Slashgeo

The Mapping News Blog reports about OpenStreetMap new ability. It already supports a couple of different formats, including PNG, JPEG, PDF, SVG and Postscript. For more info and the screenshots, please visit the Mapping News Blog. Update: 04/22 14:47 GMT by S : Here's the official announcement on the new export capabilities. In addition to lxnyce's story, I recently found out (via Kurt) about eWorld, an open source framework to import mapping data, including OSM data. From the eWorld page: "eWorld is a framework to import mapping data from providers, such as OpenStreetMap.org (OSM), visualize it, edit and enrich it with events or annotational attributes and pass it to traffic simulators, such as SUMO or VanetMobiSim."

An innovative project, called OpenRouteService, shows how "volunteered geography" and OGC standards can be merged together. This project respond to the need for a "public-owned" routing service. From the article: "OpenRouteService.org is the first routing service that uses OpenStreetMap data and provides those through the standardized interfaces specified by the OGC within the OGC Open Location Services initiative (OpenLS)". This project has been implemented by the Research Group Cartography, Department of Geography, University of Bonn. The application works from Denmark to Italy. See this article for more information. Update: 09/30 21:17 GMT by S : Fixed gignacnic summary's source name.

When I show OpenStreetMap to friends and colleagues, I systematically talk about its coverage in Baghdad. Ogle Earth just did a comparison of the major webmapping sites specifically for Baghdad with screenshots. As much as OpenStreetMap is surprisingly great in some areas, a user comment reminds us it varies a great deal on the location, such as in this Turkish region: Live, Google, Yahoo, OpenStreetMap. See also related stories below.

In September we mentioned the conversion of OpenStreetMap data in shapefiles, but now that's much better: worldwide OpenStreetMap data available in shapefile, XML and Garmin formats. From the FGT entry: "Broken down by country/state, you can download: * OSM XML extracts * Garmin Map Files (OSM.err edition) * Osmosis country bounding polygon * Shapefile extracts * Navit maps * GPX POI * TomTom POI [...] CloudMade is developing APIs to deliver the OSM map data in web and mobile format, but these are currently in alpha and limited to developers." The FGT has a followup entry on OSM Garmin Maps. While we're on the OMS subject, you can now collect data for OpenStreetMap with the iPhone's OSMTrack: "OSMTrack is an application that allows you to use the iPhone 3G’s GPS to capture tracks and waypoints and upload them directly from the iPhone to the OpenStreetMap servers." See also related previous below.

The Mapperz blog has an excellent writeup on this new "beta" OpenStreetMap feature. It even supports path's which can be embedded in the map. Here is part of their summary, visit their page for more detail and screenshots : "Main idea of the project is to create an web application which will provide an easy way of embedding maps into web pages. Application is going to be deeply configurable and easy to install by anyone on his server. It is being implemented in PHP5"

The OpenStreetMap State of The Maps 2009 conference took place in Amsterdam last weekend. I plan to publish at least one separate related story, meanwhile Stefan Knecht, who submitted a story named "You shall not remit OpenStreetMap", writes "from the do-not-bash-the-crowd-department: Ed Parsons recaps the SOTM '09, citing Muki Haklay's updated comparison of OSM (OpenStreetMap) vs UK OS (Ordnance Survey) Meridian 2 data. The original article from August 2008 was widely cited as a proof of feasibility for OSM and misleadingly shortened as "the quality of the [OSM] data is comparable and can be fit for many applications". To make a long story short: OSM is getting better compared to 2008 but still OSM is far from professionally reliable. Read on at United Maps' blog." Also related, Yahoo! will "have removed all proprietary place data by 2010 and will make their data open". See also numerous related stories below.

NRCan just announced a new freely available layer to GeoBase.ca named 'Land Cover, Circa 2000 - Vector'. In my opinion, one the main interest of that new layer is that it actually integrates together many different sources of LULC into one product. The description: "Land Cover information is the result of vectorization of raster thematic data originating from classified Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 ortho-images, for agricultural and forest areas of Canada, and for Northern Territories. The forest cover was produced by the Earth Observation for Sustainable Development (EOSD) project, an initiative of the Canadian Forest Service (CFS) with the collaboration of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and in partnership with the provincial and territorial governments. The agricultural coverage is produced by the National Land and Water Information Service (NLWIS) of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC). Northern Territories land cover was realized by the Canadian Centre of Remote Sensing (CCRS). Land Cover data are classified according to a harmonized legend build from the partner's legends. This legend is principally based on the legend described in following publication: EOSD Land Cover Classification Legend Report, on which CFS and AAFC collaborated. Some classes related to Northern environments where added in order to meet the interpretation of the Northern land cover classification experts." See also related stories below.

