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TIL: fosm is still a thing

Update, 2020-09-13: fosm.org seems no longer to exist:

Oh my: fosm.org still exists —

fosm.org: Like OpenStreetMap, but more out of date

fosm shouldn’t really be a thing still. It only exists because some people didn’t like the terms of the licence change. Guided by the principles of maximum free software drama, they forked OSM (it was CC-BY-SA at the time) and created fosm.

Thing is, the licence change was in 2012. Most of the fosm data in my neighbourhood looks untouched since then. It’s a fork that’s, um, forked. I remember meeting someone who was so convinced that OSM was going to fail with the new licence, they were saying stuff like “fosm’s gonna drown you guys!”

In the words of Drive-by abuser: 🛵📢 fosm, yeah? Why not, though, eh? It’s your life, innit?

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Lovely Buildings

from StatCan’s Open Database of Buildings

Looks like hell has frozen over — there’s now an Ontario open buildings layer that’s compatible with the OSM licence: The Open Database of Buildings. Thanks go to StatCan for aggregating all the data sets into one huge database.

A small sample is here: scruss/Neighbourhood_Buildings.geojson

A certain sarcastic file format will be pleased to know that it’s all packaged as one gigantic shapefile.

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My map from “Experimental Cartography: Mapping Knowledge and Perceptions of Our Worlds”

Family Dynamic Balance – Stewart Russell, 2018-09-19

Map Subtitle

How and where and when a Scottish guy whose family has lived near Glasgow forever found love far away and now moves slowly back & forward along Eglinton Avenue East.
The Gulf Stream? It’s the warm waters of the Mississippi-Missouri warming the west coast of Scotland …

Not shown/drawn due to lack of time: the flotilla of water biscuits transporting gullible folks up the River Clyde …

Event Description

In a world of filter bubbles and fake news the importance of understanding how we know what we know and where our information/knowledge comes from is greater than ever. We can use mapping to help us understand these invisible structures that control parts of lives and reveal the ways our perceptions are shaped.

In this hands-on mapping workshop we will create maps of personal knowledge (e.g. personal itineraries, common perceptions, fears, etc.). We will ask: how do I map my perception of the world (e.g. through news media or walking)? Participants will apprehend “their state of our knowledge of the world” on a particular subject as well as create representations which bridge the real and the imaginary.

Philippe Rekacewicz is a cartographer and information designer. After completing his training as a geographer at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, he worked from 1988 to 2014 as a permanent staff for the monthly journal Le Monde Diplomatique. He concurrently directed, from 1996 to 2008, the Norwegian cartographic unity of the United Nations Programme for Environment (UNEP), the GRID-Arendal. A specialist in Geopolitics and International Relations, he addresses especially topics linked to migrations, refugees and populations’ forced displacements, as well as frontiers. He works at present on several socio-cartographic projects (public and private spaces, perception and representation of frontiers) and explores the links between cartography, art and politics, like the art’s contributions on maps’ production and the political uses of maps as objects ofpropaganda and manipulation. He also leads a research on the “new cartographic writings” and the emergency of radical, critical and experimental cartographies. Since 2006, he attends project of artistic mappings and political art in several European countries. He is associate researcher at the departement of Anthropology of the University of Helsinki (programme Crosslocation – Trade, Transit and Transport). He is the current editor of the research blog on mapping and visualizing Visionscarto http://visionscarto.net/

Experimental Cartography: Mapping Knowledge and Perceptions of Our Worlds was hosted by the public visualization lab at OCAD U in the evening of 2018-09-19.

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BBC gets all azimuthal equidistant, 1936


Source: National Library of Australia — “With the greetings of the BBC. Christmas 1936” Promotional christmas card with schematic world map produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation.

(indirectly via Rupert Goodwins.)

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3D Printing Buildings & Terrain

«insert weak joke about a small, transparent city hall here»

Pocket Eildon Hill (rustic edition) for homesick Borderers

Based on Selasi Dorkenoo and Claus Rinner’s presentation at Toronto #Maptime – 3D Printing Demo. More later.

