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.

You can spot where a mini-football game was playing by my different routes through an otherwise unobstructed field. I also witnessed the aftermath of both a cycle accident (top right) and a car accident (top left)… The screenshot is from the Ascent application and includes imagery from Microsoft Virtual Earth.

I did so much running on the Sunday that I gave myself shin splints and so am not going to be doing any running at all for the next few weeks.

Despite my lack of personal success, my team did rather well and we have ended up with a lot of prizes.

I made it along to the second Finsbury parkrun this morning, having missed the first due to a trip to France. It takes just over an hour to my “traditional” parkrun location at Bushy Park, so, after an evening out in Camden, the 25 minute cycle to Finsbury Park was definitely a preferred option. It was a cool, crisp morning, quite sunny. The park was surprisingly busy for 9am on a Saturday, with other joggers, BMT clients, cyclists, and children in the playground. There were 38 people for race – as the series has just started, the numbers will probably grow, but it meant I got a top-10 finish today.

The course is two laps of the park, with a meander inwards to the top of the hill, from the northernmost point of the perimeter road, near the end of each loop. The meander starts with a short, sharp (1 in climb up to the top, my km splits (3:51, 4:10, 3:51, 4:11, 4:07) suggest the hill, in the 2nd and 5th kilometres, seemed to take around 15 seconds out of my time each time it was visited. There was another, more gradual hill in the first and fourth km. I finished 7th, in 20:11, but didn’t push hard, so should be able to beat that comfortably in the future. I’m going to try and make it to as many of these ones as possible, in the next few months, unless an even more local one starts!

The background, by the way, is a faded greyscale version of the map for much of London, which came from a “Slippy” street orienteering map of the metropolis that I’ve created but never got around to releasing, however it does show the extent of OSM’s London coverage now – pretty impressive.

Click the graphic to see a larger version, but you’ll have to come to Durham yourself to see the original in its A1 glory.

There are some omissions in the coverage of course – e.g. Chancery Lane is a notable missing street. But my home street in Hackney is there, and the imagery extends right out to the edge of the metropolis.

Here’s some fare-dodgers getting booked by the police, outside the main entrance to UCL:

View Larger Map

The green dots are points tagged with natural=tree, here at City University London.
OSM documentation for the natural=tree tag

This got me thinking – might I be able to build a “proper” orienteering map using entirely OpenStreetMap? Street-O* maps can already be produced with OSM data – this was some work I did last summer, and also am working on – but being able to produce an ISOM** map directly from OSM data is quite appealing. (ISSOM*** might be harder, as this standard requires roads to be shown at their actual width, rather than being linear features with fixed-width cartography.)

Most of the orienteering-specific features, such as pits and earth walls, wouldn’t show on the “public” renders of OSM data – the ‘general maps’, but a customised rendering could show these and have specialised cartography for them. As well as adding these new features, some existing features (e.g. natural=woodland) which are rendered on the general maps could have tags added to indicate the runnability level – orienteering maps have four levels of “greenness” for woods, and sometimes tree canopies are shown in white – this could be inferred from a size tag associated with a natural=tree point, medium being shown as a circle with a 5m circumference, for instance.

Many other features are already on OSM – paths, tracks, minor and major roads, as used in the Street-O maps, and also vegetation types, gates, walls and fences, that would appear in an ISOM/ISSOM based map.

My local park, Victoria Park, could be having a lot more detail added to it soon.

* Street-O: An informal orienteering discipline, run in urban areas with simple maps showing the street and path networks, and little else. Typically A4 at 1:10000
** ISOM: International Specification for Orienteering Maps. “Normal” orienteering races use these maps, which are full colour and very detailed, typically A3-A5 at 1:10000.
*** ISSOM: International Specification for Sprint Orienteering Maps. A much newer specification designed for the increasingly popular urban and sprint races, the map is almost a plan view of the ground, with roads shown at their correct width, sometimes with pavements shown seperately. Typically A3-A4 at 1:4000 or 1:5000.

