Harry Wood Blog

The following is a set of questions which Bhaveen Dattani put to me, as part of his studies of VGI and OpenStreetMap for his course at Aston university. The basic questions are the always the big questions, and I had to take a step back and think a bit about all the broad issues around OpenStreetMap (my big hobby). In the spirit of openness I’m sharing these answers here:

What is Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI)? / Have you seen VGI?
I have noticed the term VGI used extensively in academia. There are several terms used for the same concept. Technologists will refer to the same (or similar) concept as “Crowd-sourced” geographic information.

But in fact, when describing the project I am involved in, OpenStreetMap, I prefer the term “mass collaboration”. Some VGI initiatives are mostly about “sourcing” data on the cheap from a crowd of low-skilled contributors. You can think of OpenStreetMap in those terms, but OpenStreetMap has volunteers who bring a wide range of skillsets and levels of dedication, many of whom have specific use cases of their own in mind. Users are typically also contributors. People collaborate en masse, coming together to build a wonderful free geodata resource, and crucially it is open licensed and co-owned by everyone.

What is ‘authoritative/official’ data? Have you seen this data?
Maps created by mapping agencies. This is the traditional way of creating maps. A map making organisation, with map making professionals conducts the surveys and creates the maps. Often these are government, or government backed organisations. The data comes with a mark of authority because it is created by this organisation.

People often present “authoritative/official” geodata as the antithesis of VGI, but in fact it is produced in very similar ways, by humans who make judgements and also make mistakes, and at some stage there has been a decision to work towards a certain detail and accuracy level in representing the real world. There’s no such thing as a “completely accurate” map

Although not always the case, it’s worth noting that authoritative map data is very often not free. The standard old market driven approach is to license map data at great expense, and protect this business model through copyright enforcement. Exceptions to this include some open datasets from Ordnance Survey, and TIGER data in the U.S. In both cases “authoritative” data being released for free, but at a lower quality than other more expensive datasets. So “authoritative” does not necessarily mean non-free but also does no necessarily mean high quality.

Do you believe that there are more people using VGI maps in comparison to authoritative maps or do you believe that more people are using authoritative maps over VGI maps? Why do you believe this?
It is still the case that most maps that ordinary people encounter in everyday life are based on traditional authoritative data. VGI is very new, but large projects which release the data openly (I’m pretty much exclusively talking about OpenStreetMap here) are starting to have an impact and reach an increasingly mainstream user-base. We are seeing a shift towards end users seeing and using OpenStreetMap more and more.

If we think at the level of developers working with geo-data or just experimenting with geo-data in their bedrooms, there is a class of web developers and mobile app developers who make basic embedding use of raster maps. These are more numerous, and these are mostly still using Google Maps. But if we look at developers who are working with raw geo-data (not just basic embedding of raster), it’s quite likely we’ve already passed the point a long time ago where the majority of such developers are using OpenStreetMap data by virtue of its free and open availability.

If you had to choose between two different sources of data, would you choose a VGI dataset or an authoritative dataset? Why would you choose this option
I always try to use OpenStreetMap, because by using it you are supporting it. I use it when viewing maps on my phone, when printing maps, when emailing a link to a map, when embedding maps on websites I create.

OpenStreetMap exists to be used. That’s the goal. It creates a virtuous circle. Using it results in new people seeing and talking about it, and then some new people contributing to it. As an OpenStreetMap contributor, by using it myself I can help to spot areas of map data which can be improved. As an OpenStreetMap developer I can help to spot areas of the software tools and user experience which can be improved.

I choose to support OpenStreetMap because it is a wonderful open-licensed geodata resource which can benefit all of mankind. It is a not-for-profit good cause (This is not true of many other VGI projects I might contribute to)

Can you highlight any weaknesses of using VGI over authoritative data?
I think the weaknesses many people try to highlight are misplaced criticisms, or points which are outright incorrect. Let me give a few of these.

