Thingomy

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”

The project to map Lerwick in the Shetland Isles off Scotland for OSM continues.

A few months ago, a company called Cloudmade provided me with the use of a gps receiver for the purposes of this project.

Having had someone I know driving around the area for months with the GPS set, virtually all of which would have happened anyway regardless of the presence of the GPS set.

(you may have to link through to the main post page to view the images properly)

There is a lot of data, about 300MB in total, and filtering it was not simple, (I spent a good 3 days up to the oxters in batch files, and even cygwin, thanks to Heliomass for help on that bit) but now most of the gibberish bits are gone, and the data is mostly clean and good. You can see some fully edited data here (please view full size, it really is awesome):

I’ve done a load of work tracing out the roads from the data, there is still some small bits missing, but nothing major. I’m about half way through the process of classifying and labelling everything, below shows just how bad it was before and my progress about half way through:

The town centre — notice that there are roads in entirely the wrong place in the old version:

Wider view of the town, notice a load of new housing on the periphery:

Unfortunately the system takes a while to update, so my last day’s work or so is missing, to follow the updates as they happen, view these links:
narrow
wide

I have just signed up for a 1 day seminar in London next month on photographic lighting — more details after the event.

I have also solved (i think) my geotagging problems for once and for all — unless some small details stops me.

(If you don’t know what a geotag is, you can stop reading now btw)

The tool that does it is found here: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/

It’s a lightroom plugin, stores the data with the images as they are being developed, and without undue stress adds the data to all jpeg exports. it’s not fully polished yet, but it has few enough wrinkles that it seems to be up to the job.

The same bloke that does it also does a flickr upload plugin that seems to work really well. There are other goodies in there too.

Unfortunatly I have yet to find a solution that I can get working that will export to ftp, the irony being that the functionality is already in lightroom only I can get it to not upload a bunch of html stuff with the images.

I am currently undertaking a mapping project for the Open Streetmap project.

Cloudmade who do a great deal of work with the OSM community have given me a grant to get a GPS set for this purpose.

The device has been shipped off to Shetland where it is being driven around by a friend of mine. I received the first batch of data a few days ago, and save for a few small issues, the data is good, clean and ready for proper processing.

On completion this project will allow the addition of very accurate mapping of central Shetland in OSM maps.