In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Two days ago the new open source iD editor we mentioned a few times has been officially launched, here's the official announcement OpenStreetMap launches all-new easy map editor and announces funding appeal.

From the announcement: "The new editor, codenamed ‘iD’, boasts an intuitive interface and clear walk-throughs that make editing much easier for new mappers. By lowering the barrier to contributions, we believe that more people can contribute their local knowledge to the map – the crucial factor that sets OSM apart from closed-source commercial maps. [...] The new iD editor is a pure HTML5 experience, using the cutting-edge D3 visualisation library. Behind the clear design and intuitive interface is a sophisticated back-end that automatically recommends the most popular ‘tagging’ conventions used by the OSM community."

Numerous sources discussed the new iD editor, you'll find more technical details on iD on the MapBox blog, MapBox built iD, including multiple links to media coverage. Slashdot also discussed two stories, OpenStreetMap Launches a New Easy To Use HTML5 Editor and OpenStreetMap Adds Easier Reporting of Map Problems.

by Julius Chrobak,

May 6, 2013

mingle.io made available almost 8 million points of interest from OpenStreetMap through their query API. Developers can use a flexible query language to get the POIs they need into their applications in sub-seconds. All the major OSM tags are included to provided detailed information about the points.

The dataset contains hotels, camps, restaurants, bars, public transportation stops, places for sport or leisure activities and more. It has been extracted from the generic OpenStreetMap structure into a straightforward tabular form. This means developers do not need to figure out what are the relations among various OSM tags in order to retrieve just the points of interest. The company believes this is a huge time saver and will make the OSM data appealing to a larger audience of developers.

About mingle.io

mingle.io GmbH is a Swiss IT start up  which helps companies and developers to access variety of large volume Open Data on demand through their flexible query API. mingle.io takes care of all the mundane data management, adminsitration, and synchronization tasks and allows developers to quickly enriching their applications with the information they need. The API documentation as well as an interactive interface to explore available datasets is available on https://mingle.io.

Contact

Julius Chrobak, co-founder of mingle.io GmbH

Hertistrasse 1, 8304 Wallisellen, Switzerland

tel.: +41 44 830 00 33

Slashdot discusses a story named OpenWLANMap: Free WLAN-Based GPS Replacement. I don't think we mentioned OpenWLANMap.org before, but we did mention MAC address mapping. Here's the OpenWLANMap.org website.

The Slashdot summary: "There are a couple of commercial products which can tell you where you are by the MAC addresses of access points in your neighbourhood. E.g. the iphone uses a system like this. There's now an open offering for this: OpenWLANMap. With this website, you can enter your access point mac address with your GPS location and then others can use that to navigate. There is also an app for your mobile which automatically enters this data, and you can upload data from e.g. Airomap and other wardriving applications."

Here's the recent open source / open data geonews in batch mode.

Software-related:

• On the iD Map Editor, the new OpenStreetMap editor, reached the Beta 1 state, if you want to see it in action, here's a nice 1-minute video
• It was mentioned in our press release section, but deserves additional attention, "GeoServer Beginner's Guide is a new book from Packt that teaches the readers to build custom maps using the dynamic real-time geospatial information. With the help of this book, readers will learn sharing of real-time maps quickly" Here's Jody's review of the book
• Via OR I learned about the release of Titan 0.3 which supports georeferenced data: "Titan is a highly scalable graph database optimized for storing and querying large graphs with billions of vertices and edges distributed across a multi-machine cluster. Titan is a transactional database that can support thousands of concurrent users."
• Here's about Scribe - A tool to facilitate the creation of Maps with MapServer
• Via OR, here's the code for WebGL Heatmap "a JavaScript library for high performance heatmap display"
• An open source Desktop GIS we never mentioned before, VSceneGIS Desktop v0.9.5, which seems to have only Spanish documentation
• Interested by the desktop GIS uDig? Here's a course on geographic scripting in uDig
• Amongst other updates, New final version of i3Geo available: i3Geo 4.7 and deegree 3.2.0 webservices released
• You can't wait? Here's Some cool new features in the upcoming QGIS 2.0
• And yes, OpenLayers 3 is getting closer to reality, the latest code sprint summary

Open data:

• Related to OpenStreetMap, the LearnOSM website got a major facelift and there's OSM PLUS - the OpenStreetMap Commercial Users Summit, the first meeting to occur on June 10th in San Francisco... with Garmin being another of the major companies diving into OpenStreetMap
• Geoff tells us about EuroGlobalMap, a free and open authoritative European geospatial data site
• The City of Chicago now offers its data on GitHub, most of it being georeferenced: "This is a new experiment, where we can see if it’s possible to crowdsource better data. GitHub provides the necessary functionality."
• On the topic of open data, you can read the new entry named The Flawed Economics of Closed Government Data by Brian Timoney

Everything else:

• Here's an entry on Map overlays with WebGL: affine, polynomial, TPS transformations in JavaScript with GLSL
• There's a new Open Source Geospatial Laboratory established at the University of Warwick, UK
• Here's the Keynote speakers at FOSS4G-CEE 2013

I'd like to introduce a new location-based game: Kort.

This web app motivates users to help improving OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. Game-like elements are used like credit points and badges in a mission to resolve missing spatial data. Kort combines the concept of gamification with volunteered geographic information and is targeted to non-specialists. Within three weeks more than 1,000 users registered and it has been translated into 11 languages!

