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Re: [PLUG] OpenStreetMap mapping party next weekend (5/16-17)
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On May 10, 2009, at 7:57 AM, Walt Mankowski wrote:
> On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 12:06:34AM -0400, Russ Nelson wrote:
>> Hi. I'm hosting, with Robert Cheetham, an OpenStreetMap mapping
>> party
>> next weekend, at Lovers and Madmen Coffee Lounge in University City.
>> I suspect that most people here already know about OpenStreetMap, so
>> I'll skip the introduction and go straight to the details:
>>
>> The Map: http://openstreetmap.org
>> The Wiki: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org
>> The Event: http://community.cloudmade.com/event/custom/opensource/show/164
>
> Did you intentionally set the map on that page to the wrong address to
> demonstrate how much help the project needs? :) (The page says 40th
> and Ludlow, but the map's pointing to 2nd and Huntingdon in
> Kensington. Also that map's wrong -- it shows St. Christopher's
> Hospital at 5th and Huntington, but it's really at Front and Erie.)
Oh, oops, you caught me out. I'd set the map to a random location
before I'd gotten the venue. Fixed now, thanks.
I don't know why the hospital is in the wrong location. A lot of the
existing church / hospital / school points-of-interest came from an
imported USGS GNIS database. The nice thing about that is that the
USGS is actively seeking GNIS updates, so such things you fix in OSM
will be exported and sent back to them. Cooperation FTW!
The traditional way maps have been produced has been to pay people to
go out to everything you want on your map and capture its position.
But, really, the only way to get a *good*, *accurate*, and *reliable*
map is for it to be created by the people who live there. It's kinda
like the inverse of how Linux development occurs: thousands of people,
independent of their location, can all work together on a single Unix
kernel. For OpenStreetMap, hundreds of thousands of people (and we're
headed for millions) *dependent* upon their location, can all work
together on a single database of map features.
--
Russ Nelson - http://community.cloudmade.com/blog - http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson
russ@cloudmade.com - Twitter: Russ_OSM - http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson
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