GeoGraphic

Big news in the geosphere today, Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap and Cloudmade has joined Microsoft’s Bing division, and Bing are making their aerial imagery available to the OpenStreetMap community.

ReadWriteWeb‘s take on the announcement is here, and James Fee weighs in with a typically insightful post here.

Why is this new imagery a big deal?  Because it is fantastically detailed in many areas.  OpenStreetMap struck a deal with Yahoo Maps a number of years ago that allows OSM editors to trace features off Yahoo-sourced imagery without having to worry about copyright and derived data issues. However the Yahoo imagery hasn’t been updated for a number of years, and is quite low resolution. Where available, the Bing imagery will prove much more useful for editors.

Lets look at The Irish Museum for Modern Art (IMMA), for example. The current Yahoo image for the area, at maximum zoom, looks like this:
And the Bing image, at maximum zoom:

In a word: Wow!

Here in Ireland the police (Garda Síochána) have outsourced the enforcement of speeding laws to a private company.  This company will operate 45 mobile speed cameras and the zones in which these cameras will operate has been publicised in advance by the Gardaí on their website here: http://www.garda.ie/Controller.aspx?Page=6497

Obviously that site has attracted a lot of attention and has been unavailable for much of the weekend.  However if you dig through the page source code you can see a direct link to the .kml file which shows where the zones are.

If you download the .kml file you can open it with Google Earth on your computer, or you can roll your own Google Map by using the ‘My Maps’ feature in Google Maps but the simplest thing to do is just open Google Maps and paste the URL below into the Search Box:

http://www.garda.ie/sez/gardagosafecameras.kml

You can see my map here:

View Larger Map

Alternatively you can see the map on The Journal here: http://www.thejournal.ie/rush-to-check-speed-cameras-crashes-garda-website-2010-11/

Earlier today Noel Ballantyne tweeted me to day to let me know that Google had updated some of their imagery in Ireland, and he noticed something unusual in Portlaoise:

http://twitter.com/NoelBallantyne/status/27831123081

This imagery isn’t available in Google Maps yet, here’s what it looks like in Google Earth:

Strange how the prison is missing from the new image, and only older imagery is used.  Noel mentioned that the prison was undergoing some renovation work at the time the second image was taken, but while the site may have looked like a building site, there is no reason for it to have been removed from the image. Unless removal was specifically requested perhaps?

A later image of Mountjoy Jail in Dublin shows no such sign of censorship:

It seems to me that something strange is going on. Now where’s my tin hat?

UPDATE: Noel also noticed that the prison is missing from recently updated OSi mapping, but isn’t obscured in the 2005 Orthophotos:

http://maps.osi.ie/publicviewer/#V1,647780,698898,6

Following on from my FourSquare post below, there are a couple of interesting sites that allow you to viaulise your FourSquare checkin history on a map.

Where Do You Go generates a Heat Map of your checkin history.  Here’s mine:

Another type of visualisation can be seen on Weeplaces which looks very impressive (it uses OpenStreetMap mapping too) The site traces lines between each day’s checkins, allowing you to visualise your movements for your entire checkin history or use the sliders to select a shorter time period, right down to a single day. The output looks something like this:

You can see my checkin history on Weeplaces here. Nice! 

GeoFabrik are German OpenStreetMap specialists, and they provide some very useful data and tools for those who work with, or are interested in OpenStreetMap (OSM).

I frequently download Shapefiles of OSM data from their servers, you can get your hands on them here: http://download.geofabrik.de/osm/

Recently I’ve been playing with one of their Lab products: OSM History and have generated an animated .gif of the progress of OSM in Ireland, from it’s beginning in April 2006 (when there were less than 7,000 nodes on the map) up to August 2010 (when the map had more than 1.8 million nodes) Here it is:

If the animation doesn’t work, you can see the original here

Impressive, eh?