Shaun McDonald's Blog

On some longer distance First Great Western trains they have an entertainment carriage in coach D. This is the Live map feature which attributes CloudMade maps that highlight the rail lines. The attribution fades after a few seconds.

Some of you who were at WhereCampUK, Nottingham in November 2010, may recognise the discussion in this blog post as it is based on my talk there.

Since the early days of OpenStreetMap, people have been bulk importing data into the database. There have been various issues with many of the previous import methods, which I’ll go through, before explaining the latest methodologies to be employed.

First up was the public domain TIGER data in the US, which is produced by the US Census Bureau. It varies hugely in quality from county to county and was seen as the only way to start the mapping in the US. The prospect of the data being imported delayed many people from starting to create the map in the US. However with the data not being great, it is difficult to improve the data as a newcomer, compared to using clean osm data.

There are on going projects to try and fixup the Tiger data. These were kick started by the CloudMade London dev team when it was realised that you could not route from one side of the US to the other, like you could in Europe. Tools were built to help highlight connectivity problems and make the road network routable.

After a Freedom of Information request the Royal Mail released the rough location of all of their post boxes (they didn’t have the exact locations). Matthew Somerville built an app for making it easier to locate all the post boxes and tick them off the list. The post box data from OpenStreetMap is regularly imported and checked against the list of post boxes supplied by the Royal Mail based on their reference number with the lists updated to show which post boxes we still don’t know the exact locations of. Some mappers have gone and made sure that whole postcode districts have all their post boxes in OpenStreetMap. Over time the novelty has worn off when playing the game of hunt the post box, or it has become an distance issue to try and find some more.

Naptan data is the public transport access point database in the UK. It has been generated by local councils using a GPS on the ground. This means that the data doesn’t have any issues with copyright from the ordnance survey, which they would have if they were positioned using ordnance survey maps. The Naptan data has been imported region by region into OpenStreetMap. There have been a few communities who have taken the checking of the Naptan data seriously to ensure that OSM has every bus stop in the correct position. They have often been in contact with local councils or the appropriate Traveline department to improve the original Naptan data where there are errors.

Novam is a tool that was built to make it easier to see which imported bus stops had been edited with various data added. A few different styles were generated as mappers came up with a consistent way that the data should be. It proved a very useful tool when working with local authorities, as they could see why OSM was valuable, and it highlighted the appropriate data. The tool is primarily used by mappers to see where they need to improve the OSM data.

When the Ordnance Survey Open Data was released on April 1st 2010, there was some discussion about how the data should be used. The consensus is that the data should not be blindly imported, rather local knowledge should be used to update the OpenStreetMap data. There are cases where the Ordnance Survey data that has been released is already out of date due to changes on the ground since the data was last collected or released. There have been cases where people have changed the correct OpenStreetMap data for the out of date or incorrect Ordnance Survey data. This is one of the reasons why you need to have local knowledge to be able to get good OSM data. Some tools have been implemented so that OSMers can improve the completeness of their dataset based on OSM. These tools are being used actively to increase the OSM coverage and accuracy.

The Bike Shop Locator was built by Andy Allan and myself as a tool to show a different method of importing data into OpenStreetMap for cases where there is significant portion of the data already in OSM, some of the data being imported may be inaccurate as the shop on the ground either doesn’t exist or has since changed name, and all of the data only having an approximate location to within a post code. The automation of the ticking off of this list is somewhat hard due to the fuzzy matching required for the names and other attributes. Also when visiting an area again to check to see exactly where the bike shop is you’ll spot other things in the OSM data that needs to be edited in the area.

WhereCampUK, November 2010 location:

For the presentation, I flipped between the following web pages in different tabs in my web browser:

• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER_fixup
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER_fixup/250_cities
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER_fixup/250_cities/duplicate_nodes
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Duplicate_nodes_map
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ordnance_Survey
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ordnance_Survey_Opendata
• http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/opendata/
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Naptan
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/NaPTAN/Import
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/NaPTAN/Request_for_Import
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/NaPTAN/Novam
• http://mappa-mercia.org/novam/?scheme=hull&zoom=15&lat=52.94958&lon=-1.14643&layers=BT
• http://mappa-mercia.org/novam/?scheme=hull&zoom=15&lat=53.74419&lon=-0.3458&layers=BT
• http://shaunmcdonald.dev.openstreetmap.org/bike-shop-locator
• http://shaunmcdonald.dev.openstreetmap.org/bike-shop-locator/shop/missing
• http://shaunmcdonald.dev.openstreetmap.org/bike-shop-locator/shop/missing.map
• http://shaunmcdonald.dev.openstreetmap.org/bike-shop-locator/shop/1076
• http://shaunmcdonald.dev.openstreetmap.org/bike-shop-locator/shop/1513
• http://shaunmcdonald.dev.openstreetmap.org/bike-shop-locator/shop/recent
• http://gitorious.org/bike-shop-locator