It is commonly held that VGI cannot be trusted compared to authoritative geodata. This issue of “trust” seems highly nebulous and subjective. I would argue that it actually boils down to a very indirect way of talking about data quality. No geodata is perfect, but if data quality is higher, more people will trust it, and OpenStreetMap data quality is ever-increasing.

People commonly criticise OpenStreetMap data shortcomings with a particular location in mind, but they should really fix it! (or at least point mappers to the location so we can tackle it, e.g. using osmbugs.org) With an open wiki-like process inviting anyone to improve the data, to criticise OpenStreetMap is to criticise yourself.

It is very common to hear people criticise aspects of the cartographic style presented on the ‘standard’ OpenStreetMap.org home page. This is a very visual thing which people are quick to notice, but it’s actually largely irrelevant. With open access to the underlying geodata (which OpenStreetMap offers for free) anyone can customise the cartographic style.

If I were to highlight a weakness, I would say one of the only fair criticisms of OpenStreetMap is the inability to achieve consistency across the dataset. OpenStreetMap currently has no upper limit on the level of detail volunteers can add, and this means that tremendous detail is added in one area, while another area is lacking. This weakness might mean that for some data use cases, a technically challenging process of smoothing over these imbalances can be necessary. For many use cases this is not a major shortcoming (and this is true of other issues of data quality)

What interests you about VGI?
I am excited by people coming together to collaborate on creating something great. I feel passionate about OpenStreetMap for this reason. The process and progress of map data being added is glorious and fascinating thing to behold.

VGI initiatives in general? I find many of them less worthwhile and subtractive from our global efforts. In particular many initiatives fail to open license and release the raw data which volunteers contribute. I would question the ethics of this exploitative practice. Hopefully potential contributors will see this and stay away, but this doesn’t always seem to work. I find it interesting that anyone would contribute to Google Map Maker.

What is required to produce high quality VGI within the UK?
There is no special requirement in the UK. OpenStreetMap’s approach to VGI was invented in the UK, but works worldwide, including creating the very first maps in the developing world for example. There are some differing considerations on a country by country basis. A key one is the availability of existing map data.

In the UK the Ordnance Survey still dominates provision of geo data. Many people in the UK are fiercely proud of our national mapping agency, but there is also a tremendous desire for open geodata. This gave rise to OpenStreetMap and continues to motivate volunteers to contribute in the UK. Partly in response to the “threat” of OpenStreetMap, the O.S. decided to release some of their lower quality datasets under a free open license. Nowadays we attract volunteers to OpenStreetMap showing that it can be better (mostly it is!) and more free compared to O.S.

What challenges do you feel would arise in the future of VGI?
I’ve already mentioned imbalances in level detail as a weakness we are struggling to tackle. This will become more of a challenge. Likewise other data issues such as vandalism and rogue importing will likely increase as the project grows, and we face challenges in structuring our project governance, but I think we will overcome these challenges within our community.

A big question is whether OpenStreetMap will remain relevant at all in the long run when faced with the challenge from other competing map providers. OpenStreetMap provides map data. It doesn’t attempt to compete on other features. There’s no OpenStreetMap aerial imagery and certainly no OpenStreetMap version of any 3D lidar photo synth features. It’s not something we are even *trying* to do, but If those things turn out to be the future, then OpenStreetMap might fade into irrelevance. This seems unlikely. Google streetview has been around for years, and hasn’t stopped people using normal maps for most use cases. Other forays into 3D have so far proved to have good gimmick value, but no long lasting effect on the way we use maps.

Another challenge might be if our form of vector map data can be auto-generated by some yet-to-be-invented machine learning OCR techniques. Of course competing crowd-sourcing initiatives might also be a challenge.

But there’s a certain glorious inevitability about the success of OpenStreetMap. It keeps getting bigger and better because people want open licensed map data. Even if OpenStreetMap somehow dies out, the data will live on with the same open license.

Do you feel that VGI is currently growing?
Yes. Massively so. In terms of quantity of data, and number of people taking part. See http://wiki.osm.org/Stats for some exponentially increasing curves.

