A couple of days back, I converted the SRTM dataset into tiles containing OSM contour lines. Meanwhile the tiles are available online. This service is provided by the Stuttgart University of applied Sciences, thanks to the support of Dr. Franz-Josef Behr.
I hope the data is useful for some community work, e.g. tile rendering for slippy maps or rendering contour lines into viewports of mobile devices. If you create publicy available stuff from the data, please drop me a line.
Gebabbel Logo
The current issue 12/2009 of the german »Linux Magazin« features several GPS related articles. On page 40 there’s one about Openstreetmap on mobile devices, especially the N810.
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Satellite (by user ivak of openclipart.org, public domain)
Since today, EGNOS is officially up and running. I’m pretty curious whether this will improve the accuracy of positioning data received by my GPS toys.
Andreas Schneider, who also seems to be an GPS enthusiast, just told me that Gebabbel is available for openSuse. The application’s page still does not exist but shoud materialize within a couple of days.
More or less I have finalized the mapping of the remains of the “Via Rhenana”, an ancient roman highway. The visible remains start in Berg and end south west of Jockgrim. I read about some minor remains in Rheinzabern and near the Zirkerhof (which is still missing in OSM), but I’ll leave it up to true archaeologists to enter more details of the trail :) .
I still find it surprising that its stretch is not as straightforward as usually assumed, especially as there does not seem to be any topological need for the deviations. Maybe they have used existing trails, but if so, I wonder why they followed them without any need. Building a roman highway was expensive, both in terms of money and labour.
Based on a description of a local Wiki, I have added the Landgraben to the openstreetmap database. It’s an old ditch, started back in 1588. Nowadays it’s completely covered in the inner city and part of Karlsruhe’s sewer system. It still gives some places and streets their unique look and (often triangular) shape, like the Lidell- and Ludwigsplatz or the Sophienstraße.
If you want to embed maps in your posts, you might be interested in this plugin.
Jochen Topf and Frederik Ramm just announced the update of their (german) book »OpenStreetMap – Die freie Weltkarte nutzen und mitgestalten«.
You can find more information about it on www.openstreetmap.info.
Shorpy has a nice “poser” image of workers in the “U.S. Geological Survey engraving room.”. What was openstreetmap like in those days :) ?
I’ve just written a small Ruby script which can convert GPX waypoints to a sqlite database file to be used in MaemoMapper. The next time I get surprised by some rainy clouds while riding my bike in the forests, I will at least know where the next shelter can be found:
If you need some material to play with the script, I have just updated the POIs for europe as well. Hope you like it.
If you think that openstreetmappers are people who spend lots of money for their GPS toys, there are similar projects which require even more expensive gadgets :) .
Igor Brejc just released GroundTruth, yet another tool to create Garmin maps from OSM data.
Ever wondered why there is no usable map material for your favourite holiday location? Süddeutsche.de, the (german) web presence of the famous »Süddeutsche Zeitung«, provides a brief overview how maps have been manipulated over the centuries.
Housenames (aka numbers) are important to do proper geocoding of addresses, e.g. for routing applications. There’s the Karlsruhe Schema which defines one approach how we could do it. (more…)
The main reason why I started contributing to openstreetmap was the fact that there was no geodata (neither freely nor commercially) available which fulfilled my needs as a cyclist. (more…)
On Thursday, the german »Bundesarchiv« (German Federal Archive) announced that they will donate about 100,000 images (mainly related to the german history) to Wikipedia Commons. Of course, that’s really great news. But even better, this confirms us over at openstreemap.de in our perception that german authorities will contribute their geodata to openstreetmap – one day. In the meantime, we still have to do the hard work manually until we become widely accepted as the “Wikipedia of geodata”.
Well worth the read.
OK, I finally managed to process the SRTM data for the whole world. The tiles are zipped individually, wasting 61G of disk space. I do not know yet how to distribute it, though. I’ll first announce it via some mailing lists to get an idea how much interest there is (I guess: less). Maybe I should Bittorrent give a try. Would be interesting, as I never used it much. (more…)
As all srtm tiles are processed, I’ll compress them as zip files tonight. Well, the command is simple:
for i in $(ls); do zip $i.zip $i && rm $i; done
Today, Quy Tonthat, the maintainer of Viking, announced that he dropped the support for Google Mas from Viking “due to requests from Google”. Frankly, it was less surprising that Google excludes other applications from using their photo material, as they did with Gaia back in 2006. Noone should complain. Google brought us cool stuff with its maps and Google Earth Software for free. It’s up to Google to decide how their data must be used.
That being said, I’ll keep a copy of revision 824 on my hard drive :) .