I recently headed over to France for another weekend cycling trip. This time I stayed the night in Oostende, Belgium, so that I could cover more distance in the trip on the continent. This time I headed over using SeaFrance instead of P&O since they were significantly cheaper when returning the following day, rather than the same day. I took a coastal route heading out, and a more inland route on the way back for some variety.

I found it interesting to use many of the Belgian cycling facilities, including the cycle node networks and the cycle paths. The cycle node networks are quite different to the UK cycle network routes. Rather than having a route that often runs a long distance, you have fairly short distance routes between numbered points. Between the points you get signs directing you to another point. When you look behind, you’ll see directions to the point that you have just come from. This seems to work better in town/built-up areas, as it gives more of a mesh network, rather than a spoke network that the route network in the UK tends to promote.

It was really nice to see cycle lanes nicely run on to the pavement as a cycle path; or priority over other junctions; or being routed behind bus stops, so that cyclists don’t need to swerve out and merge with the rest of the traffic when buses stop.

When I was cycling along the LF1 beside a canal, I seen people playing some form of volleyball in canoes on the canal.

Just as I was about to leave the last town in Belgium on the way back to Calais, I was flagged down by a group of 3 students who were looking for directions to get on to the North Sea Cycle Route. Having seen 2 or 3 signs for the route, I was able to give them some pointers about cycling in Belgium, as it is a bit different to the UK, and point them in the right direction. They did have maps based on car-centric Google maps showing the route and were thinking about riding on the UK equivalent of trunk or primary roads, however in Belgium (and other European countries), you are often not allowed to cycle on those busy roads, rather you are meant to use the adjacent or nearby cycle paths.

When I was entering the data from my journey, I was chatting on IRC to one of the local OSM mappers, so that I could get a better idea of how the data should be entered. I learned that the North Sea Cycle Route is actually signed on the ground as LF1, though there does appear to be a coastal and inland strand of it. I am still a little confused by it being signed as LF1 in some places and having North Sea Cycle Route signs in other places, and nothing linking the two on the ground.

While waiting for the ferry in Calais I had a nice chat with one of the motorcyclists and car ferry passenger. On the ferry over I had my dinner. I had pre-paid for it as you get 10% off the cost of the meal deal. On arriving in Dover there was a nice sunset over the harbour.

Overall it was a total of 140 miles over two days, 125 miles of which was on the continent. I’ve uploaded the photos from my trip to Flickr.

As in the past couple of years I’ve made a Mac OS X Dashboard widget to count down to the State of the Map conference 2010.

SOTM 2010 Dashboard Widget and the Dashcode project source.

This Tuesday 8th December 2009, there will be another Edinburgh OpenStreetMap meetup. Unfortunately I won’t yet be able to enjoy another cycle out along the coast from Edinburgh to map some more of North Berwick, and return back to London on the Caledonian Sleeper. Not forgetting the significantly more people who came to the meetup than I originally expected. It’s great to see such great enthusiasm for a regular meetup in another UK City.

When I was buying the sleeper tickets for the return leg of the last meetup, I found that phoning got a better deal than buying the tickets online and picking them up online.

Yesterday (Saturday) I done one of my rather large February cycles. I didn’t go quite as far as last year’s 150 mile cycle, though I still done more than the 70-100 miles I was anticipating doing. In total it was about 115 miles (the last 4 miles were from Bromley South station home). The total journey time to Dover was about 12 hours. When I set out I decided that my camera would stay at the bottom of the pannier, otherwise I’d spend too much time taking photos, rather than getting somewhere.

The route I took was heading out fairly direct to Faversham, via Bromley, Swanley, unmapped Cobham, Rchester, Rainham, and Sittingbourne. After Faversham I headed to the coast all the way round to Ramsgate, where I hit the A256, and then the A2 to race down the road to Dover to get the last direct train back to Bromley South.

