In the second part of his critique of OpenStreetMap Justin O’Beirne discusses various issues surrounding labelling of cities in OpenStreetMap’s cartography, specifically in our default mapnik rendering of the US. The issues he highlights can be broadly divided into two categories: problems with our stylesheets and rendering technology; and problems with our data, and in [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Geo category.
Oxenden or Oxendon?
One of the data sets released by Ordnance Survey as part of the recent OS OpenData release was OS Locator, which is a gazetteer that basically lists the name of every road in the country along with a bounding box for it. ITO World have now made use of that data to do a comparison [...]
Well Done New Holland Pubishers
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the use of OpenStreetMap in The London Cycling Guide and specifically about the lack of proper credit for the project and its contibutors. Well I’m delighted to say that today a representative of the publishers posted a comment on that piece apologising and explaining what they’re doing [...]
How not to credit OpenStreetMap
I recently received my copy of The London Cycling Guide by Tom Bogdanowicz, which I bought both because I was interested in the routes it shows and because it uses OpenStreetMap maps throughout. As an example, here’s a part of one of the maps, showing the Isle of Dogs:
Response to OS Consultation
I finally got around to writing my response to the government consultation on releasing Ordnance Survey data – you can read my formal response but the summary is basically that yes I would like them to release some data but there are serious issues around some of the details such as the proposed license.
Mapzen: First Thoughts
CloudMade have tonight launched their Mapzen flash based editor for OpenStreetMap. It’s officially described as a beta, but as they’ve made it publicly available and it is working against the live API and editing real data I assume that is more of a “Google beta” than anything else. The basic editing of roads and such [...]
MONOPOLY City Streets EPIC FAIL
It seems Hasbro had a brilliant idea – launch a free online version of Monopoly™. So they got Tribal DDB to build it for them and engaged on a media blitz promoting MONOPOLY City Streets everywhere they could. Then they went live… I suspect they fairly quickly wished they had done things in a slightly [...]
Ordnance Survey Pricing Fail
Ed Parsons provides an interesting example of just how crazy the world UK of geodata can be – when a digital copy (with essentially zero marginal cost) of an Ordnance Survey map costs more than twice the equivalent paper map, with all it’s associated costs of production and distribution, something is very, very wrong somewhere. [...]