Harry Wood Blog

Yesterday I gave a talk to the British Computer Society about openstreetmap.

OpenStreetMap talk on slideshare.com

Audio mp3 (68 MB)

Download the slides : BCS-OSM-talk.odp (34.2Mb)

The topics I talked about were

• OpenStreetMap purpose and premise – Comparison with wikipedia, graph showing the long tail nature of the community
• Data structures – Nodes, Ways ,Tags and their XML representations
• Editor demo – Quick demo of adding a road and a POI in JOSM
• OpenStreetMap servers and architecture – Component diagram, UCL hosting details, and the OpenStreetMap foundation
• Rendering and map displays – OpenLayers, Tile serving/hosting challenge, Mapnik toolchains, and other renderers
• The license – Attribution. Sharealike. The spirit of the license, and change to the Open Data Commons

That was all well received. Of course OpenStreetMap is a topic I have tonnes to say about, and I as prepared I got a bit carried away, and came up with 146 information packed slides. I had quite a long time to talk, but what with JOSM demonstrations and video interlude, it was clear I’d overrun by a mile, so I stopped at a convenient juncture part way through.

I intended to spend a lot more time talking about CloudMade products and services, particularly the styles and style editor at maps.cloudmade.com and the developer zone.

Other topics I didn’t cover include: Imports, Yahoo imagery, Landsat & NPE, Armchair mapping, a demonstration of photo mapping in JOSM, Mapping Parties, Developer community, and details of how to get involved. Enough material for a part II some time perhaps!