I hadn’t prepared quite enough with my GPS tracking. For those who don’t know I use a private beta of TrackMyJourney on my Sony Ericsson K850i with a bluetooth GPS for most of my location logging and mapping. I know that my main 5Hz bluetooth GPS lasts only about 8 hours, so I got my older, less reliable on cities, GPS partially charged, but not enough to last until the phone ran out of power. After I ran out of power I was using a fast direct route, so it was easy to get the route’s distance using CloudMade’s routing. I did have a GT-11 GPS as a backup, however the 16MB card is too small for my extravagant cycle journeys, though the battery did last for the whole journey. Ah well, couple of lessons learnt.

It’s been great to be able to have live re-routing over the web,  constantly updating my ETA, and the ability download map tiles live, thus able to have the cycle map wherever I am within mobile phone signal range.

I did find a part of the NCN1 to the east of Sittingbourne, where the route took you into a pile of trash at the side of a traveller camp, with no further signage.

I really enjoyed cycling along the coast, I found it quite rare to be able to go for so far that close to the coast, because usually you have private properties next to the coast for much more of the coastline. There was one place where I saw a sign telling cyclists to slow down and give way, where you would normally just get the irritating and unnecessary ”cyclists dismount” sign. I really should have taken a photo of it, but then would I have had to go via London Bridge?

In the future I’ll hopefully get around to cycling from Margate to Folkstone at a more leisurely pace to be able to take in the scenery.

With the extra eating over Christmas, I’ve started out on my (evening) cycling again. On the 1st of January I headed out East and got to Rochester before getting on the train home. On the way near to Ebbsfleet International I found a rather interesting sign that I just had to take a picture of.

After uploading it to Flickr, I check that I had geocoded it right, by looking at the map on Yahoo. I got very confused. It seems that Flickr need to start using OpenStreetMap data for London. Yahoo don’t that the new Channel Tunnel Rail link and some of the new roads around Ebbsfleet International, though they do have the location of Ebbsfleet International. Compare Yahoo with OpenStreetMap.

UPDATE: Looking further it seems that Flickr are using older map tiles compared to Yahoo.com, but appear to be the same tiles as used in Yahoo UK. 

END UPDATE

On the way I was testing out some routing using osm data, and found a few data bugs. One very important one being a primary road that goes through a tunnel, which doesn’t allow cyclist, pedestrians, nor horse drawn carriages, hence routing cyclists through it shouldn’t be done.

On the 2nd day of the year, I took the train down to Caterham, which is just inside the M25, and then cycled back up mostly using the NCN21. On passing through New Addington, I got a little mapping done on the way, mostly new roads that are completely missing from OSM, there is a lot of mapping required down there. Anyone up for a mapping party?

This year for Christmas I went over to Germany to see some family I haven’t seen for 11 years. I really should learn some more German, so that I can speak with my grandmother, rather than needing my cousin, to translate for me. She learnt more English than I learnt German, though she needs to learn it for her university course.

While I was there I got the village Singhofen mapped, all on foot, and often freezing temperatures. At least it was dry, and I had my big duvet jacket, so didn’t notice the cold as much. There are plenty of quiet roads that lead off to the neighbouring villages, and some of the finer details that still need to be completed. Hopefully next time I go, I’ll have a bike, which will make it rather a lot faster to do the surveying.

Some people think that Germany is complete, in fact most of the small towns and villages have been forgotten about. Many of them are missing any roads going to them. The Germans are organised enough to have a list of places that need mapping, with an accompanied slippy map.

To get there I used the Eurostar from St. Pancras to Brussels, there I changed to Thalys to Köln, where my cousin and her boyfriend picked me up. While I was in Brussels, I had an hour to kill so went out for a quick walk and found some unnamed streets. I also found this cart that had fallen on the  tracks in the station:

I have a 44MB NMEA (27MB GPX) track @ 5Hz of my journey back, with the exception of when I was on the DeutcheBahn train from Koblenz to Köln, which seems to be like the UK’s Virgin trains in their expertise in blocking GPS signals.

One interesting thing I found outside Köln train station was that there was a lot of bicycles standing there with a lock between the back wheel and the frame, and not locked to anything fixed to the ground.

Happy new year to all.

Last Wednesday there was an OpenStreetMap meetup in London on the South Bank. In all there was 15 people there. It was an interesting evening because there was many new faces, most of whom were developers using OpenStreetMap data in some shape or form.

Does anyone have ideas for central London pubs that we could go to at the start of next year? If so, please add your local knowledge to the wiki page.

Linux Expo Live is an event being held in Olympia to showcase the latest software for Linux. This year the event has been combined with Mac Expo Live and Creative Pro.

OpenStreetMap has a stand there, so drop by and have a chat if your in London today, tomorrow or Saturday 25th October 2008. More info on the osm wiki.

Here’s some photos from setting up last night: