India’s Tata Motors has the People’s Car, and the Isle of Man’s Peel Engineering has the P50. Spot the difference?
Archive for the ‘Isle of Man’ Category
Islands of innovation
Thursday, February 14th, 2008Isle Of Man Mapping – OSM is on the way
Sunday, August 12th, 2007On the 1st and 2nd September, the Isle of Man is going to be hosting its first OpenStreetMap mapping party, organised by Dan Karran, who’s been blogging quite a bit about the event. Dan’s latest post highlights the impact that OpenStreetMap maps of the Isle of Man can have. Right now, the best map of the Isle Of Man that you can find on the internet is OpenStreetMap’s. Its not complete yet, but it could be with a couple of days of effort.
You can find more details about the weekend on the OpenStreetMap wiki. If you are interested in joining in the mapping, get in touch with Dan, or me.
Isle of Man is OpenStreetMap’s Image of the Week
Sunday, June 24th, 2007Its great to see the the Isle of Man featuring as OpenStreetMap’s image of the week:
The map you see is the combined result of people tracing from aerial imagery, people collecting gps tracks, and people tracing from the map that the Isle of Man Department for Local Government and the Environment gave to OpenStreetMap.
With the help of Artem and John Burgess’ osm2pgsql conversion utility, I’ve produced some shapefiles of OSM data for the Isle of Man. Grab them from here.
Mapping the Isle of Man
Thursday, March 1st, 2007
A few weeks ago, I got in touch with Robert Clynes from the Isle of Man Department for Local Government and the Environment, the Department with responsibility for GI on the Island. My request was simple: are you interested interested in helping out OpenStreetMap? The response was equally simple too – yes, they were. I little while later, Robert sent me this GeoTIFF of the Isle of Man, that OSM have been given permission to derive data from.
Kristian Thy form OSM, put the image onto a WMS server that he runs, and now the map is available as a WMS layer. From here, we can import the layer into JOSM, using Chippy’s WMS plugin, using this WMS URL:
http://quovadis.dk/cgi-bin/man.cgi?SERVICE=WMS& VERSION=1.1.1&REQUEST=GetMap&layers=man&srs=EPSG:4326 &format=image/png
The results look like this:
The north of the Island being edited in JOSM
St Johns – in the centre of the Island
One of the first things I noticed was how nearly-complete the mapping of the Isle of Man is. Looking at OpenStreetMap data of the Island, I had estimated that about 60% of the roads were mapped. Validation is a major problem when collecting geo-data. How do you know that you know where something is? Who do you trust to tell you where it is? OSM has an additional problem that in that its completeness, in the UK at least, is measured against the benchmark of the Ordnance Survey. A public admission by an OSM contributor to using Ordnance Survey data to verify their mapping could open up a whole can of nasty worms and threaten the future of the project. Of course comparing OSM data to OS data would not necesserily breach any OS copyrights – but any attempt to do so would have to exercise a lot of caution. In this case however, we are able to both compare and trace from a map that is derived from a the Isle of Man’s master data set. Why is this so?
As a self governing nation, the Isle of Man is responsible for its own mapping. In the past this has largely been carried out by the Ordnance Survery who are contracted by the Manx Government, who retain copyright of the map data produced. See here for more details. The licensing is pretty reasonable, and most importantly the details are contained in a few PDFs on one webpage. The standard license wouldn’t usually allow someone like OSM to apply its CC-by-SA license on derivatives of their data, but in this instance we have been given special permission to use the data. I’m going to try and get the entirity of the map traced by the end of the weekend – happily coinciding with the OSM Carto Day in Oxford, which should lead to some beatifully rendered Mapnik tiles of the Island.
Isle of Man leads the way
Monday, February 26th, 2007Not something you read everyday perhaps? The BBC reports that one in three adminssion of under 16s to the Island’s A&E department are alcohol related. That seems quite a lot of boozed up youngsters. How things have changed since my day, when we used to fly kites in the fields and only went to A&E for scrapes on our knees. Read on further and discovert that:
… in 2004/5 22 children were admitted for alcohol-related conditions, with a further 50 having conditions attributable to alcohol, such as injuries.
Then reverse engineer the number to discover that approximately 210 children were admitted to A&E during the year, for alcohol related injuries. Just so you know this all fits into the bigger picture, here’s some demographics: