Category: maps

Doing the OpenStreetMap jigsaw

Posted on by Harry Wood

Doing the OpenStreetMap jigsaw As a follow up on the OpenStreetMap jigsaw, it seems dad has conquered the 1000 piece beast. Here’s what he had to say about his Christmas present:
“I finally finished the jig-saw the day before yesterday, after several days obsessively working on it. Nearly drove your Mum mad because apart from distracting me from the things she thought were more important, it occupied the dining table for several days. It was certainly quite intriguing, a challenging test of topographical knowledge of London. It would make a good training tool for taxi drivers. The lettering was certainly too small and fuzzy. I found a magnifying glass was useful. But even so it was often unreadable, unless it was a street-name which I half-knew or remembered anyway. I expected it would get easier towards the end, when with a limited number or pieces, it would be possible simply to complete the missing geometry of red, green or orange road patterns. In fact it got more difficult in that respect because the pieces remaining contained fewer distinguishing lines. I finally learned that an effective technique was to examine the lettering on each piece to establish which way up it should go, and carefully keep the pieces orientated correctly even if they couldn’t immediately be fitted. Thus it was possible to key the shapes of the remaining pieces as well as the design on them. I found it a more satisfying puzzle than the 500 piece Turner painting of the Fighting Temeraire, still unfinished from last year’s Christmas. This includes a large number or plain pieces of similar colour, which is ultimately boring unless you’re a jig-saw fanatic.”

So there you have it.  It is do-able. That’s a relief.  I hadn’t thought about the text orientation advantage. I guess that does help a lot.

A couple of people have asked me for more information about how to make your own OpenStreetMap jigsaw, or for help with doing so. It’s pretty tricky. I gave some details in my original post, but I could write some tutorials, or even make software to make it easier.  …Low down on my todo list right now though I’m afraid

OpenStreetMap Jigsaw

Posted on by Harry Wood

I got an exciting Christmas present for my dad. Pretty sure he doesn’t read my blog so I’ll tell you about it here (shhhh)

OpenStreetMap Jigsaw3

There’s a bunch of different sites for ordering custom jigsaw puzzles. Obviously the normal thing is to use one of your own photos, but how about a jigsaw map? ….open licensed of course. A map could be a cool image to use on a jigsaw puzzle, because its a nice intricate image, with evenly spread complexity (compared to some photos at least) and it becomes a puzzle of geographical knowledge rather than just colour matching.

I decided to order one from AllJigsawPuzzles.co.uk which does 1000 piece jigsaws! This is 66 x 50 cm (26 x 20 ins) and costs £29.99 (+ £2.79 delivery) I sent them an OpenStreetMap image which was 7168 x 5448 pixels, here’s what I received a few days later:


OpenStreetMap Jigsaw 1
OpenStreetMap Jigsaw 2
I’m pretty pleased with the result. It comes in quite a nice box. The box and the jigsaw pieces themselves are with a papery finish, not gloss (maybe less durable)  The text of the road names came out a bit on the small side. I think the fuzziness you see in the photo is actual fuzziness of the printing rather than camera blur, so yes the text would definitely benefit from a few more pixels, but hopefully it is not too painful to read while doing the puzzle.I knew that this was a danger as I prepared the image. An interesting “feature” of AllJigsawPuzzles.co.uk is that, despite a deluge of information on there, it doesn’t tell you much about what kind of image you’ll need until after you’ve made a credit card payment. In fact the image upload page is available with all this information, but you’re not linked to that until after paying.

Even then it doesn’t actually tell you what pixel dimensions to go for, but you can work it out. The information is: “If possible save the picture at around 300 dpi (dots per inch), that is the resolution we work at. If you crop your picture before sending it, then try to have the picture size in the ratio of 25:19;”. The printed image is 26 x 20 inches, so it’s recommending 7800 x 6000 pixels. Now I sent a slightly lower res image at 7168 x 5448 pixels. To be honest I’d already faffed around a lot with the image at this size, before reading the instructions on this page, and I couldn’t be bothered to re-do everything. But also I figured they were probably erring on the high side at 300dpi, and I knew the text size was going to be an issue. If I’d sent a larger image (covering a large area of map) then the text would have printed even smaller.

