For my latest adventure around the world with mediascapes I went off to the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s second annual conference, entitled State of the Map. This year the conference was held in Limerick, Ireland - cue an obligatory limerick competition (the winner of which I unfortunately didn’t write down).
For those you haven’t already heard, the driving force behind the OpenStreetMap idea is that the online maps that many people believe are free, such as Google or Yahoo maps, are actually far from that. Yes, you can look at them for free, and can build mashups where your own data is overlaid on top, but you cannot extract the maps images and use them offline in any way, you can’t print them in paper brochure and you cannot add, update, or alter them without falling foul of the licence restrictions all of these sites include. That is, all of them except for OpenStreetMap.
Essentially it’s the wikipedia of online mapping, built using crowd-sourcing - a large-scale online collaboration where anyone can add to the map, or fix errors they find. The way it is done is that people cycle around with a GPS that logs their path, and record the street names, locations of parks, pubs, shops or restaurants they pass using using a camera or pen-and-paper. Back home they upload the GPS log and use one of OSM’s mapmaking tools such as potlatch or JOSM to draw in the streets, paths, & junctions over their route, and enter in the other point-of-interest data.
We first looked at OpenStreetMap a couple of years ago but found that the data was so sparse that the maps really were not all that useful. Fast-forward to the present though, and the 46000 registered users have done an amazing job so that the quality of maps in major cities like Bristol is often more detailed and up-to-date than the equivalent Google map.
For example, here’s the centre of Bristol in openstreetmap
and here’s the same area in maps.google.com.
The openstreetmap version has extra details like the footpaths, pubs, car parks, and churches. For those who know Bristol, you’ll also notice that it has the new unfinished Cabot circus development, which included the redirection of several major roads. Even though the roads were changed over a year ago, the current google map doesn’t include this.
At the conference there were a whole series of talks on people who’d been evangelising OpenStreetMap (OSM) in their own countries, Bolivia, Japan, Canada. Cue the oft-repeated scene of a ‘before’ and ‘after’ view of the map data, accompanied by much ooing, ahhing, and applause. Also there were many speakers who were using OSM data commercially, in print such as the WikiTravel press series, or online such as AND (who donated their entire map of the Netherlands to OpenStreetMap).
For my part I gave a talk entitled Pervasive Media and OSM and demonstrated a simple mediascape game in the hotel grounds based on myLocated Quiz Game tutorial in conjunction with OSM map data.
In the talk, I introduced the new mscape version 2.2 which includes integrated OpenStreetMap functionality - so you can use OSM maps in the authoring of your mediascapes. I also talked about how access to creative-commons licensed geographic data enables a wide variety of interesting possibilities, such as using building outlines to generate 3d models of the local environment, for gaming, audio environmental modelling, predicting the accuracy of GPS.
Download the game created for the conference - Kilmurry Quiz
