How long do you feel VGI would be used for? Why do you believe this?
The data will be around, and will form the basis of interesting geo-experiments long into the future I’m sure. As a snapshot of the world as we see it today, OpenStreetMap is fascinating, because of the way it has be built by real people with local interests. But OpenStreetMap’s data is not being used to its full potential yet. The interesting question really is how long will it take for OpenStreetMap to really go mainstream?

How long do you feel authoritative data would be used for? Why do you believe this?
As mentioned, authoritative data currently forms basis of most maps in use today. I think this will continue until OpenStreetMap not only goes mainstream, but starts to push all other map data providers out of the market. I’m not sure if this will ever happen (I think in ten years time we’ll know either way) but in any case OpenStreetMap is adding value, and can add much more value, alongside authoritative map data.

Where do you see VGI in five years from now?
Impossible to say. We’re at an exciting juncture right now. In five years OpenStreetMap could be massive, or it could be coasting along still yapping at the heals of other map providers.

What do you believe the future trends are for VGI?
We’ll see more commercial propositions built on top of OpenStreetMap, and I think this will help to drive things forwards. We may see the emergence of a new kind of “authoritative” data, built on top of VGI. Map data authorities could take a snapshot version and “bless” it as trustworthy, or perform some elaborate branching of the dataset to arrive at an authoritative version.

Is there anything else you would like to add about VGI and its future trends?
VGI / crowd-sourcing initiatives should open-license the data they gather, to provide it back to those who contribute. In fact it should be regarded as unethical not to do so, and we must campaign strongly against instances of closed data crowd-sourcing (such as Google Map Maker) to ensure that this exploitative practice does not become a trend.

Open licensing is about giving the data back to your contributors (which should help you attract them in the first place) but it’s also about data sharing *between* different initiatives, and ensure your data gets used as widely as possible. New VGI initiatives should also consider the compatibility of their open license with that of OpenStreetMap. How might we share data? Or could OpenStreetMap be a good platform for directly publishing the data? By doing this you can be taking part in the largest VGI initiative of them all!

I was invited to speak at the PICNIC festival in Amsterdam. I was presenting OpenStreetMap and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team again, a slimmed down version of this presentation. I followed after Helena Puig Larrauri presenting the “Standby Taskforce”, and then we sat together and took questions. You can watch that whole thing here:

I had the impression I was bringing OpenStreetMap to a very new audience which is always worthwhile. In this case the session had a journalism theme to it. It was organised by European Journalism Centre. Big thanks to them for inviting and organising for me to speak. It was an interesting session overall, and the EJC folks even took me and my fellow panelists for dinner on boat ride around Amsterdam! Here’s another video with me on the boat:

The connection between Humanitarian OpenStreetMap and journalism is one I haven’t given a lot of thought to before, and I probably should’ve given more thought to it before trying to answer those questions! Clearly OpenStreetMap has great potential for unrestrictive (free!) use in presenting maps for newspaper & TV news. Perhaps I should also have mentioned that journalists can of course help our cause simply by talking about us. OpenStreetMap has made the mainstream news in Germany more than anywhere else, and we can see the benefits this has brought in increased contributions (Or maybe the contributor interest came first. Who can say?) More people viewing and taking an interest in opensteetmap.org is all good news. hot.openstreetmap.org also offers an interesting window into the project. I think the more obvious “good cause” nature of that may appeal to more people, and things like tasks.hotosm.org might present a more obvious starting point for people looking for places to contribute.

I hung around for the second day at PICNIC which was also fun. I’m not quite sure how to categorise this conference. It’s sort of about technology, or just new ideas I suppose. Apparently there were ~3000 attendees. Lots of creativity and buzz and picnic boxes for lunch, all set on the opposite side of the river from the Amsterdam city centre in an amazing new building which looks like a crashed alien spaceship.

I started by presenting some slides from my OpenTech OpenStreetMap developer ecosystem presentation which highlights the central role of raw geodata, and gradually builds up a picture culminating in this diagram (see above link for the full build-up and explanation)

Also a re-use of the slide explaining different levels of OpenStreetMap use which developers and data user organisations might consider.