Of course what I should have done, is generated the map image myself, using a custom Mapnik stylesheet with larger text for printing. I notice Holger Schöner has some nice examples of this: ‘Mapnik maps for other resolutions’ on his demo page. But I was too lazy, so I used the BigMap perl code which creates a big image by tile stitching. I did actually use a custom CloudMade style with no buildings and no residential grey patches showing. This was because the coverage of these things is irritatingly incomplete at the moment (I organised a special mapping party to tackle this back in September, but there’s still a lot of work to do on that) and it would have annoyed me to have these problems showing on a jigsaw.

I may regret this though because it means fewer recognisable details for the purposes of puzzle solving. In fact it remains to be seen how do-able this 1000 piece puzzle will be. I was thinking afterwards perhaps I should have gone for a 520 piece one, or maybe I should have added a slight graduated fill to the whole background (make it easier to roughly place pieces). Or maybe that would be too easy. We’ll have to wait and see how my dad gets on. I’ll get back to you on that after Christmas!   ( UPDATE: Doing the OpenStreetMap jigsaw )

Last day for CloudMade London

Posted on by Harry Wood

Today’s the last day for the CloudMade London team. We’re not powering down any servers. It’s business as usual for the rest of CloudMade, but for me, Andy, Matt, Shaun and Emma it’s time to finish packing up junk and selecting office furniture to purloin.

It’s been an pretty amazing year. Our team here in London was working with the OpenStreetMap community to further the goals of the project, and I hope we did a good job of this, but I can’t help feeling regret at not having done more, or certainly at not being able to continue the work.

It’s been hectic. Time was gobbled up on the various OSM communication channels and on CloudMade support emails. What was left was generally spread too thinly between many projects and ideas. I’ve been in the eye of the OpenStreetMap storm, watching powerless as the debris flies past. I’m sure future jobs won’t ever be quite the same (and not nearly as much fun), but right now I still have a head full of project ideas and a busy inbox, so I need to learn the lessons and get better at juggling these things.

Last week I saw some great talks at the Open Source Show and Tell, and some of them really related well to OpenStreetMap and to what might have come next for our team.

Leisa Reichelt talked about the Drupal 7 User Experience Project. A group of paid people worked on a major UX overhaul for the next version of Drupal. She described the type of usability studies they did, and some of the processes they had to go through to introduce these ideas and have them adopted by the drupal developer community. She said they used video a lot (see YouTube group), not just because it gets across usability ideas well, but just as a more engaging way of getting their message to the community. She stressed the need for feedback early on, and throughout the process. Now OpenStreetMap is just at the beginning of this process, with a few people starting to mention UX as the next big priority (Not just front page flower-arranging. We need to look at the whole user experience) As an Open Source project, we’re pretty small fry compared with Drupal. Certainly we can try to do a similar thing, but it’s shame there’s no longer a paid team of people who could dedicate themselves to this.

Iain Farrell talked about Canonical and their work with the ubuntu community. He talked about the big community conferences they hold every 6 months. Naturally this made me think of OpenStreetMap’s State Of The Map conference, but actually these are all about getting ubuntu developers together to brain-storm and design the next releases of the software. Clearly this is another highly “mature” Open Source community, and the conferences fit into a very specific point in their carefully controlled release cycles. What’s the closest thing OpenStreetMap has to this? Probably our London developer meet-ups and “hack weekends”. That’s another thing we’re going to struggle to do now, if only in terms of having a venue.

Things like release cycles and UX reviews all require a level of coordination beyond the basic mish-mash of individual developers scratching their own itches. As OpenStreetMap continues to grow, we’ll need more coordination. I’m sure Foundation Working Groups will be part of the solution, but these are made up of volunteers too. I’m sure we’ll make it work one way or another, but I’m sorry our CloudMade team didn’t get to see things through to the next level in 2010.

OpenStreetMap at Where2.0Now

Posted on by Harry Wood

At Where2.0Now I presented the OpenStreetMap idea with these slides:

OpenStreetMap talk at Where2.0Now on slideshare

I will post a video link if and when it comes available, but here’s a wee photo for the time being:

Harry Wood presenting at Where2.0Now

Promoting OpenStreetMap

I like to highlight similarities with wikipedia. The approach of letting anyone edit without strict moderation, the wiki “soft security” approach, really does work. But I think to some people this will seem unlikely, particularly if they’ve never heard about the details of Wikipedia. Hopefully this audience was web-savvy enough to get the idea.

