Presentation at OpenStreetMap's State of the Map 2008, Limerick, Ireland.

1. Open content printed travel
guidebooks using OpenStreetMap
Jani Patokallio
jani@wikitravelpress.com

2. Overview
● What's Wikitravel?
● A Brief History of Mapping on Wikitravel
● Integrating Wikitravel and OSM
● Future plans

3. Website
● "Wikipedia meets Lonely Planet"
● Launched in July 2003
● Almost 50,000 articles in 20 languages
– ~19,000 in English version alone
● 10,000+ edits/week
● Webby Award for Travel in 2007

4. Printed guides and
Wikitravel Press
● Addresses an obvious need
– Internet is good, but sometimes paper is
better
– Current guides are 3-10 years out of date
● A design goal since day one
– Long, comprehensive articles > short stubs
– "Can you sleep?" test for creating a page
● The key: Print on demand
– Book is printed after you order
– Information in the guide is up-to-date

5. Flow between
website and
book:
1) Edit guide
2) Publish guide
3) Deliver guide
4) Read guide
5) Edit guide...

6. State of the Map,
2003
● Virtually no usable open map data
when Wikitravel was founded in 2003
● OpenStreetMap?
– Didn't exist
● Wikipedia?
– Maps vary wildly in appearance and
licensing
– Only rarely street-level
● So we had to roll our own...

7. The First Map:
Montreal, 2003

8. Mapping with DEMIS
● DEMIS Web Map Server (demis.nl)
– Semi-commercial software, free web demo
● Generates nicely shaded maps of any
spot on the planet
– Output is GIF only
– No street data
– Minimal, often faulty city, road, rail data
● License is almost-but-not-quite PD
● Usable "region" maps with a little work

9. DEMIS:
Iriomote, Japan

10. Mapmaking
Expedition
● Standardize appearance
– Listing icons
● Document mapmaking process
– Trace over satellite imagery
– SVG format, so relatively easy to edit

11. Homemade:
Helsinki, Finland

12. But nevertheless...
● Intimidating barrier of entry
– A number of prospective editors for WTP
guides screamed and ran for the door
● Time-consuming to create
– More time spent drawing than editing
● Painful to maintain
– Bars and restaurants go bust, hotels
change name
– No link between guide data and map

13. OpenStreetMap to
the rescue!
● Vast treasure trove of detailed, CC-
licensed map data
● World map is improving continually
● Web interface and tools being
developed
● Output can be customized by editing
XML "style sheet"
● How does Wikitravel fit into all this?

14. OSM v1:
Helsinki, Finland

15. Step 1:
Listings in OSM
● Listings (attractions, restaurants,
nightspots, hotels and whatnot) added
as nodes to OSM
● Verify that names are identical
– either name or name:en used to match
● The beauty of it:
– No Wikitravel-specific tags needed for OSM
– No geodata needed in Wikitravel itself

16. Step 2:
Export and merge
● Wikitravel listings are also XML
<see name=”Foo” address=”8 Bar St”>Great
place!</see>
● Mashing the two together just requires
a little XSLT magic
● End result:
– OSM data dump with Wikitravel-listed
nodes changed to use icons and the rest
removed
– Dump of matched and unmatched listings

17. Step 3:
Generate SVG
● SVG output customized for printability
– Large fonts
– Contrasty colors (even in grayscale)
– Unnecessary stuff removed
● Main file has the map and icons
● Second file has an automatically
generated key to the listings
● Put them together and you get...

18. OSM v2:
Helsinki, Finland

19. Problems (1/2)
● OSM not very friendly for adding listings
– Current: Need to add "nodes", "tags" etc
– Wanted: Drag-and-drop little restaurant, bar,
hotel etc icons into the map
– Ideal: Drag-and-drop from Wikitravel page
into the map (so name etc are automatic)
● Matching can be a little hit-or-miss
– If two places have exactly the same name,
Wikitravel can't tell them apart
– Solution: Add OSM IDs to Wikitravel?

20. Problems (2/2)
● Osmarender SVGs and Inkscape
– Can edit and export, but corrupts when
saved
● No “Recent changes”
– Who changed what and why?
– Example: We added boundaries for Paris
arrondissements, but they were removed
– After lots of detective work, it turned out
that boundaries should be done as
relations...

21. Future plans
● User-friendly icons into Potlatch
● A slippy map server for Wikitravel
– Sights, restaurants, hotels etc as layers
that can be turned on and off
● ...

22. Thank you
http://wikitravelpress.com