Abigail Brady

South East London Mapping Party. tomorrow and Sunday. i won't be able to go due on the Saturday due to work. unsure about sunday. they is friendly bunch. if you are around and interested then pop along either day. tell them i sent you.

new years eve. still in leicester. seem to have forgotten to do any socialising.

what i did do was a great deal of mapping on my bicycle:

compare before (left) and after (right):


i'd set myself a target of doing the entirety of leicester east of the railway line. this was not to be, but i'm still quite pleased with what i did : northfields, humberstone, hamilton, netherhall, thurnby lodge, rowlatts hill, north evington, random bits around the city centre, and a good start on crown hills/spinney hills. i hope by year end 2008 it will be finished.

i return to london tomorrow. i shall be in the pembury tavern in the evening.

One of the problems with mapping is how do you know when you've done? This is something OpenStreetMap will need to take seriously, given the present lack of any tags to indicate areas in which there be dragons.

Last month I sent a request for a definitive list of roads which make up the Primary Route Network to the Department for Transport (these are the roads which are signed in green). I recieved this in due course (apparently they'd had to collate it specially), and then sent them an email back asking if I could actually use it to find errors and missing bits in openstreetmap so we could correct them.

Now, I believe this would fall under the "research" exemption for copyright under UK law. Although exceptions for fair use are narrowly drawn compared to the United States (where this would be PD anyway), it nontheless permits "research". And I'm not copying the spreadsheet, I'm using facts from it to send people out to check things on the ground, or to alter a thing that says "highway=primary" to "highway=trunk" or back again.

The DfT pointed me at the OPSI. I asked them. I was told I need to get a Click-Use license for this. I've looked at the terms: this would forbid me to put derived works under a creative commons license, and thus would be entirely useless for OpenStreetMap. I've explained I don't expect them to put the spreadsheet under the PD or a more permissive license, but am just asking for agreement that what I want to do is acceptable in the absence of a license.

The PSI regulations say

The aim of the Regulations is to encourage the re-use of public sector information by removing obstacles that stand in the way of re-use. The main themes are improving transparency, fairness and consistency. In doing so it will help stimulate the development of innovative new information products and services across Europe, so boosting the information industry.

Um, that's us, right?

playing around with osmarender, i made a sort of tube map.




it also shows the borough boundaries i've been walking

some missing stations, obviously, and visual artifacts. and in some places tunneled bits are approximated with a straight line. should it try to show major roads (faintly)? how can i indicate the different railway and tube lines (there aren't enough colours).

well, that was a lot of effort to go to just to get a new userpic. ;)

this week i shall be attempting to circumnavigate the london borough of hackney. got most of the border between islington and hackney yesterday: gave up when i got to the bit where the border appears to be the regent's canal as i cannot swim, and it was getting late. going to try for the remaining bit of that and the hackney/tower hamlets border this evening, i think.

today i walked 18km in Kew Gardens.

my feet hurt.

this weekend i have been mostly mapping SW1 (St James's, Belgravia). going to have to make a return trip to Belgravia to get all the mewses and a few other roads i missed. I discovered that Eaton Square isn't!

pembury this evening for cider&games: beer festival rush had largely finished so we were able to play games without much problem.

work is going well. to bed now..., for an early start tomorrow.

today's map update. missing: brunel walk, brunel road, victoria crescent, kerswell close, notes as to the one way system, random twiddly bits on russell road and braemar road.

i've not added edgecot grove, which google maps thinks is a through road, as it doesn't seem to exist in any meaningful way (being a very shallow cul-de-sac at one end). that could really catch people out.

GPS device arrived! i spent this afternoon wandering around seven sisters and various other parts of london making GPS trails for openstreetmap (which is like Wikipedia, except for street maps). added a few roads today, will try for a great big wodge of the seven sisters road/west green road triangle tomorrow.

finally started watching Battlestar Galactica. saw the miniseries and the first 2 eps so far.