The usual pitch was modified slightly. Normally we’ll say “Mapping is fun! Go out and try it!”, as a core message. I did mention mapping techniques, including the simple pencil & paper (something else I always like to highlight) but with a room full of GIS industry people I mainly tried to talk more about using OpenStreetMap. The last slide is a new one where I encouraged people not just to view OSM as a source for a one-off data download, but as an ongoing collaboration with other interesting possibilities. You can tap into the updates stream, you can contribute data back and benefit from further updates, and you can contact the OpenStreetMap community to ask questions and get involved.

Promoting CloudMade

Naturally I mentioned CloudMade services a few times.

The CloudMade style editor is an exciting tool for anyone interested in trying out quick and easy custom OpenStreetMap renderings.

I also mentioned Cloudmade downloads which offer more manageable (country level) extracts than the full Planet downloads aswell as ESRI shapefile downloads, all for free!

I’m still working for CloudMade for a few more weeks, but even if I wasn’t, it’s pretty natural to drop in a mention of these things when talking to firms about using open licensed geodata. There’s a bunch of other interesting products for geo-developers on the site.

Promoting myself

Of course the conference was a great opportunity to make a start at promoting myself. Things are winding up at the CloudMade London office which is sad, but the OpenStreetMap project is going from strength to strength, as is the geo-scene in general. In 2010, after I get back from Christmas in Brazil, my plan is to start freelance IT contracting work (although not ruling out permanent positions) I’d love to continue doing OpenStreetMap work, but I’m still trying to gauge how likely that is. Any hints/tips/ideas/job offers are welcome!

Where2.0Now AGI Northern Group Conference

Posted on by Harry Wood

Yesterday was the Where2.0Now conference of the AGI Northern Group.

Where 2.0 Now banner

Here’s the list of speakers again:

Rollo Home did a great job organising this, and managed to put together a really interesting day. There was all the usual geo-buzz and excitement around neogeo technologies which we see at London tech conferences and meet-ups, and this is always fun, but yesterday was interesting for a couple of other reasons.

Firstly there was lots of guys in suits there. Like at the other AGI geoconference events, the “traditional” GIS industry was out in force. A lot of the speakers (myself included) were taking the opportunity to spread the “neogeo” message to these people. It was also an opportunity for we cheeky whippersnappers to learn a thing or two from them. Lots more work to do on this. I feel the OpenStreetMap community in particular have a lot to learn and a lot more to offer big-business GIS firms if we could only learn to speak their language better. As usual, the conference participants widely agreed that there’s no point drawing strong distinctions between neogeographers and paleogeographers, and as usual we went ahead and did it anyway 🙂

Secondly the event was interesting because it was definitely not in the The South. No… not in California either. We ventured up to Harrogate in North Yorkshire to reach a whole new audience. We should do this more often. Thanks to GeoPlan for a great venue, and thanks to my mate Paul for putting me up at his house.

Some follow ups…

Blog posts: Tim Waters, Ed Parsons, Steven Feldman , John Fagan

The busy #geocom twitter stream was preserved as a pdf by Steven Feldman    Total failure to tweet by me I’m afraid.These MindMaps from Ant Beck give a nice overview of topics covered in the talks.

(update) I have blogged again with a little more detail of what my talk was about. I have uploaded my slides to slideshare with a ‘geocom’ tag (munged with the other events in the series). Maybe  they’ll be uploaded separately by the geocommunitylive user too.

Videos of the talks were also made, but probably won’t see the light of day for a while (…so surprise me)

OSM talk at London Wiki Wednesdays

Posted on by Harry Wood

London Wiki Wednesdays last night (Wednesday night in fact) was pretty good. It was kindly hosted by NYK line in the amazing city point tower. Here’s the slides for the little talk I gave:

‘OpenStreetMap : The Wikipedia of Maps’ on slideshare

In fact on the second slide you can see the city point tower in the aerial imagery screenshot.

My talk was explaining the similarities between this large open mapping collaboration, and wikipedia. Although mainly it was just a very quick run through of OpenStreetMap.  ( Some links related to the slides: the Flash editor, the desktop app editor, API, mapping techniques, gordo’s photo, stats, the Open License, opencyclemap.org, openpistemap.org, Hiking Map, Whitewater Maps, bus map, CloudMade style editor, and a zoomed in map of the building  )

David Terrar is back in the wiki mood and managing to secure venues and sponsors for future months, so I think it’s looking good. It will be somewhere different in November. Check back on the London page for details

London Wiki Wednesdays are back tonight

Posted on by Harry Wood

London Wiki Wednesdays

There was a series of monthly London Wiki Wednesdays events with presentations and networking chit-chat, all about wikis, blogs and social media technology, mostly as applied to enterprise use. Sadly they stopped happening back in 2008    ….but tonight they’re back!

