Thingomy.co.uk

Having not posted in a while, and having some good photos lying around, I thought it was a good idea to kill 2 birds with one stone.

My cat, Jasper:

I managed to take a photo of an event before it happened from hundreds of miles away, and all without knowing I’d done it…

In actual fact it’s a photo of Samhuine that I took last year.

Samhuine 2008

Beltane main web page

JR

There has been a lot of work done on this porject over the past days. Matt Williams has created the following:

Descussed further here:OSM GB-Talk archives. The method used to create this is not really sustainable, but once things are devoloped a little, we should be able to create similar results with only a little user interaction.

Milliams’ Verticality Meter has been set up and used to catagorise the images as to thier verticalness, with great results, the following map gives the output: map

This project was sponsored by ITO World Ltd who organised the project in the first place. Travelline are working with us to strongly support the improvment of maps. At the end of the day, the plan is to create mapping data by tracing the images to further enhance the data on OpenStreetMap.org.

I got a new job.

It’s working for Liverpool University, School of Archeology, the Classics and Egyptology; as a computer tech.

I will I’ll put some updates up here with more information about what I’m doing once I start… tomorrow.

It appears that some people looking at this stream don’t actually know what’s going on. About a week ago I got an email telling me that a company called ITO World were looking for somone with a camera to volunteer to go up in a plane and take an areal survey of Stratford-upon-Avon. I enquired what the deal was, and true to my usual form I got roped in before I knew where I was. It was however a fantastic experiance.

I haven’t imported all the images yet, but i’ve gotten to 793 so far — and the vast majority of them are fully usable.

I do feel like a bit of an idiot in that I managed to take 231 of them mis-focused — they are still perfectly usable — you can still see car windscreens, but they have rounded corners, not square ones. They just don’t have the same crispness to them.

I did have a worry that there would be large gaps in the coverage — but judging from the number of buildings that i’ve seen in about 10 images, I don’t thik it’s goign ot be a big issue. there may be some places near the edge of town that are only covered at low resolution, but it should be fine.

Now if someone would please inform me of the best way to ortho-rectify 900ish images, I’d be most appreciative… the collection is here, can be exported in a matter hours, however it ammounts to about 10GB, so is niether webable nor emailable.

There is another batch of photos up on flickr — these are some of the more aesthetic images I found, but these are at the resolution and angles that I did the whole town at. See here

I should also mention that Travelline are working with us to strongly support the improvment of maps. At the end of the day, the plan is to create mapping data by tracing the images to further enhance the data on OpenStreetMap.org.

The following should show up properly on my blog, appologies if it displays wrong on other systems, these are duplicates of 2 of the images on flickr:

I’ve now done the trip, and I can tall you that it was a long day, but it was a truly fantastic experiance, many insights into how things work with this sort of thing, but that can wait.

I have pre-processed the first batch of Areal photos, see here

Tomorrow at 1500 I’m taking a flight for OpenStreetMap.

I’ve managed to get the opportunity to be the photographer on what is possibly OSM’s first ever plane hire. The flight will last an hour, and will involve flying in ever decreasing circles over Stratford-upon-Avon — I fully expect to run out of camera memory.

This is a totally experimental process for us, and I really don’t know how the results are going to turn out, but in addition to the images themselves, we as a community will learn a great deal about how to do this sort of thing in future.

I was hoping to have a good deal more time for planning, but there is looking to be a fantastic weather window (uv index 6, and it’s not even summer , which would be too good to miss.

The flight is funding by ITO World Ltd. Traveline are also supporting the improvement on Stratford-upon-Avon data in advance of the AGI conference which takes place in the town starting on the 22nd September.

Recently I have been doing a fair amount of mapping — a couple of hours a day or so.

I attended the liverpool mapping party a few weeks ago, and had a good time.

Since the area I’m in at the moment is mostly mapped, I decided to think outside the bbox a little, and start working on San Angelo, Texas. (I visited there for a few weeks when in america a couple of years back)

The americans are really lucky, in that they have the TIGER data — this is publically available census data, but it really is pants when it comes to quality — it’s like the results of a kit scribbling a map on an envelope — it has general layout, and it has names (that are noramlly acurate), it even has connectivity (even when there isn’t any in reality) — but when it comes down to it, the whole thing needs a really good review before it’s any good.

Now the americans are not too into user contribution. San angelo is a fair sized city, (about 200,000 people if I remember correctly) and asside from automated TIGER import tools, and one other person that retagged a couple of roads after my request, I’m the only person to have ever touched it.

I imagine that most of them would be a little dishartened having to tag a freeway as a “Motorway” though

So I’ve spent the last week or so going through large areas of it with yahoo satalite images, lining everything up (as is the accepted method). I’m about quarter of the way through the city so far.

– edit 2009-08-11 — changed title from “San angelo”

I’m trying to do some tidying up on my gallery, but I need some help.

If anyone has any old (or new) links to anything in my gallery, could they please tell me about them, so that I can check that what I’m doing won’t break them.

I know that there are several link scemes in existance for my gallery (due to a few changes I have made since it went up) and I need at least one link in each format in order to test everything.

Please let me know if you have anything that may be able to help me.

… when you are taking a walk in a park, look up and notice the jpeg artifacts in the clouds