OpenOrienteeringMap (not to be confused with the new OpenOrienteering Mapper project) is an orienteering map of the UK and Ireland, based on OpenStreetMap data. There are three formats – “Street-O Plus” “Street-O Lite” and “Pseud-O”. Version 2 of OpenOrienteeringMap is now in beta.
The Street-O map formats contain the level of detail equivalent to Street-O maps used for informal orienteering races around the streets of London and other urban areas in the UK and around the world. The Pseud-O map is a less serious map (as the level of detail in OSM is not sufficient for “proper” orienteering maps) but attempts to emulate the look and feel of standard orienteering maps.
Both maps make (loose) use of the ISOM and ISSOM orienteering mapping specifications, particularly the colours and the styling. Measurements are less likely to be within spec, due to artistic considerations and limits of standard screen resolutions.
When first accessing the website, you start zoomed out. Pan and zoom to your area of interest, then zoom back in a few times until you start seeing the orienteering map. Alternatively you can jump to a UK postcode, by typing it in at the top right.
Because the maps are based on the “Tile Mapping Service/XYZ” standard, they are viewable only at fixed scales. The current scale is displayed on the bottom right of the map. The most relevant scales for orienteering are 1:7000 and 1:14000 – these are the scales you will see for the third and fourth-most zoomed in levels (16 and 15), assuming a 72dpi screen.
Some areas of the UK are still missing much detail. You can help build the free map of everything in the world by contributing to the OpenStreetMap project, by surveying your local area and adding the roads, land types and other data into the project. The data is then pulled into OpenOrienteeringMap on a fairly regular basis – I’m aiming for monthly, or daily in the long term, but will need prodding to do it at the moment!
OpenOrienteeringMap was available for the world for a while, but the rapidly increasing size of the OpenStreetMap dataset has made this no longer possible at this time. However a version for specific countries is part of my plans in the medium term.
You’ll need a modern browser (i.e. not IE6) to make full use of the site.
Note that I cannot help fix the data – this should be done with the editing tools in OpenStreetMap – however if you have made a significant improvement to an area and would like it reflected in OOM before the next data refresh, by all means let me know.
- OpenOrienteeringMap
- Announcement on my orienteering blog
- Announcement on my work blog
- Announcement in my OpenStreetMap diary
- Some unrelated work people have done with orienteering maps and OSM
- Feedback?
Would you give access to the code for your setup? I especially like the functionality to create a map. I’ve compiled a list of services using OSM and yours is one of the better more functional ones.
The list:
http://goo.gl/XvxaK
Hi,
I posted a comment on your site last month, but did not receive a reply.
My previous comment was as follows. I would be very grateful if you could consider it:
The British Library would like to invite you to participate in our web archiving programme. We select and archive sites to represent aspects of UK documentary heritage and as a result, they will remain available to researchers in the future. The British Library works closely with leading UK institutions to collect and permanently preserve the UK web, and our archive can be seen at http://www.webarchive.org.uk/.
Please can you supply us with an email address, so that we can have the relevant information sent out to you.
Regards,
Permissions Officer (pp. Alison Hill, Curator)
Web Archiving, Room 150, Floor 2
The British Library
96 Euston Road
London
NW1 2DB
Tel: 0843 2081144 (ext. 7211)
Fax: 020 7412 7691
E-mail: web-archivist@bl.uk
UK Web Archive: [http://www.webarchive.org.uk/]
Hi,
OpenOrienteeringMap is a dynamically generated site and also does not store data itself – the data source is OpenStreetMap. As such, it is not suitable for archival.
My contact details can be found in the “Contact Me” link on the top right.
Regards,
Oliver
any way of exporting the generated map to a file that can then be uploaded into OCAD and custom-edited with additional symbols ?
Truly amazing. Thanks for making this great resource available. I now have the first ever O-map of my home town, in just 5 minutes work!
This is really beautiful, not to mention great. In my classification it’s one of the very best examples of innovative use of OSM data / how OpenGeoData allows just about anything one wants to do with it.
One question, though: How / how often do you update the data? I see that you ask people to ask you to update if they have done “significant mapping in a given area” — but I’d love to know what kind of system (if any _system_ / standard procedure) you have in place for updates so I don’t need to bug you (when an update is possibly just around the corner).
Thanks!
Ps. Please consider installing some WordPress plugin that allows commenters to subscribe to comments via email.
I’m having a problem with OOM.
When i elect to create a PDF of a map I have set up, the PDF has none of the orienteering conventional signs (landscape features etc) on it.
Which features in particular? Can you see them in OpenStreetMap (http://osm.org/) for the corresponding area? If so, let me know and I’ll add them into the stylesheets for OOM so that they come in there.
