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Apr 06
2009

BarcampOxford GeoMaps and Data

Posted by Andrew Luke

Andrew Luke

Much of this session was informed by Nick Burch. Breadcrumb-traces for maps by Nick cycling aroun Oxford on his bike, has formed part of the city's complete geomapping.  (Some rather good photographs here) He tells us that a variety of map editors are used including the Flash based Potlatch, and the Java-based JOSM

Nick mentioned that someone had created a geo-mapped database of phoneboxes with details of whether or not they had SMS, accepted cards, the numbers of the phones, and details if they contained a postcode.

In geo-mapping, everything is revision based.

We got to hear how data was occassionally manipulated to ward off large lorries travelling through tiny gaps in small village roads.
In the US, Tiger Data from the government can be downloaded for free, although its not always accurate, and a often people spend time cleaning this up.
Under a Creative Commons license...well, geodata may not be applied, it doesn't belong to anyone. A number of companies tried to get around this by going for the Creative Property claim. This often led to companies creatively stamping through the use of  fake or trap streets. The wiki-ing of these led to the companies subsequently removing such detail rather quickly.

Following this, there were some discussions about new class licenses, giving and restricting appropriate data.


Additional OSM Link: http://www.opengeodata.org/?cat=20


This blog entry is part of a series based on my notes from the OxfordApacheBarcamp sessions, user-generated conferences held at The University Club, 4th-5th April. More details can be found on this wiki, Twitter feed at #barcampoxford and lots of places.


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