Points of Interest

Spatialite is a GIS extension developed by Alessandro Furieri for Sqlite, the famous file based database system. The upcoming 2.4.0 Release will support the import of OpenStreetMap data. Currently it gets shipped with a dedicated converter called spatialite_osm, which imports the street network from an OSM XML file into a spatialite database. Its usage is simple. Just create an empty database, initialize it and import the OSM data file:


spatialite rlp.sqlite
.read init_spatialite.sql ASCII
spatialite_osm -o rheinland-pfalz.osm -d rlp.sqlite -T roads -m


Spatialite also contains a viewer application. Here’s what the road network looks like while displaying the inner city of Speyer, Germany:

Spatialite GIS showing the inner city of Speyer (data CC-by-SA by openstreetmap and its contributors)

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When I joined openstreetmap back in 2006, I immediately understood its potential. However, I didn’t believe it would grow as fast as it actually did. Today opentreetmap pervades everyday’s life. Maps rendered from our data can be found in the »Fahrradbuch Karlsruhe« or in a brochure of the local public transport company, showing all public baths of the Karlsruhe region.

This eve, on the way back home, I saw a display at a pharmacy around the corner, alternately showing some ads and the location of the next emergency service. I knew those maps:

Osm on a pharmacy display

You can even see some dismantled railways which have been mapped by some trainspotters. Here’s a screenshot to preserve the rendering:

The area around the Ettlinger Tor, Karlsruhe, including some dismantled railways (data by openstreetmap.org and its contributors, CC-by-SA)

I find it very interesting where our data pops up every now and then and am curious where they will surprise me next.

Today the weather conditions haven’t been optimal for biking, so I grabbed a car and visited the Black Forest. Fortunately it was open today.

Until last year, I hoped that one day hikers would start to map Black Forest trails. The fun finally started in 2009, when new data popped up frequently. The downside was that you went mapping and noticed that the trip was useless as another mapper was quicker. The more I am surprised that I still find a lot of missing trails nowadays, even tracks of grade 1. I’m not disappointed at all – the opposite is the case :) . That’s the area I’m talking about. Obviously the tracks on the left hand side (west) are almost complete, while on the right hand side (east) a lot of details are still missing. So there’s still room for some occasional weekend trips:

Tracks near Ruhestein (openstreetmap.org and its contributors, CC-by-SA)

On my way back I stopped at the Ottenhöfen station. The last time I was there I had no minutes left to map this area. The only data that existed west of the Allerheiligenstraße and south of the Ruhesteinstraße was the railway and the stream. Now it’s a bit more, but still not complete:

Area around the Ottenhöfen Station (openstreetmap.org and its contributors, CC-by-SA)

I’m not a trainspotter at all, but here’s an image of the historic Achertalbahn at the Ottenhöfen station (I apologize for the overexposure on the right hand side):

Achertalbahn (copyright Christoph Eckert 2010, all rights reserved)

A nice sunday afternoon trip, though it was way too cold.

Ladybug (openclipart.org, Public Domain)

Today I had a couple of minutes left. I downloaded the openstreetbugs of the area nearby as GPX waypoints, imported them as POIs into Mappero (an excellent mapping application for the Nokia N900 BTW), and started editing the data using osm2go. While editing I noticed that a lot of details (schools, kindergartens, parking lots, cycleways, paths) are still missing all over the city.

I admit that I almost immediately stopped mapping Karlsruhe after other mappers finally joined and we had completed the road network back in 2007. I never wanted to map Karlsruhe. I just started the work as there was no data at all back in 2006. What I wanted to do is riding the bike in the country and the woods – and mapping ways and paths between Germany and France. And so I did.

Others have continued the work, e.g. by drawing buildings, railways, cycleways and addresses. But Karlsruhe never reached a similar level of detail that other cities did.

Since I’m contributing to osm, I always heard proud mappers who pointed out the Google maps are that dated and we have that many details. My usual stock answer was that maintaining the data is much more difficult than creating it. Consider a small village which consists of place=village, landuse=residential and a couple of streets. Who will ever notice whether streets are missing, have been renamed or whether the restaurant around the corner still exists?

Navtec, Teleatlas and others know those issues. We still need to learn it. I guess local mappers need to update the areas of their region systematically in certain intervals.

OSM Booth at GeoKur

In addition to yesterday’s posting, here’s a picture of today’s OSM booth at the GeoKur event. There were about 800 attendees, and Joachim Kast held a talk about OSM. Many geocachers already heard about OSM or are already using Garmin maps etc., but some people reported that they have been unsuccessful using OSM. Some people report they have been told that OSM maps cannot be used on Garmin devices. I do not know whether Garmin dealers are responsible for this misinformation or whether people just do not manage to download and install our Garmin maps on their devices. According to the event, I guess it’s the latter issue.

Fortunately we have been prepared. At the booth, we had a handout available which describes the process of downloading and installing Garmin maps. As an additional service, we installed maps directly at the booth or gave away micro SD cards to visitors. I hope this helps to “spread the word”.

One further issue was that Geocachers tried but did not manage to contribute to OSM. In my opinion we are still missing an easy to find and use editor, something between openstreetbugs and Potlatch.

Many thanks to Joachim for the organisation of the booth plus the talk and Sven Geggus who once again brought the ready-to-use OSM computer.

Tomorrow a geocaching event called GeoKur will take place at Bad Herrenalb, Black Forest, Germany. At the Kurhaus, the central facility, we will man a booth to provide first hand information about openstreetmap to the 600+ attendees.

This evening, there was a nice barbecue party at the Hirschwinkel shelter near Bad Herrenalb, where we helped the first people to solve problems using osm data.

A rather interesting experience was to observe geocachers “logging” a car by scribing their nicknames into its surface. I always knew there are human beings with strange hobbies, but until a couple of hours before I thought mapping for osm was the most strange :) .