London Wiki Wednesdays 7th October 2009

When I first went to Wiki Wednesdays a couple of years ago, I was massively enthusiastic about wiki collaboration in open content communities such as wikipedia, entirely for fun, as a hobby (though mostly pursued while bored at work). The events really opened my eyes to the possibility of working in this arena. I wanted a piece of this action. At the same time I was getting hooked on OpenStreetMap. Wiki-style collaboration to build a free map of the world. Since the last Wiki Wednesdays meet-up I’ve ditched my more dull I.T. job and got myself a job working full time on OpenStreetMap, so this evening I’m returning victorious!

I’m going to give a talk about OpenStreetMap. The talks are only 5 mins, so hopefully they’ll be a bunch of other talks. Often these are about behind-the-firewall or b2b collaboration style uses. Should be good.

Community Smoothness

Posted on by Harry Wood

Back in July we had a fantastic conference all about OpenStreetMap. I did a write up of ‘The State Of The Map 2009’ back then, but I didn’t mention my talk on “Community Smoothness”.

Sadly the proper video of my talk is not available yet, but you can hear my talk and see the slides as a video (15 minutes long.  14Mb download) :

“Community Smoothness” talk : m4v format, or mov format

Or you can see just the slides on slideshare.

I will update this with a link if and when the real video comes available.

It’s a talk about debates within the OpenStreetMap Community, particularly “tagging” debates.

  • An explanation of the big debate we had about the “smoothness” tag, and how this led people to question the wiki processes.
  • A run through of common suggestions to fix the process, and problems with these ideas: The idea of creating a tagging committee, and ideas of locking the wiki page, or creating other restricted lists (such as downloadable PDFs or preset files) which boil down to the same thing.
  • Technical solutions, creating separate web-apps which list tags: Featurama, TagWatch, OSMdoc, Tagstat, Floaty cloud-Tagwatch-on-steroids. [Update: TagInfo is the one to use now, and happily seems to be longer lasting]
  • My suggestions for simple social solutions: Write out tagging policies as with the Verifiability page. Maybe supply motivation for people to be more critical of tagging proposals. Long-standing community members should display more information leading to respect within the community, or give out awards and write testimonials to each other more. Most importantly, we should generally improve the standards of existing tag documentation as a way of raising the bar to new proposals.
  • Closing remark: We should always seek positive outcomes from debates, and look for ways of taking action.

Since giving this talk, everyone in the OpenStreetMap community is following my advice, and a new spirit of harmonious cooperation has settled over the project….  and look! There’s a pig flying past 🙂

Where2.0Now? AGI NG Conference in November

Posted on by Harry Wood

AGI logoI’m going to be speaking at Where2.0Now?, a conference of the AGI (Association for Geographic Information) Northern Group in Harrogate on 10th Nov. There’ll be talks from Chris Osborne, Chris Parker, Craig Moulding, Dr Michael Sanderson, Dr. Andrew Hudson-Smith, Dr. Richard Kingston, Ed Parsons, Gary Gale, Jo Cook, John Fagan, John McKerrell, Prof. Henk Scholten, Stuart Harrison, Tim Warr, Tim Waters. …and me! (Those following “Geographic Information” circles will recognise some names. It’s a good line-up. Not to be missed if you’re up North)

My talk will be 20mins all about OpenStreetMap.org of course. It will be based on my hour and half BCS talk and also covering more uses of OpenStreetMap. …so I may need to condense it down a bit!

UPDATE:  Where2.0Now AGI Northern Group Conference

30th Birthday BBQ

Posted on by Harry Wood

Big thanks to everyone who came and helped me celebrate my 30th birthday! Lots of people came and squeezed into my back garden for a BBQ. It was really great to assemble this random collection of mates. It was that classic slightly odd meeting of worlds, with groups of kayakers meeting OpenStreetMappers, meeting friends from back home, meeting brothers and sisters, and everyone in-between. Having said that we did partition off into different parts of the garden quite effectively. Hopefully everyone had fun. Much meat and beer was consumed, and best of all we actually had sunshine!

Comedy highlight was hearing everyone singing “Happy Birthday” with a dawning collective realisation that I was actually upstairs on the toilet at the time!


Where’s Harry?

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