Alternatively, are you looking at OOM in the “Pseud-O” mode? By default, PDFs are created in the Street-O style, you need to manually select “Pseud-O” from the second box – the one that appears when you choose “Create Map”. Then, the PDF should look the same as the version on screen.
i have added some footpaths to the open streetmap of rugeley but when i generate a streeto map or a pseude o map these are missing?? except preexisting ones.
ant suggestions as to what i am doing wrong?
just had another look and some have appeared but not others…Might be just a matter of time?? Am using the uk version of open o ( Ithink)
John – your browser is probably caching the old images. Try closing and reopening your browser (although sometimes this will still result in the old ones being used – Chrome is quite bad at this. Try Firefox?) The new data should appear when you create a PDF from the data.
John – Hi, sorry, I was being too lazy to check properly. After a power problem last weekend, the updates weren’t flowing through, until I fixed the problem yesterday. It’s caught up now.
Hi,
This is a great project.
I noticed that streets in my town centre (Lichfield), which are pedestrianised are appearing as foot paths whereas they are roads for the prupose of orienteering. They are marked on open street map as highway – pedestrian. Should these not appear as roads?
See this link for a description of ‘highway – pedestrian’
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dpedestrian
Thanks,
Dave
Daveb – Hmm, not sure about that – what is a path and what is a road? I generally think of roads as things where you might expect to meet cars moving along them, rather than being defined by surface or width.
I would love to see an update of the OOM map in Sweden. I have made some major additions to OSM and can’t wait to see them in OOM!
Thank you very much! I will definitely use this for some trainings with my club!
I see that power=minor_line is not rendered right now, maybe it could be rendered in the same way as power=line?
Thanks again!
Why the labels for city/street names are not displaying in PDF when i do create PDF
Henrik – not currently but will look into it.
Srinivas – Orienteering maps do not show street names. The context layer is just intended to help you line up the orienteering map online to specific streets, before producing the PDF of it.
Maybe I’m missing it somewhere, but when setting up an O course:-
a) can you input a separate finish or is it assumed that’s where the start is?
b) how do you link between controls ie 1 to 2 to 3
c) if there are special things, such as out of bounds, I guess those have to be input into Open Street Map and then deleted if removed?
Hi Ian:
1 – there is currently no separate finish indication, it is assumed that it is where the start is marked. This is because OOM is based on the Street-O maps that SLOW produce/use for their series, and we have always run the start and finish from the same place. Separate starts and finishes will be available in a future update to OOM.
2 – OOM is designed for score courses only currently. Again, something that I should be able to put into a future version.
3 – Please don’t edit OSM with orienteering-only information, i.e. OOB areas. Instead, you’ll need to post-edit your maps (e.g. red pen on the printed copies) to show such areas. As with the above points, marked OOB areas will be available in a forthcoming update to OOM, and this one is very near the top of the list, so it will appear sooner than the others.
thanks for help
Hi Oliver,
I’ve just noticed something that looks odd (to me) in the Street-O rendering of tunnels. I was just starting on a map for HH summer series and comparing the two options below, the Street-O version is generally nicer, but the tunnels don’t work:-
http://tinyurl.com/84lpdgj
http://tinyurl.com/6u7orok
In the Pseudo-O map you can see the large road is marked as being in a tunnel, but on the Street-O map it looks like it’s on the surface. The Psuedo-O map is the best representation of reality – the road is in a tunnel that runs under a shopping centre and there is no sign of it on the surface. Is this is a feature of the spec for Street-O maps (and hence actually correct for this type of map), or a rendering oddity?
I’d like to use the Street-O version, but don’t think I can like this as it will be realy confusing on the ground for runners.
Hi Kevin
It is a total mystery to me why this is happening for the Hatfield Tunnel – it doesn’t seem to be happening for most of the other tunnels. On both renders, the tunnel should only be shown as a series of grey square dots – not as the road line as well.
If you look at http://casa.oobrien.com/maptiler/streeto/17/65517/43588.png then it working fine but http://casa.oobrien.com/maptiler/streeto/17/65449/43434.png which is your tunnel, is not rendering it as a tunnel. I’ve checked the tags in the database and they are correct.
Investigating further…
Turns out the problem was that the “relation” which links together the various ways that make up the A1 (M) had a highway=motorway tag on it, causing it to be rendered as a separate above-ground motorway on both my map and the general OSM one, this was obscuring the tunnel underneath. Another contributor has now deleted the tag to fix the issue in this case.
Hi,
I’m trying to create a pseud-O map for an event, but when I click the create pdf button, I get a street-O version of the map. The map is the right area and shows the controls, but is the wrong type.
Any assistance appreciated.
