Bernie Goldbach pointed to a Guardian article about citizen mapping which, as a GPS newbie, I found fascinating and inspiring. Why don't we create a similar 'open source' GPS map of Ireland? If OSI aren't going to play ball with GPS mapping companies then maybe we can re-route around them (pun intended) with a smart mob of volunteer mappers.
Lets try rolling a snowball through the hills and valleys of Ireland. High ho, high ho, it's off to work we go.....
I think this is a great idea, might I suggest using http://gpsmap.sourceforge.net/
I have not installed this program yet, as I normally program in VB (this is Java) I suggest using a CSV file format...
(ie:"N7","Motorway","53.2456","-6.2135","53.2472","-6.2144")
as two points define a line ( I know the N7 isnt a straight line, however multable road segments would do!)
if someone can suggest where to start posting road lat longs, I will start posting
Posted by: Jason | April 28, 2005 at 07:41 PM
i have a many major dublin junctions that i have logged on my gps over the past year or so (fun on dublin bus). give me a location and i will up load them.
Posted by: moylan | April 29, 2005 at 10:00 AM
Jason and Moylan, thank you both for your input. I'm delighted you're interested in getting involved.
You both ask about where to post data so my first question is do you have blogs? I would personally love to see this project proceed in a 'small pieces, loosely joined' (http://www.smallpieces.com/) manner. In otherwords I'd prefer for there not to be a central repository for the data, at least not yet, not until the best (if there is a 'best') method of doing so emerges.
With the proviso that I'm a newbie to GPS I think that as long as we all keep records of our GPS data in GPX and plain text format we should be able to store and process that data in all manner of ways in the future.
That's why I'd like to see everyone who gets involved in OpenEir intially posting the data to their own blogs and tagging those posts with the technorati 'OpenEir' tag so that they are all aggregated at this page - http://www.technorati.com/tag/openeir - including the similarly tagged Flickr photos.
However, if you don't have blogs please feel free to send me your data. My email address is jamescorbett[AT]hotmail.com and if you mark the subject line 'OpenEir' I won't confuse it with spam ;-)
Thank you both very much. Let's build it :)
Posted by: James Corbett | April 29, 2005 at 10:43 AM
will dig out data this weekend with a bit of luck and email it to you.
Posted by: moylan | May 11, 2005 at 02:15 PM
Excellent, that's very much appreciated.
Posted by: James Corbett | May 11, 2005 at 04:18 PM