EirePreneur

Powerful geo-data service that actually covers Ireland

I wasn't expecting much from Geonames because I've been aware of the problems John Handelaar experienced geocoding street addresses for Ireland and the VocalVoter project. But boy was I surprised and delighted. Even a search on my rural home town of Newcastle West in Co. Limerick returns 42 items of interest including streams, bridges, castles, country houses and railroad stations, each listed by distance from the center of search and with lattitude and longtitude coordinates.

Its high time to get out my Garmin Geko GPS again and give the OpenEir mapping project another kick up the arse ;->

Using Mapbuilder to anotate Irish cities

Mapbuilder "lets you tag locations on a map and publish it on your own site. Mapping is now easier than ever. It's free"

The full tagline deserves to be quoted on this occasion because Mapbuilder really is a brilliant service. It only took me 20 minutes to produce this map of Limerick with three hotels tagged. I'll be adding pubs, restaurants and more over the coming days.

I think it would be really nice to have a detailed anotated map of every city in Ireland, if for nothing more than blogger meetups. Want to help?

100 members of Irish GPS mapping project

Wow, we've just reached 100 members of the OpenEir GPS Mapping group. I've been very lazy about doing any serious mapping myself over the last few months but as the nights start getting longer now and the weather better (hopefully) I'm going to get going again on this. John Handelaar's geocoding script is a great boost to the group and hopefully we'll get more hackers producing 'localized' versions of these mapping mashups.

How to plot your street on an Irish map

John Handelaar says he's found the holy grail of Irish mapping. And that might just be no exaggeration! I tested it by throwing a number of Limerick streets at it and it worked every time.

Hopefully John will explain more about how we could use this clever hack over on the OpenEir mapping project.

Another Irish petrol stations Google maps mashup

Pumps.ie is similar to MapEire, but concentrates on the narrower area of Irish petrol prices for the moment. It's got a terrific interface which makes it really easy to add new petrol stations. Good to see more and more Google maps mashups for an Irish audience.

What's I'd like to see next is more specialist mashups providing services to tourists for example. Why not display the landmarks, public toilets, public telephones, picnic areas, etc, being gathered as GPS waypoints in the OpenEir mapping project?

European GPS system underway

Its great to hear that the first Galileo launch has been successful and we can look forward to 1 metre accuracy for OpenEir mapping via a European GPS system.... even if we do have to wait another 4 years :(

GPS map of Ireland for download

Koen DePoorter has uploaded a map of Ireland for use in Magellan GPS to the OpenEir group. The group now has 77 members and personally speaking I'm looking forward to getting back into GPS mapping again in 2006.

Testing GeoRSS

Just a brief post to test GeoRSS

geo:lat=52.4462 geo:long=-9.0578

This should also show up in my WorldKit map.

Panoramio - one of the better google maps mashups

Panoramio is another excellent mashup of Google maps and geopositioned photos. I must find out how they got the mouse scroll wheel to take on a zoom function. That's something for the MapEire lads to implement.

Stamping GPS coordinates to digital photos

I've previously pointed a few OpenEir mappers to software for stamping GPS data to the EXIF headers of their digital photos and here's a quick link to another solution I'm after coming across. Grazer is trialware though so if anyone has tried the freeware WWMX alternative utilities can they comment on how well they work please. I still haven't got around to testing them properly.