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too damn many open data licences

Oh Canada …

  1. Open Government Licence – Ontario
  2. City of Guelph Open Government Licence
  3. Open Government Licence – Vancouver
  4. Open Government Licence – County of Grande Prairie
  5. Open Government Licence – Alberta
  6. Open Government Licence for City of Nanaimo
  7. Open Government Licence – Strathcona County
  8. Open Data Licence for Town of Banff
  9. Open Government Licence for District of Squamish
  10. Open Government Licence — Town of Oakville
  11. Open Government Licence – Kamloops
  12. Open Government License for the City of Surrey
  13. Open Government Licence – Toronto
  14. OPEN GOVERNMENT LICENCE – TORONTO PUBLIC LIBRARYand yes, they’re not covered by the City’s licence
  15. Open Government License for Government of British Columbia
  16. City of Edmonton Open Data Terms of Usea truly odd one that seems to have little in common with any of the others
  17. Region of Waterloo – Open Data Licence
  18. Open Government Licence for the City of Regina
  19. Open Government Licence – The Corporation of the City of Kitchener
  20. York Region’s Open Data Licencea catchy little URL at only 427 characters short
  21. Open Data Licence for The Regional Municipality of Peel
  22. Open Government Licence – Canada
  23. Open Government Licence – City of Ottawa

— and they’re all slightly different, even in how they spell the word “Licence”  …

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map markers: don’t have to stick to the defaults

Some of the languages of Irian Jaya

Map background: Natural Earth (public domain)
Language point data: Glottolog (licence: Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0)
Map markers: font: Overpass (licence: SIL OFL/LGPL), character: 💬 — U+1F4AC SPEECH BALLOON.
Label font: U001Con Italic (foundry: URW++, licence: AFPL)

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map of the world (actual size)

Back in 2000, when I worked for Collins Dictionaries, all staff were given a copy of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World (ISBN 0-7230-0792-6). It’s colossal: nearly half a metre tall, and around six kilos in its slip case. Devised by Bartholomew’s and gloriously printed in Germany, it’s unlikely I’ll get this home from Scotland. So here are some photos, lest I forget:

Time Comprehensive Atlas of the World, Millennium Edition (banana for scale)
Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, Millennium Edition
(banana for scale)

atlas2

atlas3

atlas4

 

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GTALUG OSM Talk last week

Title OpenStreetMap: Building a great map while everyone tells you you’re doing it wrong.

frontpageNotes/Links:

  1. ‘The Map’ — http://www.openstreetmap.org . It supports routing now, too.
  2. QGIS, an open GIS manager. It’s rather good — http://qgis.org/
  3. The OSM Wiki; ridiculously complete documentation: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/
  4. OSM Help Stack Exchange-style question/answer: https://help.openstreetmap.org/
  5. All of the OSM stats! — https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Stats
  6. Toronto map growth animation — http://www.geofabrik.de/gallery/history/index.html#toronto
  7. Crowdsourced geocoding (+ lawsuit from Canada Post) — http://geocoder.ca/
  8. Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL) — http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/
  9. Canada’s new Open Government portal — http://open.canada.ca related: Toronto Open Data — http://toronto.ca/open
  10. CIPPIC Open Licensing Project (CLIP) — http://clipol.org/
  11. Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team [HOT] — http://hotosm.org/
  12. OpenCycleMap — http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/43.6666/-79.3785&layers=C
  13. The rather wonderful /uMap/https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/

Original GTALUG note: OpenStreetMap links from the other night.

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Bitcoin Map spams OpenStreetMap

It looks like the Bitcoin Map website adds points illicitly to OSM through a Google Maps interface. This is rather bad.

Update: they’re fixing this …

Here’s a test run I took to see if the data was really being added to OSM:

Screenshot from 2015-03-04 21:52:38
Bitcoin Map website showing a location near me in Google Maps

Screenshot from 2015-03-04 21:56:34
Adding fake POI info (including massively fake city address, for lulz)

Screenshot from 2015-03-04 21:57:05
Confirmation that Bitcoin Map has accepted my edit

Screenshot from 2015-03-04 21:58:26
Checking the details on the website

Here’s the POI data, in raw OSM XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<osm version="0.6" generator="CGImap 0.3.3 (28262 thorn-02.openstreetmap.org)" copyright="OpenStreetMap and contributors" attribution="http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright" license="http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/">
 <node id="3383877893" visible="true" version="1" changeset="29257856" timestamp="2015-03-05T02:56:47Z" user="BitcoinMaps" uid="2135320" lat="43.7298277" lon="-79.2721787">
  <tag k="addr:city" v="Bemidji"/>
  <tag k="addr:housenumber" v="134"/>
  <tag k="addr:street" v="Woodfern Drive"/>
  <tag k="contact:email" v="name@example.com"/>
  <tag k="contact:phone" v="+1 416 555 1234"/>
  <tag k="contact:website" v="http://example.com/"/>
  <tag k="description" v="i have totally made this up to see if it will be added to OSM even though the location was derived from Google Maps"/>
  <tag k="name" v="Entirely FictitiousName"/>
  <tag k="payment:litecoin" v="yes"/>
  <tag k="shop" v="books"/>
 </node>
</osm>

Screenshot from 2015-03-04 22:24:41
The node is still (temporarily) on the map, despite deleting it. It’ll be gone soon.