After a bit of airline nightmare (do any US flights arrive on time anymore?) I made it to Limerick Ireland for OpenStreetMap’s (OSM) conference “State of the Map“. The talks have really highlighted how popular OSM has become. Roughly I break them into two buckets 1) the state of mapping a country 2) doing something cool with OSM data. The number of country presentations providing updates on OSM mapping progress is really impressive.

The usual suspects including Germany, Netherlands, France, our host Ireland and some surprising new places like Japan and Bolivia. The universal quality of each country presentation was how much had been mapped in the last year. The before and after pictures are quite dramatic. This was only reinforced by the massive posters on the wall of the conference venue showing six month incremental growth of mapped streets in the UK and Germany.

Equally impressive was the number of projects that are using OSM data for an innovative application. My personal favorite was OpenRouteService which allows users to geocode and route against OSM data. The project is being run at the University of Bonn and there are plans to open source the code, which would be great for providing open global geocoding services. Something we’ve struggled with finding. ITO also had a clever OSM implementation that allows you to query and filter through OSM data as separate map layers, both by feature type and edits (including temporal).

Wikitravel and Nestoria both had interesting examples of commercial services being built on top of OSM data. Wikitravel has a particularly cool approach where all the data they and the community has built up is free under Creative Commons, but they charge for on demand publishing of travel books you can take with you on a trip. Have to see if their geographic listings of travel amenities is something we can add to GeoCommons.

One of the most illuminating talks was “OpenStreetMap v the World” by Dair Grant, which provided a quantitative comparison of the accuracy of OSM vs. TeleAtals via Google Maps. Dair first did an analysis of Heath Scotland (roughly 10 km2) and found 89 errors in the TeleAtlas data. He then moved to Edinborough and did an analysis for a 10 km2 of OSM data and found 192 errors. Conclusion that none of the map providers are 100% accurate and OSM is not far off. A bit of detail on the OSM errors:

- 50% of the errors happened in 1km2
- 50% of the errors were missing roads (completeness is a common OSM challenge)
- 20% of the errors were missing names
- 15% of the errors were wrong names
- Only one error was from an incorrect junction

The big advantage of OSM when it comes to inaccurate data has been the ability to change the data easily. The big guys have caught on to this and just about all of them have developed technology to copy the concept:

- TomTom MapShare
- AND Map 2.0
- Google MapMaker
- TeleAtlas MapInsight

Dair pointed out that with all these services that there is no feedback loop to indicate your change was accepted and/or has been implemented. I believe this may not be true with Google MapMaker where the moderator provides feedback. Dair also provided a suggestion for OpenStreetBug to provide an easier mechanism to point out errors on the map. With all the discussion around crowdsourcing and accuracy this was a very enlightening talk. More to come from day two tomorrow.

Popularity: 12% [?]

ArcGIS 9.3 JavaScript API is now available. The two extensions that were also released at the same time were ArcGIS JavaScript Extension for the Google Maps API and the ArcGIS JavaScript Extension for the Virtual Earth. For more information on this free API, visit the ArcGIS 9.3 Resource Center.

Do you prefer GIS or Surveying? Apparently, a retracted article – due to legal jurisdictions – on GIS versus Surveying for Professional Surveyor Magazine caused quite a buzz. The article revealed continued tension and misperceptions between both GIS and Surveying communities. David G. Smith, a GIS practitioner, states, “One basic thing that we all need to come into reckoning with is that Surveying and GIS overlap, but that neither is wholly contained within the other, and that each has areas which may additionally be mutually exclusive from the other.”

Google is on the move. Now pedestrians can view their walking directions on Google Maps. Presently, the company’s existing maps are only good for driving directions. Use of this tool will be popular for major cities, especially those with one-way streets.

Known as a library for mapping APIs, Mapstraction allows the development and construction of mashups supported by major mapping providers such as Google Maps and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. The tool offers many features such as building a map where the user has an option to see the end result on either of the supported mapping providers, tile layer support and demos.

Have you heard of a Twitter conversation map? Well Walter Rafelsberger from MODUL/University Vienna/Department of New Media created just that. With the use of GeoNames, he was able to reveal the location of Twitter users and generate weather information for the ‘Twitter Weather Map.’

Popularity: 8% [?]

Every year in Pamplona Spain thousands of people risk their lives for the thrill of being chased by a 1,000 lbs bull. This is known as the encierro, the famous tradition of the nine-day festival of San Fermín starting the 6^th of July.

In honor of the festival that kicked off this week, I thought that this was a great opportunity to show how Finder! can be a great trip planning tool. With the ability to download geographic datasets of your choice as well as create your own, you can use Finder! to make a custom and interactive map that displays everything you want to do and see on your trip. If you are interested in joining the chaos of San Fermines, or just want to experience the region’s famous tapas and beautiful landscapes, we have created some datasets in Finder! that can help.