Kevin
Hi – you need to choose “Pseud-O” from the drop-down on the map creator panel, not from the radio buttons which are for what’s displaying on screen. Yes, sorry, I know that this is dead confusing, and this will be made much more obvious in Version 2 that I am working on this summer.
I have been trouble trying to produce a map in the global setting. I am trying to see Ottawa Ontario Canada. The PDF has an MOD_PYTHON ERROR when you hit create PDF.
Hi Wolfgang – I’m afraid the global map is currently non-functional – I’ve had to temporarily remove a database that it needs. I’m hoping to have it back in the next few weeks.
Ok, how do you update the map. Not being a computer geek I can’t see how you do it. I need to up date several maps by adding streets for various orienteering club nights.
Cheers
Hamish Lead Community Coach North.
Hi Hamish
You update the map through OpenStreetMap – http://osm.org/ – the updates should then flow through although currently that doesn’t happen – however with luck things should be back to normal within the next week.
Is your April 4 2012 note (re no updates to Open Street Map being shown on OOM) still valid? This presumably does mean that development of further OOM’s is on hold for now? Any timeline for possible removal of the licence restriction?
Thanks
Ian – stay tuned, I should have some big updates within the next week.
Hi
For a few weeks now we can’t zoom in to places in the south of France and Monaco in order to make an oom.
When you zoom in the screen just goes blank, it reappears when you zoom out again.
Thanks
Fran
Hi Olly
I am new to all this
How long does update from OSM take to appear on OOM?
I put some changes on a bit of Shrewsbury last week- they are on OSM but not yet(?) on the Orienteering map
This whole thing is amazing thanks for setting it up
Adrian
PLEASE READ BEFORE COMMENTING
OOM Worldwide is currently offline due to server space issues.
OOM UK is currently not updating – an old copy of the DB is available but it is from ~March 2012. A new version of OOM UK should be online soon, complete with updating database – this has been delayed by City Race organisation so now looking at October 2012.
Hi,
It would be really useful to save/create a map in another form other than PDF. I would like to be able to make some additions to the map I create (i.e. labels, show changes to boundaries that have occurred since area originally mapped), but I am unable to do this in PDF format.
Hi
What other formats would be useful for you?
Hi Oliver. Are there any plans to restore the global version of Open O-map? Or is it possible to restore certain areas separately on a rotating basis(Europe this month, North America next month, or something?). It’s a great asset which I use for doing training maps and want to use for night street-O.
(PS I enjoyed my second London City race & have pencilled in 21st Sept 2013 already)
John McCullough
3ROC
Dublin
Hi John,
The UK version is misnamed – it should actually cover Ireland too, as I used the British Isles OSM data download for the most recent DB update, rather than the Great Britain one.
The are no plans to restore the Worldwide one. The work server I was using has been coopted by a colleague for an Olympics-related work project over the summer, and there simply isn’t enough server-grade hard disk space on it for the complete OSM global DB (~400GB+) at this time.
Hi again, Oliver.
I have just discovered that if I use the UK OOM and drag southwards from, say, Newry, I will arrive in the Republic with an OOM, so – problem solved!
John
Hi Oliver,
is there any chance that in the near future OSM global will be available again ?
Regards, Gerrit
Hi Oliver, is there any chance taht in the near future OSM global will be working again ?
I’m realy missing it !
Regards Gerrit
I’ll see I can free up some disk space – sorry for the extended outage, Gerrit!
p.s. There’s a better chance that a Europe-only version will be up as that will take up a lot less disk space than a global one – would this be OK for you?
Oliver,
Europe-only would be fine for me, i live in The Netherlands.
