18 Dec 2009
OpenOrienteeringMap
With the OpenStreetMap spatial dataset of the world, and the excellent map rendering toolkit Mapnik, it’s quite straightforward to make theme-based maps, such as OpenCycleMap, OpenPisteMap, OpenHikingMap and OpenWhitewaterMap.
All very well, but what about orienteering maps? So, here is OpenOrienteeringMap. For the moment, it just covers the UK, but there’s no particular reason why this couldn’t be extended to cover the world (except that the postcode-finder only works in the UK). [Update - it now covers almost the whole world!]
The map is created on-the-fly, using a process developed by the OSM community that I’ve built on for my day job at UCL. The map is created on a quite fast computer, but because it is created on-demand for areas people haven’t visited before, it may run slow if a few people are looking at it at once – and you’ll need a fast internet connection as the map is delivered as PNGs.
There are two styles – Street-O and Pseud-O.
Street-O
This attempts to recreate the “minimalistic” feel of street-O maps, as used for informal street events in London by the central clubs SLOW and LOK, and in other areas around the UK. Only roads, tracks, paths, rivers/lakes and railways are shown, the maps are high-contrast (black on white) and have little colour. The few colours that are on the map – for major roads and water features – are the “official” ISOM standard colours for these features.
OpenStreetMap data has been used for one street-O before – my Bow race in September, although here the data was pulled into Quantum GIS and a vector-based PDF was produced, allowing maps to be printed at high resolution.
Pseud-O
This is a less standard but richer map. It uses many more features in the OSM data, where they correspond to regular orienteering features. OSM data, for ~99.999% of areas, is not detailed enough to correspond to that on an ISOM map, but it might be sufficient for basic urban orienteering events in a few places, or the odd trail challenge. As the OpenStreetMap dataset continues to be added to and enhanced by its contributors, so the orienteering map will increase in complexity and accuracy. Again, the colours are as officially defined in ISOM. For now, it’s fun to look at the whole of the UK with the ISOM look-and-feel, but let’s not run any serious events with the map! (More on ISOM orienteering maps and OSM.)
The postcode finder uses the c. 70000 postcodes supplied by NPEMap (with contributions from FreeThePostCode and the postbox locator project) so should get you to within a mile or two of where you want to be, in urban areas.
Explore the map and let me know about any big problems with the cartography or functionality via the comments here. I’m not interested in missing data complaints for an area though – OSM is a project produced by the efforts of volunteers, so if your area is blank, it’s because there isn’t an interested local. So go and map the area yourself, and add it to OpenStreetMap so the whole world benefits (and let me know so I pull in the updated dataset!)
More information about how the map is made is here.
Top: Good to see the efforts of the Milton Keynes mapping party I organised in May make it to an orienteering map. Upper Middle: Edinburgh’s Old Town. Lower Middle: Shotover Wood, near Oxford. Bottom: Great detail in Putney, thanks to an enthusiastic local contributor in the area.
[...] details of the construction are in a posting and information page on my personal [...]
Suprageography » Blog Archive » On-The-Fly Mapping Preview
December 18th, 2009 at 21:07permalink
Fascinating. Have been an OSM mapper for two years and am also an O mapper with Ocad. Would be delighted to see to see parts, if not all, of Ireland included in the dataset. Particularly http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=53.3432&lon=-6.43949&zoom=15&layers=0B00FTF and http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=53.2336&lon=-6.2311&zoom=12&layers=0B00FTF .Did some mapping in North Wales and Leicester as well and these look Great in OOM. Well done at pushing the frontiers of OSM. Regards
Brain
Brian Hollinshead
December 20th, 2009 at 17:17permalink
I certainly hope to get Ireland and the Isle of Man in to the database and so into OOM, soon.
Oliver
December 21st, 2009 at 15:01permalink
Those StreetO maps will save a lot of time.
The only problem that I could see (apart from OSM data errors) was with tram routes eg. Sheffield (S1 1AA) and Croydon (CR1 1AA) .
Where the tram shares the road with traffic only the railway symbol is shown. Not sure how you solve this without using a new symbol.
Steve Brockbank
December 23rd, 2009 at 01:29permalink
Steve – good spot. I should be able to fix it by layering tram-lines underneath roads, while keeping railways above them (in the absence of specific layering information for the features concerned).
Oliver
December 23rd, 2009 at 16:26permalink
Great work! Any way to add data for other countries? I would love to see a Pseud-O map for my area (Germany, city of Karlsruhe). Since OSM is very detailed here already, this should give quite a nice start for a simple sprint race. Also, the city is mostly flat anyway, so missing contours are no problem.
