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Category: OpenStreetMap

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits

4:06 pm PHT

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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A Year of Crowdsourced Map Making

2:10 am PHT

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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Crowdsourced Road Mapping Project #3: Wikimapia Beta

1:13 am PHT

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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OpenStreetMap-WaypointsDotPH Meetup

4:54 pm PHT

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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Official Philippine Launch of Google Map Maker

3:00 am PHT

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.  :-P

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Google Dumps Navteq; Opens Up Map Maker for the Philippines

7:08 pm PHT

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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Google Map Maker Takes on OpenStreetMap?

8:07 pm PHT

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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More OpenStreetMapping

11:53 am PHT

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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OpenStreetMapping My Neighborhood

6:10 pm PHT

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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OpenStreetMap Does the Philippines

4:43 pm PHT

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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