driving, walking or riding around, logging position data from a GPS unit of some kind, and joining up the points to represent the streets along which they have just passed. They make the point, though, that
“The London mapping party will try to use aerial photography to create a map of London, rather than the traditional GPS units”
As well as challenging the ridiculous prices imposed on map data by organisations such as the UK's Ordnance Survey, OpenStreetMap has played a role in highlighting some of the deliberate errors that traditional mapping companies have tended to introduce into their data.
In a similar vein to our arguments about Open Data, OpenStreetMap argues that a more affordable pool of basic map data will lead to innovation, increased use of mapping, and (potentially) increased rather than decreased revenues in the sector.
Steve and I have a panel proposal in for this year's World Wide Web conference in Canada, and I look forward to working with him if the proposal is accepted.
Technorati Tags: open data, Ordnance Survey, openstreetmap, Talis
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