The market is a place I may not have discovered had it not been a plea from Pete Gravell for someone with OpenStreetMap experience to host a small stall to promote the project. Pete was organising an Open Sourcery event as part of Spacemakers organisation that is trying to re-invigorate the market. Spacemakers are allowed to use some of the empty units to host weird, wonderful, arty things that encourage people to come and see what's going on. Which has the hopeful knock-on effect of businesses wanting to rent units in the market because of the increased foot-fall.
Along with Simon, I went along to try and get more out about OSM and crucially more geo-information for OSM.
Brixton like most of London is well mapped however as this was likely done from aerial imagery, and a few people on the ground there is not much local information about playgrounds, pubs restaurants and local businesses. Even the Market itself was not on the map! Which Simon quickly sorted out.
To get local POIs we had the idea of having a large map that people could write on (similar to Walking Papers) and me or Simon could add the data into the database ourselves. This morphed into using pins and wool, and extra blank pieces of paper either side because there wasn't much space on the map for writing descriptions
Starting at 10:00 I was worried that people would walk past and not be confident enough to add their local knowledge to the map, however the free-minded/spirited people of the market seemed to be used to being asked to do slightly crazy things in Brixton Village Market. Once people clicked that their favourite park, cafe or restaurant was going to be on a public map they were very enthusiastic although I'm not quite sure I got across to everybody what OSM was about.
Halfway through the day - Me in my OSM Surveyors Hi-Vis jacket trying to explain OSM to general public. Image courtesy of Pete Gravell©.
Once a few things were added the visual attraction of pins and coloured wool meant that more people stopped to have a look and then got caught to adding more information. One woman even came back 5 times (probably more) trying to add information and only on the 5th time did she have a cafe that had not already been added!
The map at the end of the day.
By the end of the day we had at least an extra 30 POIs on the map and with all the which has been left in the Market because I couldn't bear to tear it apart to take home. Now that the market has been added to the map I'd like to go back and add in all the little businesses in the units. The market changes from week-to-week, month-to-month, year-to-year and OSM is probably the only project that could even come close to coming up to date.
I've never taken part in an OSM event like this before. I have been to mapping parties but they are always with people who understand the project and we usually map a place that is already blank. So we are trying to add in the roads and road names, and hoping someone else will add in POIs. Seeing as it didn't cost much to make the map, and it's a very intuitive way of adding information I think it should become a part of OSM outreach activities.
The map was using Mapgen.pl (originally designed to be a quick and easy way to generate maps for emergency response in Haiti) and sent it to the printers. Total time between thinking of the idea and having a map was less than 24hrs! The map also "only" cost ~£16, which for a 4 hour print time, one off colour printing on very high quality A1 paper I thought was quite reasonable.
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West Bromwich Mapping Party - This Weekend.
Birmingham is done. What next? West Bromwich and the Black Country of course!
To help us on our way a Cloudmade sponsored mapping party is happening at The Public, map(Very Rough!) in West Bromwich centre this weekend, 4th and 5th April.
(If you look at the map link given, you can see that West Brom town centre is very poorly mapped. That will have to change!)
This mapping party is welcoming anyone and everyone to help us. Walkers, pensioners, students and families! Remember the first rule of OpenStreetMap is to "Have fun!". If you'd like to take part just come along, preferably with a pen and paper. There are GPS devices available for loan, and if you have your own even better. A digital camera or Dictaphone are also very useful.
The OSM Midlands User Group has set themselves the challenge of mapping the West Bromwich and Black Country area before Christmas 2009.
Andy Robinson (Blackadder) has already divided up the region and produced the cake[1]. There is a massive total of 284 segments, of which 17 have been done by Andy and Brian Prangle.
To complete the map by Christmas we need to do about 7 segments a week! And that is more than manageable I believe. And the mapping party will get us off to a good start.
See you there!
[1] A cake in OSM is not edible. It is a map of the region that has been divided up using easily distinguishable landmarks, such as main roads, rivers, canals, motorways etc. This means that a coordinated attempt can be taken to map an area, without the likely hood of repeated effort. Plus they look pretty cool.
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Now that Birmingham is complete, I did a video party render of all the GPS tracks I could get a hold of for the Birmingham area.
Here is the result
This is the slow version, a higher (time) resolution version is available from here.
This video represents an enormous amount of raw data 398MB. That is also just the GPS data. It doesn't show the ways and points-of-interest associated with them, which is what gets rendered by OSM and is viewable on the website.
Hope you like the video.
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The OpenStreetMap API lets you do lots of things with the OSM data, like uploading and downloading GPX traces. Unfortunately when you download GPX traces the data/time stamp has been removed. If you download GPS traces individually from the public gps list, then you get the raw original (I think) GPS data with date/time stamps.
Now since Birmingham is complete. I wanted to generate the party render for the entire city over the last 2 years. I neede a way to download 170+ traces. I certainly wasn't doing this by hand. What follows is my most hacky python script yet, it will parse a page and look for the GPS trace IDs, then construct a URL to download. You have to change the page to scrape manually, but hey I wrote it in 30mins what you do expect?
#! /usr/bin/env python
'''Python GPS downloaded for OSM'''
import sgmllib
class MyParser(sgmllib.SGMLParser):
"A simple parser class."
def parse(self, s):
"Parse the given string 's'."
self.feed(s)
self.close()
def __init__(self, verbose=0):
"Initialise an object, passing 'verbose' to the superclass."
sgmllib.SGMLParser.__init__(self, verbose)
self.hyperlinks = []
def start_a(self, attributes):
"Process a hyperlink and its 'attributes'."
for name, value in attributes:
if name == "href":
self.hyperlinks.append(value)
def get_hyperlinks(self):
"Return the list of hyperlinks."
return self.hyperlinks
import urllib, sgmllib
# Get something to work with.
f = urllib.urlopen("http://www.openstreetmap.org/traces/tag/Birmingham/page/9")
s = f.read()
# Try and process the page.
# The class should have been defined first, remember.
myparser = MyParser()
myparser.parse(s)
# Get the hyperlinks.
links = myparser.get_hyperlinks()
working = []
final = []
traces = []
nonduplicates = []
for i in links:
b = i.find("user")
print i, b
if b > 0:
working.append(i)
for i in working:
b = i.find("traces")
print i, b
if b > 0:
final.append(i)
for i in final:
parts = i.split("/")
lastitem = len(parts)-1
traces.append(parts[lastitem])
for i in traces:
if i not in nonduplicates:
nonduplicates.append(i)
for i in nonduplicates:
url = "http://www.openstreetmap.org/trace/" + i + "/data"
print url
trace = urllib.urlopen(url)
localfile = open(i, "w")
localfile.write(trace.read())
trace.close()
localfile.close()
Credit - the HTML parseing class was written by Boddie.
I plan on tidying this up (a lot), as it is extremely useful, until the OSM API catches up anyway.
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There was agreement among the mappers of Birmingham in November to complete inside the motorways before Christmas, it was a mammoth task, but OpenStreetMap now has a complete map for the Birmingham area! This is thanks to the hard work of multiple mappers in the Birmingham area, but most of all to Andy Robinson, BrianBoru and Xoff. These 3 guys between themselves mapped more than 75% of Birmingham. My own efforts only managed to contribute about 1.3%!
The announcement by Andy can be found here.
This is not to say there is anything left to do, as there are plenty of things to add to the map. I for one am going to keep adding data.
The next step is to get this data into the hands of people who can use it. Please send in suggestions, or edit the Mappa Mercia page on the OSM wiki to include anything you think is useful.
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