Notices

Hey, just thought I'd toss you guys a note to mention that I ran into the guys from OpenStreetMap down at Ohio Linux Fest this year. He had some pretty interesting stuff about it, some of the size of the community behind it (167,000 active contributors) and the fact that it doubles in size every 6 months! They also apparently have their maps available in both raster and vector formats, a huge GEO database, and they even mentioned that they're very much like a wiki for maps and that they'll very soon be able to export their maps into other formats (Garmin, TomTom, etc) and even have full routing capability built into the maps.

Count me in as one of their new members. I started to import some roads this summer during my last vacation trip in Finland. I used the Osm2Go on N810 to collect the waypoints and upload to openstreetmap server. After that I used PC to edit the data.

I also did work a lot during past 1-2 months by doing "cleanup" work on Dallas/Fort Worth area. Most notably I added/fixed many bridges. Most of the original road data was imported using some "Tiger import", that doesn't know if roads crossing each others at bridges and intersections are connected or not. I fixed many of those, so it should now work a lot better if/when using the routing features.

As far as I know the street address data is still almost non-existent. That will be a lot of work...

I encourage everyone to try. It is pretty easy to start editing existing data using web browser and the flash application. In the US there are good and detailed aerial images shown on top of the editable map. in other words adding/fixing roads doesn't need any GPS data!

Did the Mer contingent show up and how did it look in person?

Mer was a no-show. If they were there, they certainly didn't have a booth.

I don't think anyone from Mer planned to be there which I may be wrong, I will be at Florida Linux Show at end of October.