Slashgeo

Last weekend was the first OpenStreetMap conference called The State of the Map. OMS has been mentioned quite a few times before. The opening keynote was given by Google's Ed Parsons which shares his slides. You can read comments from Dan Karran, high earth orbit, Maemo and Brain Off blog. From this last link: "We’re nearing consensus in the nature of the challenges facing OpenStreetMap as it’s growing, the approaches to take, and bit by bit heading towards solutions. Even the extremely contentious legal debate is moving towards actions — drawing up a concise list of questions for presentation to a (paid for) lawyer. The foundation is starting to get more financially comfortable, so there’s also money for servers and a recognized conduit for donations."

SlashDot is currently having a discussion on the aforementioned topic. At a glance, it seems to be about OpenStreetMap. Here is part of their summary : "Goodchild's paper looks at volunteered geographic information as a special case of the more general Web phenomenon of user-generated content. It covers what motivates large numbers of individuals (often with little formal qualifications) to take part, what technology allows them to do so, how accurate the results are and what volunteered geographic information can add to more conventional sources of such information." Head on over there to discuss and get the link to the original story.

Here's a wrap-up of last month's geonews regarding OpenStreetMap. First is a long discussion on the licence attributed to data contributed to the OpenStreetMap project, an exert: "Many of the problems arise because Creative Commons (the “CC” of our licence), as the name suggests, is largely concerned with “creative works” - music, literature, art, and so on. OpenStreetMap, on the other hand, produces data: a factual, uncontroversial recording of the world around us. [...] In the [Science Commons initiative] protocol, Creative Commons restates the problem that copyright simply does not apply universally to factual information." Then there's an update on Nestoria, the first commercial application now using exclusively OSM data. We also have Google's Ed Parsons discussing the differences between data in Google Maps and OpenStreetMap. Other OSM entries include a short discussion on the community surrounding OSM vs "old timers", a mention of OSM during the KDE 4 keynote, a visual comparison of Google data vs OSM + OpenAerialMap data over China, a short account of using JOSM, the advanced OpenStreetMap editor, and finally, the announcement of this year's State of the Map 2008 conference will be held in Ireland. See also the numerous related stories below (more if you search the Slashgeo archives). On a personal note, I used to say about OSM that data is particularly useful in Europe, but not in North America yet... after a quick peak today at the status of OSM completion in NA, I admit I'm impressed, data has been added very rapidly and this is obviously great news for public domain data.

Nick writes "CloudMade announced details of their OpenStreetMap Grants scheme yesterday. The idea is simple — anyone can apply for grants of £100 — £1000+ to support useful, interesting or innovative work around OpenStreetMap. This could be anything from squashing OSM’s 10 most annoying bugs to mapping an entire city to building an OSM community from scratch to writing a new mapping client. The grants scheme is open to anyone regardless of location — all ideas are considered and the chosen entries will be announced on CloudMade's blog." Recent OSM related stories copied below, but a lot more with a search.

Jani Patokallio writes "Another step down the road of merging together open content: OpenStreetMap maps and Wikitravel travel guides have now been combined together into Wikitravel Paris , a 185-page guidebook to the City of Light. Like all Wikitravel Press books, the entire tome is updated monthly and printed on demand when you order. Expect to see many more OSM/WT books like this in the future!" I copied below some related stories, but a search will reveal how often we cover OpenStreetMap, including it's other commercial applications.

Nick Black writes "We’re pleased to announce that registration for the State of the Map 2008 is now open. Go to this page to sign up. The State of the Map is OpenStreetMap's conference — covering all aspects of using and producing open geodata. Speakers at last year's conference included Google's Ed Parsons, Multimap founder Sean Phelan as well as a host of OSMers, including Steve Coast, Barry "bouncing maps" Crabtree and many more. This year's conference is taking place in Limerick, Ireland on the 12th and 13th July 2008 with even more home-brew-GPS-slippymap-bicyclemapping fun than last year."

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.