Hello,
tried little testmap in germany by the fly but got this error message (dont know anything about Phyton):
MOD_PYTHON ERROR
ProcessId: 21435
Interpreter: ‘casa.oobrien.com’
ServerName: ‘casa.oobrien.com’
DocumentRoot: ‘/home/ollie/public_html/’
URI: ‘/maptiler/pdf/’
Location: None
Directory: ‘/home/ollie/public_html/maptiler/’
Filename: ‘/home/ollie/public_html/maptiler/pdf’
PathInfo: ‘/’
Phase: ‘PythonHandler’
Handler: ‘renderer::handle’
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/mod_python/importer.py”, line 1537, in HandlerDispatch
default=default_handler, arg=req, silent=hlist.silent)
File “/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/mod_python/importer.py”, line 1229, in _process_target
result = _execute_target(config, req, object, arg)
File “/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/mod_python/importer.py”, line 1128, in _execute_target
result = object(arg)
File “/home/ollie/public_html/maptiler/renderer.py”, line 59, in handle
req = handlePDF.processRequest(req)
File “/home/ollie/public_html/maptiler/handlePDF.py”, line 50, in processRequest
outf = createPDF(path)
File “/home/ollie/public_html/maptiler/handlePDF.py”, line 148, in createPDF
mapnik.load_map(map, styleFile)
RuntimeError: Postgis Plugin: PSQL error:
ERROR: relation “planet_osm_polygon” does not exist
LINE 2: from planet_osm_polygon
^
Full sql was: ‘SELECT * FROM (select way,”natural”,waterway,landuse,way_area
from planet_osm_polygon
where waterway in (‘dock’,'mill_pond’,'riverbank’,'canal’,'river’)
or landuse in (‘reservoir’,'water’,'basin’)
or “natural” in (‘lake’,'water’,'land’,'marsh’,'scrub’,'wetland’,'glacier’)
order by z_order,way_area desc
) as water_areas LIMIT 0′
encountered during parsing of layer ‘water_areas’ in Layer at line 266 of ‘/home/ollie/production/maptiler/styles/streeto_global.xml’
MODULE CACHE DETAILS
Accessed: Mon Nov 26 20:51:05 2012
Generation: 2
_mp_e7f8d206af4dc7e51841871b7f166ea5 {
FileName: ‘/home/ollie/public_html/maptiler/gen_tile.py’
Instance: 1
Generation: 1
Modified: Sat Nov 24 01:47:51 2012
Imported: Mon Nov 26 20:48:42 2012
}
_mp_be664c449fcc8992b2de2509ea296aa6 {
FileName: ‘/home/ollie/public_html/maptiler/handlePDF.py’
Instance: 1 [IMPORT]
Generation: 3
Modified: Sat Nov 24 01:48:22 2012
Imported: Mon Nov 26 20:51:05 2012
}
_mp_e72dc1c33a5050165fac52e925ffacbb {
FileName: ‘/home/ollie/public_html/maptiler/renderer.py’
Instance: 1
Generation: 2
Modified: Sat Nov 24 01:48:34 2012
Imported: Mon Nov 26 20:48:42 2012
Children: ‘/home/ollie/public_html/maptiler/gen_tile.py’
Friends: ‘/home/ollie/public_html/maptiler/handlePDF.py’
}
Does it only work in UK-Version?
Regards Siegfried
Hi Oliver,
This is by far the best enhancment I ever seen in this category!
I really miss it too. I’ll be happy to to donate to your progress if the Northen Europe / Europe will be up and running again
All the best
Peter from Sweden
Hi Oliver!
This is the best enhancement I ever seen in this category! I wish you the best wishes for a happy progress.
Yes, I really miss it too.
I live in Sweden so Europe will be great if that will be up n working : )
Have you consider some possibilities to donate for your projects? I guess we are many folks out there that appreciate your work and want to encourage you going forward
All the best,
Peter
Hi, is it possible to get the Mapnik style file source for this map somewhere? I would like to make a training orienteering map in Krkonoše, Czech Republic, but I can’t since the global service is down.
Hello,
I seem to experience some problems creating Street-O maps for Brussels (I tried via the belgium.php, global.php and uk.php), The UK.php does make the maps in London. The Global.php also has problems in Paris for example.
When zooming in the whole area gets a nice pink color, no Street-O map however…
Best regards,
Alistair
Yes, I have the same problem with the south of France, just pink & no street map.
Have mentioned this about 6 months ago, but still no luck………………
Fran
Hi Oli, wondering if this is a rendering oddity.
This map :- http://oobrien.com/oom/uk.php?zoom=16&lat=51.74878&lon=-0.35317&layers=B00FFTFFFF includes a number of what look like fenced areas, but are in fact leisure=pitch in OpenStreetMap.
On the ground they are just football pitches marked out in the park so the tagging seems appropriate, but the rendering isn’t. Any thoughts?
Kevin
Hi Kevin
Yes, that’s the way I’ve set that tagging up for OOM’s terrain layer – I’ve assumed there are fences around pitches, but this is quite often not the case. I could get rid of that particular bit of tagging but it would be good to delineate pitches from open land some how. Maybe showing a path going around the perimeter?
The new look is great – but damn you for making the changes the day after I print my street o map!
The new look is part of the new release. It’s a bit that’s rolled out early for testing. The other bit (the new website) will be rolled out in phases – Phase 1 is coded and so will hopefully be rolled out in the next week, once it get signed off. Phase 2 (persistent saving, cluesheets) to follow!
Hi Ollie,
We’ve got a small night o event planned on Thursday (20th) and have been making quite a few changes to OSM but have just now noticed the message saying you arent currently pulling updates through.
Any idea when you will and/or I assume its not possible to just pull one small area of ST16 through if I ask really nicely?
Kelvin
Sure, I’ll kick off an update now.
Thanks, really appreciate it. Saves us having to do a load of manual map updates!