Open Street Map Party in Sheffield

Posted by Marcus D. Hanwell on

On Saturday and Sunday I attended the Sheffield Open Street Map party. All this is pretty new to me but I was certainly interested in the concept of creating a free and openly editable map of the world. The party was kindly hosted and organised by the IET and ShefLUG in cooperation with the OSM guys who brought along some GPS gear for those of us who don't have our own.

We got a crash course on how to use the handheld GPS devices and then went out to do some mapping. I partnered up with Dan on Saturday and we wandered around the back streets quite close to the Mappin building which was our base. We took it in turns making notes and using the GPS and I think we managed to map just about every street in the patch we covered as well as quite a few footpaths.

Sheffield Open Street Map

Above is a copy of the OSM map of Sheffield as it stands right now after some of our weekends work has been added. It still hasn't rebuilt the tiles with the extra bits I have just added but I am sure it will get on there soon. I really enjoyed doing the mapping and hope to do more in the future. There are so many good reasons to help out with this project if you can.

Marble is planning on adding support for OSM, it is also a great way to do something pretty geeky and get out of the office for a while ;-) I love the freedom it gives you to add data, correct mistakes and use the data for whatever you like. Personally I am thinking of adding dive sites as I go to them and using Marble to display all the sites I have been to. I could also use it to map out runs and check on my performance as I train.

Trackbacks

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as Linear | Threaded

reinventing the wheel on :

reinventing the wheelThis is open source for the sake of it.

For heavens sake guys! The work has already been done and done professionally. All the work is available at a fee. Why not just ask for donations (how about properly costing that time spend wandering around the streets and donate that) and then when there is a big enough fund pot, go talk to Ordinance Survey et al and negotiate.

Marcus D. Hanwell on :

Marcus D. HanwellWhat makes you think they would ever let you use that information freely at any fee? What about having a map that can be updated when mistakes are found, or being able to add arbitrary extra data to it?

I have to say I personally disagree with you. I would know not to ask you to help if you had left your name though ;-)

John Trev on :

John TrevI just visited www.mapjack.com and found it has some top quality images of city streets in San Francisco.

Add Comment

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA 1CAPTCHA 2CAPTCHA 3CAPTCHA 4CAPTCHA 5


You can use [geshi lang=lang_name [,ln={y|n}]][/geshi] tags to embed source code snippets.