Just a quick post for people who use Attackpoint – >a OpenOrienteeringMap (OOM) is on it! More specifically, you can view GPS routes that people have uploaded, using OpenOrienteeringMap as a background.

To do this:
1. Click on the little “globe” icon beside an entry that has a GPS log. Here’s an example from my Venice Street Race run on Sunday.
2. On the map that loads, click on the “OSM” button on the top right.
3. Click on one of the OOM items on the menu that appears just below the OSM button.

(Note, the global version of OOM is used – this one does not update as the OpenStreetMap database updates, but instead on a more occasional schedule.)

The basemap is based on OpenStreetMap data.

Cross-posted from my research blog.

The organisers of next year’s Olympic Games in London, LOCOG, have unveiled their map of the 1000+ places that the Olympic Torch Relay will pass through. The data that the map is built from is readily accessible (as a JSON file that gets downloaded to your computer when you view the map) so I’ve taken the data and built my own (unofficial) map. It has a number of advantages over the official map:

• The base map is OpenStreetMap, which is much more detailed.
• The map takes up the whole browser page, allowing for easier panning around.
• The line that connects each of the places is drawn as a vector, so it still appears as you to zoom right in to see individual villages. (The official map surprisingly uses tiles for the line.)
• There are Wikipedia links for each of the places. Almost all of these resolve to proper Wikipedia entries, so you can easily find out about the places that have been picked, with the richness of detail that is characteristic of the Wikipedia project.

See it here.

I have finally upgraded my old iPhone 3G, which I’ve had for a good three years, to a shiny iPhone 4S.

The old iPhone has done well – it still works, although its volume control has fallen off and its back is scuffed and slightly cracked – dropping it recently, at speed on the A104 through Epping Forest, didn’t help. It even survived being submerged for several minutes in an authentic peat bog in the Scottish Highlands last year. The battery is not great – if I have my screen as dim as possible, and don’t make/take more than a couple of calls, it will generally make it through the day. Its second most irritating habit is regularly freezing up for several minutes – often when trying to get a GPS lock (as happens automatically when tweeting or using the Maps app) – and then reopening such an app will cause it to crash repeatedly. This has meant I’ve spent plenty of times at the side of a road junction, cussing my phone for freezing up just when I need to to show me a map of where I am. Its most irritating habit is locking up occasionally when a call comes in, so I miss the call. Bad phone.

Despite these annoyances, the new phone was, I’m afraid, always going to be an iPhone. Reports from my Android-using friends are mixed, and now that I am 100% Mac at work as well as at home, having a phone with an OS that is designed by people who consider Mac users to be more than an afterthought (hello Sony Ericsson synchronisation c. 2007, hello Nokia developer environment c. 2005) is key.

To get my new iPhone, I went on to the Apple website at 9pm yesterday. The list of UK stores appeared, after a couple of browser refreshes, a couple of minutes later. However, very disappointingly, it listed all versions of the iPhone 4S as out of stock at all nearby stores. However on refreshing again a few minutes later, full availability suddenly appeared. You then pick a store and date – and also a 15-minute time-slot!

So this morning I headed along to Westfield Stratford City for 9am. This was my fifth (!) visit to the giant complex – once previously for the opening, a couple of times to map for OpenStreetMap and once to buy a British Olympic Team mug from the Olympic store at the back of the John Lewis. This visit was very different to before – it was almost empty and there was quite a bit of store construction and general maintenance going on. Odd. But then I noticed the sign on the door to the mall – open at 10am on weekdays. Ah. But you can still get inside, and it turns out the Apple Store is opening between 8am and 10am for reservation pickups only. So I headed up the stairs and over to the shop with its giant Apple logo shining like an artificial sun over the muted mall surroundings.

Here’s what Stratford City currently looks like on OpenStreetMap, following a coordinated mapping party there a few weeks ago, and some usefully licensed areal imagery – the Apple Store is not currently shown but is essentially above the “Tommy Hilfinger” shop that is marked:

Here’s the same map on Google Maps:

Good to see the John Lewis in there.

To be fair, the Ordnance Survey (available via Bing Maps) also have updated they Landranger map to show Stratford City correctly and also add in the various Olympic stadia.

Once at the store, the process is surprisingly convoluted but at the same time efficient – first you join a short queue of people to get into the store, then a store employee checks your ID, matches you up with an appointment list on an iPad he is holding, and points you to another queue line. At the end of this line, another employee again checks your ID against their iPad list, and then points you to one of the tables in the middle of the store, where a third employee, standing with you rather than across at you, picks up a boxed iPhone and scans the barcode with a special iPod Touch. You hand over the credit card, and finally a receipt appears from a printer very well hidden underneath the table. And that’s it. I was in and out of the store in less than five minutes, and out of Stratford Westfield and back on my bike in another five.

Apple obviously intends the Apple Store retail experience to be something slightly different. There is an unmistakable if unintentional feel that roles are switched from the traditional consumer model – the store is a temple and I am a disciple?

As things stand, here are the ways you can get to it. I’ve marked the entrances on in red, on an OpenStreetMap map. The map is currently rather bare, in that it doesn’t really show the mall buildings, or indeed much else. However never fear, the OpenStreetMap community is here, and I have it on good authority that the map will rapidly become more comprehensive and complete in the next few days.

1 – NE. Cars only.

2 – NE. Pedestrians and cyclists only. After walking along a dusty, unpleasant road through a building site, you then follow a narrow path, with a couple of switchbacks to climb up onto a bridge. Only after passing the main access road to the Athlete’s Village can you join the road. There are security people at three points – the entrance to No. 1, the bridge, and the point where the route joins the road, to ensure everyone goes the right way.

3 – SE. Pedestrians only – although you could walk your bike. This is over the huge “rusty” bridge from Stratford itself, and drops you straight onto the “ground” level of the mall.

4 – SE. Pedestrians and cyclists via train from Stratford station, or pedestrians from the bus station just to the north. This entrance is at “lower ground” level of the mall, i.e. below the “rusty” bridge. There are a few cycle parking stands here.

5 – SW. Cars, pedestrians and cycles, although it’s a long lonely road to walk along from here – but you do get a great close-up view of the Aquatic Centre and its curious turf wall. The cycle lane marking is a bit of a mess – initially you start on one pavement, then encounter a no-cycling sign and have to cross to the other – but breeze-blocks have hemmed in the route, meaning pedestrians and cyclists have to share less than a metre’s width of space.

6 – NW. Cars only. The most contentious route for me on a bike, as it’s the direct route from Hackney. Security here is polite but firm – only cars get to drive through the Olympic Park. I suspect the real reason cyclists and pedestrians can’t enter here is because there are no pavements, just fences and walls – so for safety these road-users would need to take up the whole lane – and that would slow the traffic flow on this critical link between the A/M11 and the mall.

7 – N. Pedestrians via train only. Entrance from the DLR station at Stratford International (bikes not allowed.) Note you have to exit through the main Stratford International station, i.e. entry-point 8. The road leading from 7 is barricaded off at this end (only) and I got a yelling from security when I approached from the other (unblocked) end of the road.

8 – N. Pedestrians and cyclists via train from the High-Speed train services from St Pancras International or from Kent.

So, the only route by bicycle that does not involve you needing to dismount is from entrance 5, i.e. to the far south of the site. And, as the Londonist has spotted, even from this direction, there are obstacles in the way!

One tip for Olympic Park spotters, there was (on Sunday) a temporary overflow car-park that had opened just NE of the Aquatic Centre, allowing people an even closer view of the facility, along with the rather attractive temporary Water Polo arena. The Olympic Stadium and the Orbit are not far away either. It’s all coming together!

I was one of the winners of the competition run by the Olympic Park Legacy Company (OPLC) to name the five areas of the Olympic Park that will, one day, be new residential areas. I actually entered the competition once for each area, but my “East Wick” was the winning name – it, appropriately, will be the area just east of Hackney Wick, separated by the canal. In the photo above, it is the area in the middle-left, dominated currently by the huge International Press Centre building. The main channel visible is the River Lea, with the green part of the Olympic Park looking nice. On the far left is a bit of Hackney Wick. The canal that separates the Wicks is just visible but has gone green with algae growth.

It is somewhat a misuse of nomenclature, as “Wick” is often used as a post-name qualifier rather than as as a name itself. Research suggests it simply means “town” but, because of the curiously large distance from Hackney Wick to central Hackney, and Hampton Wick to Hampton Court, I’ve always thought it indicates “far end of”. So by “East Wick” I would mean, using my unofficial definition of “Wick”, the far end of the “East End” of London.

My final inspiration might have been that the “Witches of Eastwick” was in my mind, as our pub-quiz team at work is called the “Witches of Austwick” – so named as the team captain is Martin Zaltz Austwick.

There’s a video on the BBC News website which includes (near the end) a vox pop of various locals grumbling about the name. As one of my colleagues frequently says, “everyone’s a critic”.

On a related topic I found some CC-By (i.e. only requiring attribution) photos by EG Focus, on Flickr, of the Olympic Park. They are very oblique aerial photos – one is above – but usable to trace rough outlines of the park area, Olympic Village blocks, roads and paths, so I’ve added these features to OpenStreetMap. The park looks a little greener and a little more detailed now. Photo above is CC-By EG Focus on Flickr.

OpenStreetMap, the free wiki world map, is starting to come of age. The project is now six years old, and is gradually becoming noticed in wider circles, with AOL and Mapquest producing their own versions of the map, support from Google and Microsoft, and an ecosystem of companies set up around commercialising the data. Perhaps the highest profile the project has had recently was when, in the days following Haiti’s huge earthquake in January 2010, the country was swiftly mapped remotely in high-detail by contributors from around the world, becoming a useful tool for disaster relief teams. Meanwhile, the project itself continues to expand, with the availability of high-resolution Microsoft Bing imagery causing a big jump in the detail being added to the map, and new countries and areas continue to be worked on.

A couple of OpenStreetMap guides became available just before Christmas, and I have one of them – OpenStreetMap: Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World. It’s published by UIT Cambridge and available on Amazon. The authors are Frederick Ramm, Jochen Topf and Steve Chilton. The book is in its first English edition – Ramm/Topf wrote the previous German editions of the book, while Steve Chilton has translated the work and updated with the latest developments. The authors are a real authority – Ramm/Topf are well known in the German OpenStreetMap community, running a company Geofabrik which builds on OSM, while Steve Chilton is a professional cartographer who has designed and maintained the “standard” OpenStreetMap map you see at http://osm.org/.

The book has a dual purpose – to act as both a guide for using and getting the most out of OpenStreetMap data, and contributing to it. It runs to over 300 pages and is split into four sections. The first section is an introduction, it outlines the basic structure of the project and the community behind OpenStreetMap. This is followed by the longest section in the book, which details how to contribute to the project, from wandering around your local street to using one of the available editors. It includes a detailed guide to Potlatch, the online editor which many people will use when starting out with contributing to the project. It also introduces several other editors, which is good in terms of balance, although new users do not necessarily need to learn more than one.

The third section is about taking OpenStreetMap data and creating maps from it. Examples of cartographical style sheets are included and carefully dissected. There is some code here, but it is well annotated so shouldn’t prove too intimidating to read. Finally, for the most advanced users, the fourth chapter details getting down under the hood of the OpenStreetMap architecture and “hacking” the data, including documenting the API calls to OpenStreetMap servers to programmatically get and put information.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is actually one of the appendices, detailing country-specific quirks of the project. One of OpenStreetMap’s greatest strengths is that it is a map and spatial database of the whole world – but individual countries have different available data sources, “tagging” customs for features, and community structures, and the appendix makes for insightful reading. Being a UK contributor of a British-founded project, I find it can be easy to overlook regional differences, so it’s good to understand why some countries have mapping features in a certain way.

I found the book extremely comprehensive. I have been a long-time contributor to the project and have used the data in numerous ways, but I was surprised to learn several new details from the book, such as how to set up banned-turn indicators, and a clear discussion of the licensing.

The book is perhaps most valuable over and above other project resources because it has a consistent editing style and level of detail. The “traditional” way of learning OpenStreetMap has been through the online wiki, but this is prone to varying levels of accuracy and detail depending on the enthusiasm of the authors – so having a single-style book like this is a considerable help in fully appreciating a very diverse project. I did feel that the section on contributing is slightly longer than it needs to be – choosing just one of the editors, such as Potlatch, rather than going into multiple editors in detail, many of which duplicate functionality, would have helped shorten this section. As, I think, people are more likely to read this book to understand how to use the project’s data and resources, rather than become advanced contributors, I would imagine many readers will end up skipping over the whole section. I did also think a history of the project would have been a nice inclusion.

Books on fast changing internet projects such as OpenStreetMap are prone to go out of date quickly. With this in mind, the authors have created a special website, http://www.openstreetmap.info/ which will contain updates to the book as the project continues to evolve. As the English edition has just been published, the book itself however is bang up to date and so stands as a definitive reference.

The website also has a PDF version of one of the chapters in the second section, Mapping Practice. You can also download a copy of the country-specific appendix.

The book succeeds in simultaneously being OpenStreetMap for Dummies, OpenStreetMap: The Missing Manual and the O’Reilly OpenStreetMap book – that is to say, complete beginners, intermediate users and enthusiasts/hackers will all get something out of the book. If you are at all interested in the OpenStreetMap project, even if you don’t intend to contribute to the project but are just curious about what it is or what you can do with it, then I recommend this book. It’s as near-perfect as any book can be about one of the web’s, and the geospatial community’s, most exciting projects. More details on Amazon.

The photo of the author Steve Chilton is by Chris Fleming. Below is an example of custom cartography using OpenStreetMap, for OpenOrienteringMap, CC-By-SA OpenStreetMap and contributors.

Following a period of downtime, caused by the rapid increase in size of the OpenStreetMap database, OpenOrienteeringMap is now back online.

There are now two editions – a UK edition which receives the live updates from OpenStreetMap, so will normally show roads and paths that are added to OpenStreetMap within a few minutes of the edit – and a world edition, which no longer updates live, but uses a static database. This database hopefully will be rebuilt occasionally to bring it up to date, although this will result in 3-4 days of downtime each time. The lack of updating, and the update downtime, is due to the limited resources I have at my disposal to run OpenOrienteeringMap. Unfortunately I cannot guarantee long-term availability or that the service will be around forever – my employer will want to reclaim the server eventually!

You can access OpenOrienteeringMap here, there is a new interstital which allows you to select the edition you want. Remember there are two versions, Street-O and “Pseud-O”. The image above shows the Pseud-O map for central Paris. Below is the Street-O map of part of Guayaquil in Ecuador.

Of note, the map in the player pack is a rather nice (I think) restyled silver-and-black version of the green-and-black fold-out maps used in the original game. The source data is OpenStreetMap and the cartography reminds me somewhat of 8-Bit City – it’s not particularly useful for precision navigation, but is a nice example of Boing-Boing cartography, to borrow an expression from a talk at the recent Society of Cartographers conference. Oh, and they have credited OpenStreetMap contributors this time – yay!

The service uses rectangular bounding boxes to show the discrepancies. Initially I thought this would not work well, as streets that are aligned north-south or diagonally would dominate compared with streets aligned to the east-west axis, but actually it visually works well, regardless of the orientation.

Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like for a park of Hackney:

The light green square at the top is indicating “Chevet Street” – this is the OS Locator name, and clicking the road underneath the rectangle in the editor reveals it is called “Chevet Road” in the OpenStreetMap database. Similarly, the red square reads “Kemey’s Street”, while in OSM it is currently “Kemey Street”. The close in green on the right appears to be misnamed as an extension of the street it joins, while the two streets at the bottom aren’t named at all in OpenStreetMap – which is why they are also showing up as red in the editor. (The blue outline indicators one of the London Cycling Network routes, by the way.)

Time to get out on the streets and and clear these errors!