OpenEir - its all about the layers

So, no doubt a few who took the time to play with the first set of data files from OpenEir will be wondering what this is all about? "Sure, the high res satellite photos are cool and all but what's the point if all that's marked are a few of the larger county towns? My paper map does that!"

Well it's all about the layers folks! Town and village centres are layer one. Among the subsequent layers I'll be adding are -

• Petrol stations, in particular 'out of town' ones.
• Attractions (museums, parks, castles, etc.)
• Bank Machines (ATMs)
• Public Toilets
• Garda Stations
• Public Gardens
• Bus Stops
• Doctor's Surgeries
• Garages/Mechanic
• Restaurants
• Sports grounds
• Scenic Areas and picnic grounds

Please tell me what am I forgetting?

The beauty of using MyGPS is that it can easily handle the importation of these 'layers' via simple text files or GPX formatted GPS coordinates. So let's paint an example scenario to show the use.

Lets say the O'Connors, a Dublin family, are visiting their relatives in Limerick (city) for a weekend. Now they've got some time on their hands on Sunday and realised they've never 'gone beyond the city'. So the pull up OpenEir calibrated map of Limerick county on the web and then the Attractions, Restaurants, Petrol Stations and Scenic Areas layers. They see that the northern route between Foynes and Tarbert (just over the border in Kerry) clings right to the estuary and notice a number of matching waypoints on the Scenic Areas layer. They also see that there's a Flying Boat Museum in Foynes and beautiful public gardens at Glin Castle. So they mark each of these waypoint, dynamically on MyGPS and generate a route which they can then simply upload to their GPS unit. Or, of course, they can just print off the denotated map if they don't have a GPS unit.

Ok, I've got county Limerick covered, who's going to add their own county to OpenEir?

Comments

[robinb]

Hi, love the idea... what is the copyright on the mapping images you're using?

I'm off to download your limerick one now.

[James Corbett]

Thanks Robin, its really only the germ of an idea yet but I even though I'm a newbie I just love this whole field of GPS and am really excited about the possibilities.

Mikel Maron, founder of WorldKit and MapProxy (which I'm using for the maps) has already commented on my first OpenEir post - http://eirepreneur.blogs.com/eirepreneur/2005/04/openeir_the_ope.html#comments - and seems to have no problem with us using his service fo the purpose of accessing the maps, which as far as I understand it are produced by NASA and totally copyright free. :-)

Looking forward to seeing what you think of my very basic first go at mapping some of Limerick and I'd love to see you doing the same for your own places of choice.