Open Street Mapping

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, my father received a Magellan GPS. Being the open source kind of guy, I have always had very strong feelings about the should-be openness of maps. I believe that the great land of Canada, especially the public land, belongs to the people and the maps of those lands should be completely open and public domain. After all, public land is called "Crown Land" in Canada, to denote that it is owned by the government and the people. I own a small portion of Vedder Road, so why should I have to pay and agree to copyright restrictions just to find out where it is? Thus, we have OpenStreetMap. Using GPS traces, and applying various properties to different location nodes, volunteers can map out street/ground level information. Personally, I think that topographical information should also be stored, but the openness of OpenStreetMap will allow export in the future, so I'm not too concerned (plus the extra dimension of information would be a huge burden on the already slow server).

I have already created an account, and have uploaded my first gpx trace. My mom had to drop my brother off at his work (Prospera Center), so I turned on the GPS unit, threw it in the back seat, and waited for her to return. You can see the resultant trace of my mom doing some errands around town. I have also downloaded the Java Open Street Map software, and am trying that out. Here's a screenshot of the same trace, after some cleaning up around my house area (the gps unit's accuracy went down from +-6m to +-30m once it came indoors and lost some satellites, so I had to clean that up).


Hopefully I'll get this stuff all figured out and do a couple traces of the Vedder Crossing area before I go back to residence (I don't get to take the GPS unit with me, so no mapping fun over the semester).