London to Eastbourne

I cycled 130km along most of National Cycle Route 21 on Saturday, from London to nearly Eastbourne (nearly, because I set out late as usual and it got too dark to do the final 30km). As usual with NCN routes, it tends to take you up hill and down dale when a perfectly good quiet road nearby would have sufficed. However, this route is generally well signposted, and everything after Crawley is very pleasant indeed. Plus you don’t get to cycle underneath an airport terminal and between runway approach lights. I’ve written an article for the route on Wikipedia – it includes the “NCN” box which links to the other routes that have articles – currently 1/3rd of them do.

Hopefully, at some point, the Wikipedia route articles, and the OpenStreetMap/OpenCycleMap maps and data, will become the de-facto “official” information sources for the routes.

The National Byway

One thing I found when doing the cycle is that some sections are not suitable for road bikes. I’m on the point of purchasing a road bike myself, so it was with some interest that I discovered the National Byway – which aims to signpost quiet countryside road-routes particularly suited for cycling. It looks like a nice idea, even if the logo reminds me of a brand of bread, but it’s a shame this doesn’t come under the fold of Sustrans as a “road-bike routes” category – e.g. it would be nice to have consistency with the waymarking being blue (like Sustrans) rather than brown. There’s also no decent online mapping – I hope it’s not just about selling maps.

Map Milton Keynes in a Weekend

Finally I’m organising a mapping weekend in Milton Keynes. The town has been identified as one of the least mapped areas in the UK on OpenStreetMap, and it’s not far from London, so this is an opportunity to fix that. It also has some completely “blank canvas” areas, which is quite exciting for any London-based OpenStreetMapper living in a “near complete” city.

The event is on the 16th-17th May and you can sign up. No prior experience needed. Based on the rough-and-ready approximation that one mapper can survey the area that 1000 people live in every hour, and four two-hour sessions in the weekend, we probably need around 25 mappers to get the whole 180,000 population town completed in the weekend.

I’m bagging the area with the concrete cows in it.

Photo by diamondgeezer

Orienteering: 17.6 hours
Running/Training: 10.1 hours
Cycling: 15 hours

A three-week gap at the beginning of Apri hasn’t helped – got a bit of work to do.

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I’ve just noticed that next year’s British Championships are at “Ysbyty Ystwyth”. Try pronouncing that the morning after 4 pints of Leffe…

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The photo is from today’s cycle ride – I cycled up the Lea Valley, out of London and into Hertfordshire.

Epping Forest 18km – Covered by four orienteering maps.
Gorhambury 15km – From Iain’s house in St Alban’s.
Port Meadow 12km – My “standard” long circuit while at Oxford.

Also, I drew a special “course” showing a Cross-Scotland walk that I’ve been meaning to do since 1997 but have still not got around to, largely due to lack of time and/or volunteers. The Great Outdoor Challenge is an organised walking challenge with a similar idea, and provided some inspiration for my original plans. The nice thing about the walk is you only cross 2 major roads, in 9 days and 130 miles of walking. (N.B. The GMap Pedometer trail of this route will take a little while to load, as it’s a very long trail.)

In case you are curious, the route would have been/will be:
Day 1 – Fort William to Corrour
Day 2 – Corrour to Ben Alder Cottage
Day 3 – Ben Alder Cottage to Dalwhinnie
Day 4 – Dalwhinnie to Glen Feshie (crossing the A9)
Day 5 – Glen Feshie to Linn of Dee
Day 6 – Linn of Dee to Braemar (“rest day” – 9km walking.)
Day 7 – Braemar to Glen Doll (crossing the A93, also the highest point of the route – 910m. Sadly, the Glen Doll YH is no more.)
Day 8 – Glen Doll to Bridgend
Day 9 – Bridgend to Montrose

There could be an extension out west (as Loch Linnhe is a sea loch, but not the “open sea”) and also a “high level” route that would be similar in distance and location, but climb Scotland’s highest Munros.