After having signed in with OSM or Google account, credit points (so called 'Koins') are collected by the players on a mission task. Examples are POIs without a name, where users have to enter the missing label. All proposals for solutions are then validated by other players. If a proposal has passed validations (around 3 depending on error type), it is considered complete.

Data errors are downloaded every night from a project called KeepRight. The data covers many parts of the world except for parts of North America and others. The final task of integrating the passed proposals into OpenStreetMap has not been realized yet. It can be done manually, though. This an other enhancements like moderating campaigns are planned in the near future.

The project has been implemented by two computer science students during their bachelor thesis at the Geometa Lab of the University of Applied Sciences, Rapperswil (Switzerland). It's based on HTML5, free (open source) and it runs on iPhone and Android, and in Chrome.

For more information visit http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/KortGame

The relation between geography and geospatial with traveling appears obvious to me. I've been using Wikitravel.org for years (it exits since 2003), and now the Wikimedia Foundation announced a competing wiki to be part of the Wikimedia offers such as the famous Wikipedia, named Wikivoyage.org.

The Slashdot summary: "The Wikimedia Foundation has marked its 12th anniversary by launching a Creative-Commons-licensed travel guide called Wikivoyage. Like other Wikimedia projects, Wikivoyage contains material written collaboratively by volunteers. The site has launched under the aegis of Wikimedia with around 50,000 articles and approximately 200 volunteer editors. Wikivoyage started in 2006 as a travel guide in German and Italian, backed by the German non-profit Wikivoyage Association. The transition to a Wikimedia project was initiated by contributors and the Association, and content is currently offered in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. The purpose of the Wikivoyage is to promote education and knowledge of all countries and regions in the world, as well as understanding among nations. There's a huge global demand for travel information, but very few sources are both comprehensive and non-commercial. That's about to change."

For the curious ones, here's the other projects under the WIkimedia Foundation, which includes Wiktionary but also a project that I wasn't aware of before, Wikidata.org, which is still in its infancy but could be eventually leveraged by a part of the geospatial data community?

Via OpenWeatherMap I learned about the OpenMeteoData.org, that has the aim to make meteorological data available for everyone.

From the website: "

What is OpenMeteoData?

• OpenMeteoData is an non-profit organization. We aim to make meteorological data available for everyone. We are now building our own supercomputer to calculate open weather forecasts. We run the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model. This is state of the art numerical weather prediction tool, developed by several major universities and US governmental agencies.

Why?

• In most Europeans countries, weather data is not freely available. You have to pay hundreds of thousand euros to get access to raw model outputs.

Who can use the data?

• Everyone. It's free. That's just like Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap. [...] We plan to release all of the data under Open Database Licence (ODbL). That means the data is free, and it can be used for both personal and commercial projects.

When will it be available?

• If everything goes right, a first preview is expected for March 2013."

Every frequent Slashgeo reader knows about OpenStreetMap, and now, the project reached another important milestone: 1 million OpenStreetMappers.

From the blog entry: "OpenStreetMap has just passed 1 million users! That's a million people who have signed up on openstreetmap.org to join in with creating a free map of the world. At first glance you may think that OpenStreetMap is a map. Those who know more will tell you that it's actually a database; a flexible editable repository of free geospatial data. But above all OpenStreetMap is a community. A massive community in which people like you and me come together collaborate and help build this thing... and now there's a million of us!"

To ease contributions even more, they also introduced the alpha version of the new OpenStreetMap editor, codenamed iD (screenshot below). And for its beauty, see the short animation on OpenStreetMap: A Year of Edits 2012.

It's easy to love MapBox for the way they push geospatial innovation. Last week they introduced MapBox Satellite.

What it is? "We’ve been working hard to bring MapBox users a fast, beautiful satellite and aerial imagery layer that integrates seamlessly with MapBox Streets and custom overlays. We’re happy to announce that it’s available today and included in MapBox Basic plans and above.

We are approaching MapBox Satellite in three main phases. Today marks Phase 1 completion with full world coverage to zoom 12 and full U.S. aerial coverage to zoom 17. Phase 2 will arrive in early 2013 as we deploy full U.S. and Europe coverage to zoom 18, followed by an aggressive Phase 3 rollout schedule for the rest of the world to zoom 17 during the first half of 2013."

Here's a really nice entry named Open Aerial: The Data Behind MapBox Satellite: "MapBox Satellite is powered by raw imagery from multiple sources that is then processed by MapBox using open source tools. All the data you're about to see is free, open, and if you're a U.S. taxpayer, available thanks to you."

This was meant to happen, via the LinkedIn OpenStreetMap group I learned about the OpenTraffic project.

Here's their introduction: "OpenTraffic is a open data project initiated by doroga.tv to create open traffic jam map of the world. We use OpenStreetMap vector graph and data feeds from various fleet management systems to calculate the traffic. Each contributor and every developer may use the traffic APIs for mapping and navigation projects and researches. [...]

If you'd like to start OpenTraffic project in your area, you need to do the following steps: 

1. Contact us so we could install the vector OpenStreetMap data for your region
2. You need to provide datafeeds from GPS-equipped vehicles so we can calculate traffic based on that data
3. Enjoy! Access the traffic data by API and use it on any web or mobile map​"