OpenStreetMap Sends UK Volunteer Mapper To Antigua 52
Gerv writes "When Google launched their Map Maker community mapping tool last year, they included loads of Caribbean islands. This led Ed Parsons (chief Google Maps guy) to say that he was sad there wasn't any fieldwork involved. Well, now OpenStreetMap have gone one better — following a successful Pledgebank pledge, they have got together the money to send one randomly-chosen guy to Antigua for a week to work on the OpenStreetMap map!"
Re:Let me be the first (Score:3, Interesting)
to say that I will take one for the team and volunteer to map Hawaii
Always puzzles me why more people don't up and move to Hawaii. If I was an American citizen I'd move there in a heartbeat. There's always some kind of jobs for clever people and I'm sure Hawaii is no exception. I mean why would you live in Montana when you could live in Molokai?
All Canada in OSM and more (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm an OSM enthusiast and wanted to share this: Canada, one of the 'poor countries' of OSM, is on the verge of seeing *all* roads added to OSM [openstreetmap.org]. No kidding.
Here's an excellent OSM introduction webcast [fosslc.org] on fosslc.org.
If you want to learn more about OSM, here's my shameless (really) plug [slashgeo.org], hell, even the White House uses OpenStreetMap! [slashgeo.org] With projects like OpenRouteService [openstreetmap.org], one will be able to replicate many of the important services provided by Google Maps, MS Virtual Earth, Yahoo! Maps, MapQuest, etc.
Re:What can be worse? (Score:4, Interesting)
Mapping for OSM is easy. Set your GPS to record your trail, and record street names and businesses as you drive/walk around. As long as the GPS and whatever device you use for street names have synchronized clocks, the work of matching them up and drawing the streets can be done later.
Ha ha ha, ow splitting my sides! You've never been to Antigua, I note. Street names? Unlikely, even in St John. Business names in St John maybe; elsewhere on the island, forget it. We saw only two direction signs anywhere - every telegraph pole had an arrow pointing to a night club on the north end, and an arrow pointing to Harmony Hall, a truly marvellous restaurant at the south end. You want somewhere else? Find it yourself by random walk.
Playing with OpenStreetMap data (Score:3, Interesting)
Last week PGCon had a session introducing this project and how to use OpenStreetMap with PostgreSQL [pgcon.org]. One Postgres add-on that's very popular in the mapping space is PostGIS [refractions.net], which lets you do all sorts of spatial bits it used to take expensive propriety tools to handle.