We regularly mention OSM, but this might still be of interest to many: Between the Poles links to an 'Introduction to OpenStreetMap' 45-minutes webcast. The intro: "This presentation will introduce you to the breadth and depth of OpenStreetMap and related projects. You will learn why you should care about maps, how OpenStreetMap is beating every other map, and see some of the amazing things that are being done with OpenStreetMap data and software. The presentation will bring those with little or no OSM experience up to speed quickly and show how to use OpenStreetMap to make the maps you need." See also previous stories below.

Martijn van Exel writes "Registration is now open for State Of The Map 2009. State Of The Map is the annual international conference hosted by and revolving around OpenStreetMap, the free editable map of the world. The summer of 2009 will see the third edition of this conference, to be held in Amsterdam on July 10-12. For the first time, the conference will spread over a full three days.

Previous editions, in 2007 in Manchester and in 2008 in Limerick, attracted a crowd — OpenStreetMappers and others — from all over the world and renowned speakers from the likes of Google, Multimap and AND, to name a few. This year’s conference will see an extra day — Friday — dedicated to the theme of commercial viability of OpenStreetMap. Prominent professionals in the GIS and general IT industry, as well as politicians, will speak about and discuss current questions relating to this theme: ‘What is the real value of geo-information?’; ‘How can crowd-sourced initiatives like OpenStreetMap compete with commercial offerings?’. This will make for an exciting conference for anyone involved in geographic information.

OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. Since 2004 it has been made by people like you. It allows you to view, edit and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth. http://www.stateofthemap.org/" You'll find *a lot* of previous OpenStreetMap-related stories with a search, some manually copied below.

Off The Map offers an interesting entry on worldwide comparison of OpenStreetMap vs TeleAtlas street coverage­. From the entry: "Alex’s original assessment was that OSM is slightly ahead of Google/TeleAtlas worldwide and in in Africa and Asia. In Europe, OSM is well ahead. Google is slightly ahead in Oceania, and well ahead in North and especially South America." See also previous related stories below or use a search.

The Between the Poles blog offers an informative entry on open geospatial data around the world. From the entry: "Another contributor to the increasing availability of geospatial data is the exponential growth in open geospatial data, the data equivalent of open source in the programming realm. There are key technologies that have enabled this to happen. GPSs have become so inexpensive that geospatial data acquisition is now accessible to virtually everyone. Secondly, the Web 2.0 phenomenon has enabled the widespread sharing of user content, in this case geospatial data collected by you and me. But equally important are open geospatial data licensing, which defines the legalities (intellectual properties rights or IPR) for sharing open geospatial data, and the open geospatial data pricing model that determines how much it is going to cost you and me. Open geospatial data derives from two sources, government and what I'll call non-government open geospatial data organizations, which tend to follow a Web 2.0 model, where the data is collected and contributed by users, typically equipped with a GPS. A motivation for geospatial software entrepreneurs to be interested in open geospatial data is open access. If you develop a web application that requires geospatial data and you use TIGER or OpenStreetMap data you can deploy your application to the web and be pretty confident that you are not infringing on anyone's copyright. If you want to do this with geospatial data from Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo, or MapQuest, you need to read the fine print and may have to work out an agreement with the vendor or the data provider." Follow the link for comments on several individual country initiatives. Some related stories copied below.

GeoBase Support writes "In celebration of United Nations World Water Day on March 22, National Hydro Network's (NHN)of Canada own contribution is the release of a brand new data format added to its product line of NHN distribution formats. In fact, from now on, NHN product data can be downloaded in ESRI File Geodatabase (FGDB) format, in addition to GML (Geography Markup Language), ESRI Shapefile and KML (Keyhole Markup Language) formats already offered. This new FGDB format is offered with an ESRI ArcMap MXD Project file, which makes NHN data much more easily usable, notably because of the data structure, symbology or graphical semiology and already built-in geometric network it contains. Canada's national coverage of NHN data is now fully available in this new format. All this is accessible at no cost on GeoBase portal. For more details and to access available data, please see the National Hydro Network section." See also several related stories below.