An Introduction to OpenStreetMap
Sarah Manley
Community Ambassador
April 20, 2009

My Background
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My Background
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My Background
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Why maps?
“Because maps are a visual tool for sharing information
with others. Because they can be produced by many
people and combined together to tell stories about complex
relationships. Because maps are never finished and only
tell part of a story that can constantly be expanded upon.
Because power exists in space, struggle exists in space and
we exist in space. Because we cannot know where we are
going if we do not know where we are from.”
- Notes for a People’s Atlas of Chicago
http://chicagoatlas.areaprojects.com/about/
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Perception
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Discovery
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Land Use
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Navigation
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Organization
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Organization
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Artistic

Artistic

Why Mapping?
“ Certainly we wanted to use the mapping to help
us figure out what a neighborhood was, but we also
wanted to use the mapping as a kind of
organizational tool, as a way of bringing the
neighborhood together and helping it to see itself.”
- Denis Wood, The Power of Maps
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Artistic
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How accessible are
current maps?
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How accessible are current maps?
• Costly
• Closed
• Often out of date
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•Copyright: http://asia.cnet.com/i/r/2007/pg/62034053/sc001.jpg 18

How accessible are current maps?
• Costly
• Closed
• Often out of date
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Copyrighted
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Norman Dennison, director of Geographers' A-Z Map
Company, confirms that Lye Close is a lie, which will now
be removed. \"The idea is to put something on the map to
protect copyright,\" he says. \"We try to put it in an area or
a part of a road which would not be misleading to the
ordinary person in the street. They have been put in out-
of-the-way places.\"
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How accessible are current maps?
• Costly
• Closed
• Often out of date
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Google screen capture: 16 Jan 2009
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OSM screen capture: 16 Jan 2009
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A thought...
“If you don’t make [lower-resolution mapping data] publicly
available, there will be people with their cars and GPS
devices, driving around with their laptops .. They will be
cataloguing every lane, and enjoying it, driving 4×4s behind
your farm at the dead of night. There will, if necessary, be a
grass-roots remapping.”
Tim Berners-Lee
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How is OpenStreetMap
different?
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\"OpenStreetMap is a project aimed squarely at creating
and providing free geographic data such as street maps to
anyone who wants them.\"
openstreetmap.org
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So what are the benefits?
• It’s Free
• It’s Open
• It’s as current as the contributers make it
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Where can you use OSM?
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How is OSM data being used?
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How is OSM data being used?
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So what are the benefits?
• It’s Free
• It’s Open
• It’s as current as the contributers make it
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How is it open?
ODBL
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So what are the benefits?
• It’s Free
• It’s Open
• It’s as current as the contributers make it
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“You could have a community capability where you
took the GPS data of people driving around and
started to see, oh, there’s a new road that we don’t
have, a new route .. And so that data eventually should
just come from the community with the right software
infrastructure.”
- Bill Gates
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OSM contributors
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Public Domain Map Data
TIGER Data:
Topologically
Integrated Geographic
Encoding and
Referencing system
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Chicago

New Orleans
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London

Berlin

Almere, Holland
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Sydney

Johannesburg

aghdad

Non-Traditional Online Maps
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You can map what matters to you
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Burning Man
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Map Rendering and
Cartography
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Mapnik

Osmarender

Cycle Map

No Name

Maplint

OpenStreetBug

Map Comparison:
http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/ : Map Compare
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How do you (and others)
get involved?
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Contribute to Potlatch- the
online editor
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You can edit from home
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You can edit from home
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You can edit from home
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You can edit from home
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You can edit from home
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Labeling in the Map
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How do you map with OSM?
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Record Observations
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Grab data off of GPS
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Grab data off of GPS
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JOSM= Java OpenStreetMap
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JOSM Preferences
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Map with your GPS
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Map with your GPS
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Edit the data
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Edit the data
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Geotagging Photos & Audio
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Geotagging Photos & Audio
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Upload and Render
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How do people map?
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Or map as a community
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Global Events:
July 10 -12, 2009: Amsterdam
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Open Source
Curriculum Initiative
•Focused on introducing students to
• community based mapping
• cartography in the web 2.0
• open source data
• crowd sourcing projects
• integrating maps into art, humanities, and other
disciplines
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Available
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Education
• will be posted on ccLearn, connexions,
curriki
• suggestions?
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Questions?
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Thank you
Sarah Manley
Bay Area Community Ambassador
Sarah@cloudmade.com
Next event: May 9 & 10:
Santa Cruz Mapping Party
wiki.openstreetmap.org
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