According to my OpenStreetMap user profile, I registered with the project 11 years ago today. And I could not think of a better way to celebrate this not-so-round milestone by attending the first day of State of the Map 2018 in Milan, Italy!

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As I mentioned in my previous post, aside from presenting at Wikimania 2014 about various collaborations between the Wikimedia and OpenStreetMap communities, I was also able to attend the London celebration of OpenStreetMap’s 10th anniversary. This was held in traditional fashion in an English pub. In the Philippines, social meetups are often held in American-style cafes like Starbucks; but in the United Kingdom, they are held in pubs. The London OSM community have regular fortnightly meetups usually held in pubs, and the 10th anniversary celebration was no different. So even though I’m not big on alcohol, I was pretty excited to go to a pub and meet like-minded map geeks.

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Many of my friends and colleagues know that I spend much of my free time contributing to OpenStreetMap and to the Wikimedia projects, of which Wikipedia is the most famous. I get a real sense of fulfilment in knowing that my voluntary work—whether online by contributing freely-licensed geographical data or encyclopedic content and media, or offline by organizing events, running workshops, or giving presentations—provides a tangible benefit to the whole world.

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Last November 5 to 7, I and a few other volunteer mappers from the OpenStreetMap Philippines community joined the Environmental Science for Social Change (ESSC) in training the local government of Guagua, Pampanga (OSM) in contributing to and using OpenStreetMap with an eye for disaster risk reduction.

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2011 was a pretty good year for the OpenStreetMap project in the Philippines. Aside from the usual Mapping Parties, the community has organized or participated in several other events, some of them outside the Philippines. 2011 also saw the release of a more improved and usable OSM Philippine Garmin map, and OSM contributors made 2011 the best year in terms of increase of data in the Philippines (thanks to Bing).

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There are only three general crowdsourced mapping projects active in the Philippines that are worthy of note: OpenStreetMap, Google Map Maker, and RoadGuide.ph. Since I’m heavily involved in the project, I often write about OpenStreetMap. I’ve also written several pieces about Google Map Maker but I have never really written about RoadGuide.ph save for a few sporadic mentions here and there.

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For the 2010 third quarter OpenStreetMap Mapping Party, we decided to go big and tackle the road network of Cavite. OSM had very poor data in the southern parts of Cavite and since one of our mid-term goals is to complete the basic road network of the Philippines, we decided to venture to the unmapped parts of this historic province last September 11 and map the major roads connecting the cities and municipalities of Cavite.

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This Saturday, September 11, there will another OpenStreetMap Mapping Party. This time we will be tackling the road network of Cavite, especially the southern parts. This will be the third Mapping Party this year after the Marikina and Ortigas-Mandaluyong parties last March and May.

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Instead of creating an extensive report of the Ortigas-Mandaluyong Mapping Party like what I did with the Marikina Mapping Party, I decided to just show the actual fruits of our labor, namely before and after looks of the map. If you want a narrative, Ian Lopez has helpfully blogged about the event from his perspective.

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I mentioned in my previous post that I’m involved in two non-profit organizations and that I’ve blogged about one of them already: Wikimedia Philippines. Well, the second one is OpenStreetMap Philippines. If you’ve been following my blog for quite a while, you should know that I’m an enthusiastic supporter of the OpenStreetMap project. So I’m extremely pleased that we now have a local organization that can help with promoting OSM here in the Philippines.

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Do you know why I think that last weekend’s Marikina Mapping Party is successful? Well for one thing, we managed to attract newbie mappers into the project. Second, we made Marikina’s OSM map even more awesome than it was before. And there’s also the fact that this Mapping Party is undeniably better organized and more polished than the two previous Manila-based OpenStreetMap Mapping Parties (Tagaytay and Cubao). But what really set this event apart from all the previous ones is The Cake.

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If you’re interested, come and help us create the best and most-up-to-date free and open map of Marikina City! It will happen this Saturday, March 20. Go to the event page at the OpenStreetMap Wiki to learn more or RSVP at the Facebook event page. See you there!

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Last Saturday, February 20, Maning, Rally, and I went to FEATI University to give a workshop about OpenStreetMap to the Students’ Association of Geodetic Engineering (SAGE). We were invited by Sorbi, a Geodetic Engineering student of the said university and an admirer of the OpenStreetMap project. He thought that presenting OSM to his fellow students and orgmates would provide an interesting counterpoint to all the geodetic engineering lessons they are studying.

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Last December 12, we had a Christmas OpenStreetMap Micro Mapping Party. The previous one was in Davao back in July and the first was in Tagaytay in May. Starting in 2010, we plan to have quarterly Mapping Parties at least in the Greater Manila Area. So if you’re interested to join one, there will be plenty of opportunities next year for you to do so.