Martin Schwarz
December 28th, 2009 at 08:51permalink
Yes, I am hoping to expand OOM to other countries – I’ll have to see how long it takes to import and whether it affects performance.
Oliver
January 6th, 2010 at 15:23permalink
Brian, Martin – OOM now covers the whole world. Also, the data has been updated to January 6th.
Oliver
January 11th, 2010 at 23:13permalink
Wow, awesome map!
Cool to see that the world is available
I dont know what you need todo at your end, but it would be GREAT to see this map available as a Google Earth KML overlay.
http://www.mgmaps.com/kml/
Currently it’s the base Mapnik/Osmarender/Cyclemap
I dont know what the author does to make it work… but its great to see it.
Your map is great because it DOESNT show the amenties. This way, we can use it to create our own tourist/theme maps and are able to draw on top of the map, so to highlight the specific amenities that our map is for. Ie. a map showing walking routes doesnt need to show all the post boxes.
Great work,
Sam Vekemans
Across Canada Trails
Sam Vekemans
January 13th, 2010 at 01:44permalink
hey,
good work!
it would be nice to export some parts as ocad-files;)
why don’t you take a domain like OpenOrienteeringMap [dot]net ? i think its a good project, where its a good thing to have a domain.
best greetings
peter
peter
January 14th, 2010 at 21:27permalink
Sam – I would be wary of adding a KML export, as it would likely strain the server a lot – the tiles are generated on-the-fly and I would image Google Earth would be more aggressive at pulling in the content than a simple web-page.
Peter – The OCAD file format looks seriously scary to export to, however I think OCAD can export PDF and/or SVG, and, as Mapnik has built-in PDF and SVG rendering support, I’m hoping to have the capability to download maps in one of these two formats soon.
Oliver
January 14th, 2010 at 21:58permalink
OOM is a beautiful thing. I’ve been adding details in OpenStreetMap for my part of the world and looking forward to seeing them rendered in OOM.
Thanks!
Woody Zahn
January 23rd, 2010 at 04:26permalink
I have created a page on the OSM wiki about OOM: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenOrienteeringMap
Next step is to populate that page with pictures.
Eugene
January 29th, 2010 at 07:09permalink
I feel it to be slightly strange that cycle/footways appear as paths (dashed lines), esp. if they are paved they are hardly any different from serviceway which are the only ones that are currently drawn with a solid line.
ij
January 29th, 2010 at 09:08permalink
Wow! Especially the Pseud-O is really good-looking and makes me wanna go straight out and map my surroundings even more. Also very nice with a pdf-exporter well suited for printed maps. This is really cool! Keep up the good work!
Erik
February 23rd, 2010 at 03:09permalink
Hi,
Awesome Site!
Wondering if your planning on having a ‘hikebikemap.de’ layer and a ‘cyclemap layer’ and a mapnik layer.
How you have that pdf creater is AWESOME!
Would be great if you could make regular 8.5×11 pages also.
Thats all for my wish list.
Great Job!
Cheers,
Sam
Sam Vekemans
February 25th, 2010 at 02:59permalink
Thanks for this, it is really really good!
Jens Kastensson
February 26th, 2010 at 16:58permalink
Thanks Sam – 8.5×11 pages (i.e. US Letter) is now available as an option on the PDF creator.
The creator is designed for orienteering maps rather than for other layer types. A general-use PDF creator is something I could build in the future if there was demand. I wouldn’t be able to do the cycle map as the stylesheet for that layer isn’t published (for good reasons, it’s Andy’s intellectual property) so I wouldn’t be able to recreate it in vector format, and raster-based PDFs are not good for maps. The default “mapnik” layer is certainly possible to do though as that stylesheet is in the OSM SVN repository.
I don’t know if the hikebikemap.de stylesheet is published, but even if it is, the use of raster layers (for the background hillshading) adds a layer of complexity to the process.
IJ – dashed lines are the convention for street-O maps. For the pseud-O layer, metalled cycle ways should perhaps be shown as unbroken lines – something that may change in the future.
Oliver
March 1st, 2010 at 14:42permalink
Great functionality. Thanks very much. Christchurch in New Zealand is well documented in OSM so this looks very interesting for our local O club.
Richard Hensby
March 6th, 2010 at 04:35permalink
I have compared a few of our maps to what comes up. Very impressed some of our areas are well documented already. Would it be possible to get the maps to display aligned to magnetic north, it appears that they are true north at present. This shows up very clearly when I flick between OCAD and the web page. Even if we had to type in the declination that would be fine. e.g. we use 23.5 degrees in Christchurch NZ.
Richard Hensby
March 11th, 2010 at 10:48permalink