Most importantly, you can upload KMLs of the route of the run and descriptions of the most dangerous sections along the route. You can use these datasets to figure out what part you want to run or just which is the best section to watch from if you plan on renting a balcony. You can also watch videos of the run to see what each section looks like from ground zero.

We also have a dataset for hotels and the top tapas places so you can find a hotel close to the run or at least one that is close to all of the bars (although anywhere in Pamplona is close to a bar!). This map, for example, shows hotels and famous tapas bars.

So make sure you reserve you hotel early and that you have your white shirt and pants and red bandana packed. Also if you plan on running, with as many as 300 injured a year and the occasional death, this is a feat to be taken very seriously (and sober!). For more information on how to participate, if you dare, check out the official Pamplona website.

(Photo Credits)

Popularity: 11% [?]

Web 2.0 has created a grand collection of buzzwords and two of the most prominent have been “collective intelligence” and the “wisdom of crowds“. Both terms are closely related and have been some of the driving forces behind the success of popular applications like Digg, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and Freebase to name a few. While there are many positives associated with these aspects’ crowd behavior, there are also negative possibilities.

This struck home for me on my 4th of July drive from Princeton, NJ back to Washington DC. I’d been on a lucky roll avoiding traffic and toll backups till I arrived at the Susquehanna Bridge and traffic ground to a halt with red brakes lights flaring. I spent the next 45 minutes creeping along in a stop and go morass. As we poked along I began to wonder what the cause of the congestion would be, ranging from 1) a big wreck 2) road construction 3) DUI check point 4) a deer strike 5) Britney Spears pulled over for speeding or 6) an alien landing…

Eventually I got to the crest of a hill and saw the culprit. On the other side of the interstate, going in the opposite direction, a car had been pulled over by two cops (and the occupant wasn’t even Britney Spears). As traffic came parallel to the pulled over car everyone slammed on their brakes to have a good long look then went back to regular speed – no congestion – flowing smoothly.

In economics terms this is called “rent seeking” behavior “Cutting yourself a bigger slice of the cake rather than making the cake bigger.” In this case, cars are getting their slice of cake looking at the silliness on the side of the road and the whole cake suffers from a 45 minute delay. There are lots of examples like this where a crowd results in a negative externality – often times not intuitive like Braess’s Paradox where adding additional lanes to a highway or building a new road or bridge actually increases traffic congestion. Here the crowd all takes the new or expanded route (collectively stupid) and traffic gets worse.

We see the negative externalities of crowds happening all the time whether it is in traffic congestion or financial markets. This made me wonder what the negative externalities of crowds were on the Web. Some have posited that the negativity comes in using crowds for prediction since it means the abandonment of the scientific method. Further, that innovation rarely comes from crowds but individuals (see Schumpeter) – crowds doom us to mediocrity. Keen and others have called this the “Cult of the Amateur” or “The People vs. the Expert“.

All good and interesting points, but the traffic bottle neck on I-95 reminded me of another pitfall with crowds and their potential for rent seeking behaviour. The crowd can often focus on what is directly in front of them and not the context of the bigger picture. That is effectively rubber necking. Compare it to animals that become fixated on a “bright shiny object” – like your cat or dog chasing a laser pointer spot into the wall.

We see this all the time on the Web and in the media where some small piece of information taken out of context, is spread by the crowd, and taken as fact. There are entire websites devoted to dispelling Obama myths, and even Obamapedia a wiki for correcting Obama falsehoods spread on Web. It is a bipartisan affair and the world has been convinced by YouTube clips that Bush can hardly spell his own name or pronounce the majority of English words. Taken in context both are equally preposterous, but the crowd spreads them as gospel and we all become collectively dumber.

This is also the fear I have of hyperlocal and the narrow focus media companies have on it. If we provide hyperlocal information without context we run the risk building the local equivalent of TMZ that just serve up vacuous information. Some traditional media folks I’ve talked to feel the only place their readers want a map is when it’s delivering hyperlocal information like movie theaters and restaurants near them.

When it comes to GIS there is still a prominent fear of the crowd (a.k.a. the public) especially when it comes to creating maps and data. This goes back to the people versus the expert debate above. The fear that letting the masses in will corrupt information and result in mediocrity that cannot be worked with. The conclusion by some of the GIS establishment is that you should keep barriers to entry high to keep the amateurs out. This is the debate that has been going on over on James Fee’s blog in regards to what we’ve been trying to do with Finder!. I won’t try to reproduce it here, but the debate between the wisdom and/or stupidity of crowds is alive and well.

I have not convinced myself that traffic congestion, rent-seeking behavior, crowdsourcing and hyperlocal actually all connect well together, but we’ll see what the crowd dictates (sarcasm here).

Popularity: 11% [?]