Speakers
Andy Allan joined OpenStreetMap in October 2006 mapping around Putney, London with his flatmate and co-conspirator Dave. Together they created the cycle map in July 2007 and it has since gone from strength to strength. Keen photograper, mountain biker and volunteer Sustrans’ Ranger, Andy is the Technical Lead at CloudMade, and was previously an IT Support Manager at Imperial College London. The cycle map is perhaps the best-known example of customised OSM cartography. Featuring everything a cyclist needs to know about – from cycle routes to contours, bike parking to, of course, pubs – the cycle map has driven the state of the art in customised maps in a number of ways. Andy will discuss some of the technology behind creating the map, along with getting the cycle map onto portable devices, as well as sharing some tips and tricks for other custom cartographers.
Graham Asher was born in Abingdon, England, in 1957. After studying linguistics at York he graduated in 1979 and has since worked as a programmer in the fields of text layout, typesetting, font rendering and graphics. Graham will be talking about CartoType, a portable map rendering and route finding library written in C++, which runs on Windows Mobile, Symbian OS and Palm OS as well as on desktop computer operating systems like Windows XP. Graham recently integrated OSM data into CartoType and will be sharing his experiences with us.
Bob Barr is co-founder and Managing Director of Manchester Geomatics (MGL), a company that specialises in the handling. and quality assurance, of spatial data for urban and social analysis. He is also a well known commentator, and campaigner on spatial data policy, through his Dangling Segments columns and many public appearances. Bob worked at the University of Manchester for 30 years before taking early retirement to spend more time with MGL and as a local councillor. He advised the Social Exclusion Unit on better geographic information and campaigns to maximise access to street and address data. Rob’s going to revisit a fable he wrote some 15 years ago, called “The Megagalactic super visible street sign company” which was a warning against the evils of anyone ‘owning’ the street map for commercial exploitation. Truly prophetic!
Steve Chilton is Technical Manager at Middlesex University, and also Chair of the Society of Cartographers. He has been peripherally involved in OSM for 2 years, more deeply since the Cartography Day in Oxford in early 2007, since when he has been possibly the most active person in introducing new elements and tweaking existing ones in the mapnik slippy map. Steve also created and maintains the zoom-linked Map key that is accessed from the map display page. In his presentation Steve will concentrate on examples of different uses of the OSM data from a small sample area (London Borough of Enfield). The presentation will show examples of the diversity of the OSM database, and how by using the same source selectively, and by using different cartographic styles and differing rendering devices many different outputs can be achieved.
Simon Cortesi is an IT consultant working with FOSS technologies. Based in Italy, Simon started working on OpenStreetMap in 2006 and is mostly working on building OSM’s community and locating open data ready to be acquired. Simon’s going to give us a round up of OSM activity in Italy, which looks like a lot of fun.
Schuyler Erle is a free software developer and activist. He is responsible for NoCatAuth, an early open source wireless captive portal, and geocoder.us, an open source U.S. address geocoder. Erle wrote O’Reilly’s Mapping Hacks with Jo Walsh and Rich Gibson, and Google Map Hacks, also with Rich. Previously, he worked with MetaCarta in Cambridge, MA, USA, developing nitfy geographic projects like OpenLayers, an open source web mapping framework written in pure JavaScript, and Gutenkarte, a service for exploring the geographic dimension of classic works of literature. Erle is proud to be a founding member of the OSGeo Foundation.
Mikel Maron is co-founder of Mapufacture, and web developer for hire, specializing in Open Geospatial and Wiki tech. He’s been active in the standardization of GeoRSS and in the OpenStreetMap collaborative mapping project, and several open source projects. He’s developed two of the first Wikis in use at the UN. Previously, Mikel worked as senior developer of My Yahoo! and researched evolutionary models of ecosystems for an MSc at the University of Sussex.
Schuyler and Mikel’s talk will focus on a series of multi-day workshops they held in February 2008 in several India universities. Researchers, students, and members of the community were invited to participate, learn, and take stewardship of their city. These were very practical, hands-on days, covering the entire toolset of OpenStreetMap and empowering participants to lead the growth of free and open mapping in India. “We will map India!”
Ed Freyfogle is one of the founders of Nestoria. Previously he worked in various engineering roles at Yahoo! Europe. He has an MBA from MIT, and was a Fulbright Scholar. Nestoria is a search engine for property in several EU markets. In the last 18 months they have experimented with different ways to use OSM data in their service. Ed will discuss these attempts – both the successes as well as some of the hurdles still to be overcome for wider commercial adoption.
Dair Grant – CTO of RouteBuddy, a UK-based developer of GPS/mapping software for the Mac. As a licensee of commercial map data, Dair is interesting in exploring how OpenStreetMap data compares to professional data for both quality and completeness.
Sean Gorman is a rabble rouser and general trouble maker currently working on trying to productize the effort at FortiusOne with a thing we are calling GeoCommons. It is largely the fusion of a variety of interests and experiences in geography, GIS, infrastructure, physics, statistical mechanics, web 2.0 stuff, and generally making the world of data (especially the geospatial variety) available to the masses. The success of OpenStreetMap and several other projects has brought access to increasing amounts of open geodata via the Web. This data, though, is often disconnected in different repositories making universal data discovery difficult. What approaches are available to begin to connect these data repositories together to create a federation of open geodata? Can we interconnect our data to create more mapping possibilities for everyone?
Jordan Hatcher, Open Data Commons, Open Knowledge Foundation, and opencontentlawyer.com. Jordan’s presentation explores the issues surrounding open data — taking an approach similar to free and open source software or open content but for data— uncovered by research and practical work on the Open Data Commons project and the development of licensing tools for data. The discussion will centre on two aspects: dedicating data and databases to the public domain and applying free and open source software/open content licensing principles to data and databases. If you find yourself writing IANAL more often than you write your name, this talk is for you.
Jani Patokallio is the managing editor of Wikitravel Press, a company that combines Jani’s passions for technology, open content, travel and photography to publish free, complete, up-to-date and reliable guidebooks using Wikitravel content. After completing his M.Sc. on wearable computing at the University of Tokyo and doing a spot of cryptography for the Finnish Army, Jani worked in telecommunications for five years before launching both his own consulting business and Wikitravel Press. Now a notional resident of Singapore, Jani continues to rack up 100,000 flight miles in an average year, traveling, writing, photographing or coding anywhere from rural Zambia (2005) to northern Sulawesi (2006), the Bahamas (2007) or Saudi Arabia (2008).
Mark Jaroski is the editor of the Wikitravel Press guide to Paris and a mapping enthusiast. He has been fascinated by computers since childhood, when he subscribed to Dr. Dobbs journal and poured through lines of code for fun. In 1996, after volunteering at a popular Chicago based online magazine, Mark took up programming professionally to support his pursuit of a graduate degree in conceptual and performance art at Columbia College. Since September 2001, Mark has been working at the World Health Organization in Geneva, but somehow he has still found the time to draw a map of Paris by hand, throw it all away, and build a new engine to extract data from OpenStreetMap and merge it with Wikitravel data instead.
Jani and Mark’s talk will look at Wikitravel Press, a company who publishes travel guidebooks using free Wikitravel content. One of the major challenges facing the project has been finding freely licensed, high-quality street maps of destinations, a challenge that OpenStreetMap looks set to address.
Torsten Rahn works as a consultant for Open Source solutions at credativ GmbH in Mönchengladbach, Germany. He has been an active KDE core developer since he finished his physics studies 10 years ago. Having a passion for all kinds of maps and education he started to work in his spare time on a virtual globe called Marble. When he doesn’t browse maps he’s trying to find directions to the milky way by using his telescope. Torsten’s talk will look at Marble, a light weight multi purpose widget set for KDE that shows the earth as a sphere using OSM data.
Frederik Ramm started contributing to OpenStreetMap in 2006. He runs Geofabrik, a German company providing software and services around OpenStreetMap. He is co-author of the world’s first book on OpenStreetMap and a restless OSM evangelist, giving talks and attending conferences throughout Germany (and beyond). Frederik is the current maintainer of the JOSM editor and has contributed code throughout the project, from rendering to API code. In his talk he will explore some of the risks facing OpenStreetMap in the years to come. His talk, ‘Threat Analysis, Things That Could Spoil Our Party’, will look at some of the potential risks to OpenStreetMap and present some ideas for solutions.
Iván Sánchez has been a PHP geek since the dot-com bubble, having developed a
variety of web applications since those heady days. A web map mashup was the reason for
him to ditch web map mashups and become one of the earliest spanish OSM
contributors, in late 2006. As a self-proclaimed copyfighter, Iván has been
talking to he national mapping agency (the IGN, which already is looking past
INSPIRE), and other cartography producers into freeing the available geodata.
Iván will be reporting on how the spanish GIS community has been reacting to
OSM, and how it may develop in the future.
Nick Whitelegg has been involved in open mapping since 2004 when, driven by a lack of freely-available countryside maps, he started Freemap, a project which aims to produce free maps for the UK countryside. After discovering OSM in 2005 Nick contributed his initial Freemap data to the project. Nick maps rural and urban areas of Hampshire as well as contributing code to various OSM-related projects such as Mapnik whilst continuing to develop Freemap and push forward the provision of open geodata for countryside users. Nick’s talk will explore ideas about an open database designed to supplement OpenStreetMap, to which countryside users can contribute and access photos and navigational information, together with a discussion of web-based and mobile software to access and manipulate the information. The goal of the project? To ensure that countryside users never get lost again.
Prof. Dr. Alexander Zipf holds the Chair of Cartography at the Department of Geography at the University of Bonn. Before that he was Professor for Applied Computer Science and Geoinformatics at the Department of Geoinformatics and Surveying at the University of Applied Sciences FH Mainz. He did his PhD at the private research institute “European Media Laboratory” (EML) in Heidelberg in his project “Deep Map” after studying mathematics and geography at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. His research interests include a broad range of aspects of Geoinformatics, GIScience and Cartography from LBS to Web2.0 and ubiquitous GI services.