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We won! Team Bloggers, which consisted of Benj, Jeff, Hannah (whom I only met then), and me, conquered the 3rd Max Road Challenge, organized by 103.5 Max FM. The Road Challenge happened last Sunday, December 13, and had us traveling all the way from Caltex along Julia Vargas in Ortigas to Leslie’s Restaurant in Tagaytay.

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Here’s one thing that I’d like to claim: OpenStreetMap has currently the best freely-available online map of the island resort of Boracay. Period. You can go see for yourself. It’s way ahead of the others like Google Map Maker and MapCentral.

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As far as I know, aside from OpenStreetMap, there is no other online mapping service that would extensively show parking aisles in parking lots. (You know, those lanes where you drive around hoping to catch an empty parking spot?) In OSM, parking aisles (tagged in the OSM database as “service=parking_aisle”) are simply specialized types of service roads ("highway=service”). So I’ve been quite crazy the past several weeks adding parking aisles to some parking lots. See the results below showing SM Southmall and Alabang Town Center with parking aisles in their parking lots marked.

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Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo!, is probably the most popular photo-sharing site on the Web. Flickr has support for geotagged photos and the site can display maps of photos using Yahoo! Maps. Unfortunately for many parts of the world, the Yahoo! map is quite lacking. To alleviate this problem, the Flickr team decided to use OpenStreetMap for the Beijing Olympics and also for last year’s Burning Man festival.

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Last June 28, Maning, Rally, and I met a bunch of guys from the BMW Car Club to talk about OpenStreetMap. The meetup happened at Centerstage KTV along Jupiter Street in Makati. The KTV is owned by Mikey, one of the club’s members. (BTW, the KTV seems to be an excellent videoke place; it’s quite similar to Red Box.)

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Well, I would be had my previous passport not been due to expire later in November (and I’ll explain why in a bit). By tomorrow, I would’ve been in Amsterdam to represent the Philippine OpenStreetMap community at the 2009 State of the Map (SOTM), the annual OpenStreetMap conference that started in 2007. For this year, the organizers announced back in May a scholarship program to bring 15 mappers from the developing world to attend the conference and to show the world about OSM activities in their home countries. SOTM will cover the full travel and accommodation costs for these lucky people. Out of 39 people nominated from 19 countries, I was one of the 15 selected.

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Inspired by the success of the Tagaytay Mapping Party last May, OpenStreetMappers from Davao City decided to have their own mapping party this coming Saturday, July 4. This event is being spearheaded by George Tujan and Marloue Pidor, both of Neuraltech Innovations, an IT startup in Davao focusing on GPS and geospatial technologies.

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I announced last month that there would be an OpenStreetMap Mapping Party in Tagaytay last May 16. Well, this post is quite late but I’m pleased to report that the Mapping Party was pretty much a success! I actually already blogged about it at my OSM diary, but that is for the OSM audience and not for general readers. This blog post would be for the latter’s consumption (i.e., you!).

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I love Google and all, but allow me to be snarky yet again at Google for introducing their Mapping Party Kit late last month. A Google Mapping Party is an event where you invite people to a venue, give them a presentation on Google Map Maker, and them let them try their hand at mapping their locality. The Mapping Party Kit is a simple reference website for anyone who wants to throw a Mapping Party. The site contains sample invitation letters, an agenda example, a presentation, and links to other resources such as Google blog posts about Map Maker.

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In OpenStreeMap, a Mapping Party is “where a group of OpenStreetMappers and novices descend on an area to map it exhaustively, usually over a weekend.” Well, the OSM Philippines community will be having its very first Mapping Party and the area we chose is the picturesque City of Tagaytay. Shown below is how Tagaytay currently looks like in OpenStreetMap (the data is overlaid on top of SRTM3 terrain data).

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I’ve mentioned quite a few times here and elsewhere that I consider Bonifacio Global City as the place in Metro Manila that is undergoing the most drastic development (like roads come and go and there’s always a building under construction somewhere). Because of that, I think that how various maps depict this district is one of the best indicators in gauging how updated any such map of Metro Manila is. For instance, I analyzed the 2007 edition of the Citiatlas Metro Manila atlas by examining its coverage of Bonifacio Global City.

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Yuga once asked back in 2007, “Google, where’s our street maps?” Now the answer has come less than two years later when majority of the data contributed by Filipinos to Google Map Maker was recently pushed to Google Maps sometime in the latter half of February (see the official graduation announcement). To celebrate this milestone, Google held a press conference about two weeks ago. However, while what’s there right now in Google Maps for the Philippines is a vast improvement over the really laughable data before, there’s still room for improvement and Google needs to up its ante.

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In the evening, after the Blogging Ethics Round Table, I met up with Maning (whom I’ve met before) and a several other OpenStreetMap mappers and supporters for the first ever Philippine OpenStreetMap Meetup, which was held at Grappa’s in Greenbelt 3. Over micro-brewed Czech Praha beer and some pizza, we dicussed mapping anecdotes, the need (or not) to set up a local OSM organization, the idea of setting up a mapping party, and other relevant stuff about mapping in the Philippines. Details can be read over at the OSM talk-ph mailing list.

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One of the cool things about OpenStreetMap (OSM) is that the data is immediately usable by anyone for any purpose. (See my OpenStreetMap category for other posts about OSM.) An end user can have access to the (massive) raw data and in fact, people have been building tons of applications using it. One of these applications that I’d like to show you is the whimsically-named Yet Another OpenStreetMap Routing Service or YOURS. Check out and play around with the simple-but-cool demonstration website. This demo site is a web application that displays optimal routes between two points you select and was launched last year.

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Happy New Year everyone! It’s been an interesting 2008 for me and one of the online projects that I’ve been quite active in is OpenStreetMap (see my blog posts on this topic). To follow up on my post about 2008 in crowdsourced map making, check out this cool animated video showing the yearlong 2008 activity in the OpenStreetMap project. A frame of the video showing the Philippines and the Asia-Pacific region is shown above.

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It’s been a pretty interesting year for amateur map making using crowdsourcing techniques. OpenStreetMap has been going strong while Google has released Map Maker just last June while Wikimapia followed up with their Beta website. I came across these two interesting and remarkably similar maps showing the extent of efforts in OpenStreetMap in the past year and Google Map Maker since its launch.

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As if Google Map Maker and OpenStreetMap were not enough, Wikimapia had publicly opened their Beta website, which is yet another crowdsourced road mapping project, early last month. It seems that they had a private beta going months before and they have not opened it to the public until November. (I learned of the announcement from Google Maps Mania.)

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Last October 18, I attended a really small intimate meetup for Filipino OpenStreetMappers and contributors to WaypointsDotPH. This was held in Makati at the posh condo unit of Louie Galvez, who’s into real estate. Louie is one of the prominent people associated with WaypointsDotPH.

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I was invited to attend the Google Map Maker Power User’s Launch last October 7 at the Makati Shangri-la Hotel. If you know me, you’d know that I won’t refuse such an event. Unfortunately, I arrived at the venue from work a bit too late for the presentation, but I managed to get to talk with Dickson Seow, Corporate Communications Head of Google Southeast Asia (based in Singapore), and Jason Chuck, Product Marketing Manager for the APAC region (based in Hong Kong), regarding my questions and opinions about Google Map Maker. Apparently, Dickson had been looking forward to meet me and Jason had even read some of my blog posts. I guess Aileen Apolo, the Google Philippines Country Representative, had briefed them about me.

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Here’s a couple of interesting development on the Google Geography department. First, the quick news item: Google has dropped Navteq as one of its mapping data providers (i.e., companies that provide street, point-of-interest, and routing data) in favor of continuing to do business with Tele Atlas. This is not unexpected since Navteq was recently acquired by Nokia and the industry movement of these two companies in the past year have made them competitors of each other. This latest move by Google was first revealed last Friday, September 19, in a blog post by Mike Blumenthal. The announcement from Google Maps Guide Adam contained this snippet:

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Late last month, Google announced and released Map Maker, a service that lets users add streets and other underlying data that will eventually make its way to the actual map tiles that you see in Google Maps. To put it—maybe too—simply, it’s like Wikipedia for Google Maps. But this is not like Google’s My Maps service, which lets you create custom maps by adding a layer of data on top of the underlying Google maps imagery. Map Maker lets you update that underlying imagery itself. Interestingly, you can trace over the satellite imagery and this is a boon for budding mapmakers since Google has the best worldwide satellite imagery coverage among all the online mapping services.

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One thing I did over the long weekend was to contribute some more to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, something I had been doing last year. This time around, I tackled various places in Metro Manila, not just the southern portions, and I added more types of data and not just streets.

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Ever since I discovered that the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project expanded their coverage to the whole world, I was excited to map out my neighborhood since I saw that my area is still virgin territory yet untouched by Philippine-based OSM contributors. You can actually add data on the site itself using their Potlatch web app. It’s a slick Adobe Flash-based application that provides a rudimentary, yet powerful map data editor and can directly show Yahoo! Maps satellite imagery for tracing streets. The other popular way of adding data is via the JOSM Java-based desktop application. JOSM is intended for power users and serious OSM contributors.

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I’ve heard about OpenStreetMap (OSM) (see the Wikipedia article) maybe one or two years ago and was interested in the collaborative aspects of it. This mapping project aimed to create a free (as beer and in speech) street geodata of the whole United Kingdom and Ireland. While Great Britain already has excellent mapping data care of the Ordnance Survey (the national mapping agency of the UK), the problem is that this data is not free (as in beer and speech). The Ordnance Survey holds the copyright to the mapping data and charges people who want to use it, despite being funded by taxpayer’s money. So the OpenStreetMap project was born.

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