Then it was on to the live demos touring around various different topics and tools. I don’t think I actually timed it well enough to get through all these things in either of the two hour-long sessions, but the following were (more…)

Last week I gave a talk at #geomob, London’s second most important geo meet-up group (after OSMLondon of course). It was good to be able to get up and present something after watching so many others over the past couple of years.

My talk was about the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (hot.openstreetmap.org) I’ve been doing a fair bit of HOT stuff lately, so it came at a good time. I’ve just got back from a week long trip to Washington D.C. for a board strategy meeting, followed by various events there. The talk is a refresh and update of previous talks I’ve given on the topic, plus some new info inspired by this recent trip (newer stuff from slide 18 onwards)

Download slides for OpenOffice (28Mb!)

…or just see them below with notes (kind of a transcript) alongside:

Slide 1

I’m going to talk about the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. How OpenStreetMap offers a great platform for humanitarian mapping, and a look at some of the (more…)

We had the annual “State of the map” OpenStreetMap conference a month ago. This was in Denver. I had a choice between this or the more sensible carbon-effiecent location of Vienna for SOTM-EU a few months earlier. I decided to go to Denver. To be honest I sort of drifted into that dicision in a disorganised manner, but I did have some reasons as I said at the time.

I knew there was a core of London OSMers who were deciding to go to SOTMEU, and not to Denver. I felt it might be important to be in Denver as a representative, to meet, explain, and be an ambassador for the heart and soul of OpenStreetMap. The “OpenStreetMap way” as I see it. This is what I tried to do with my talk: “Blossoms, weeds and blades of grass: Growing the map”

The following is all the slides and a transcript of roughly what I said (or intended to say) It’s a bit of a whopper. Sorry if your RSS reader just blew a fuse. Alternatively you can watch this as a video showing slides and good quality audio, or a live action video from the front (but not so good audio). You can also see the slides on slideshare, download for OpenOffice, or powerpoint (32 MB).

Slide 1

I’m Harry and I’m from England… and I thought I’d compare OpenStreetMap to an english country garden.

It sort of blossoms with a wondrous variety of (more…)

A couple of weeks ago I was in Plymouth for the Society of Cartographers Annual Conference. Lots of interesting talks and a fun and friendly atmosphere, particularly during the evening entertainment: pub quiz, boat trip and rum cocktails. [update: forgot to say my photos from the conference are here]

I came across a strange new breed of people who knew all about making maps using only adobe illustrator. That’s a side of “cartography” which rarely surfaces at the geo events I’ve been to before (and I’ve been to quite a few now), but this seems like a rather interesting artistic end of a map-making spectrum. I didn’t come across anyone who had tried out OpenStreetMaps options for exporting to Illustrator. This probably needs to be made easier, but I suspect Maperative might be a kick ass tool in this arena. I don’t have illustrator myself, so I’d be interested to know how well it works.

I gave a talk on a blend of topics to do with transport and open data and some of my experience of mobile geo development. I talked through some stuff I’ve been working on at placr.co.uk: The UK Travel Options iPhone app, and the more recent placr.mobi mobile website. Then I gave a few more nice bits of bus route related technology (and cartography) coming out of OpenStreetMap.

The slides and notes (approximately what I said in the talk) are included with the presentation on slideshare, or OpenOffice download, or PowerPoint download …or here it all is in good old pictures & text:

Slide 0

I’ve got four different things I want to talk about.

I want to talk about Open Data, and specifically Open Transport Data. And I want to talk about the work I’ve been doing at placr.co.uk, and finally my hobby and passion OpenStreetMap.

Lots to cover, but fortunately they’re all wonderfully interrelated, so it’s really just one big topic.

(more…)

Last week I gave a talk about humanitarian mapping with OpenStreetMap. This was at an event organised by Article25, sponge network, and RIBA knowledge communities.

Download slides as an OpenOffice .odp file

Slides on slideshare.net

Or here are the slides as plain old images and slide notes alongside:

I’m going to talk about mapping as in creating maps, and the not-for-profit mass-collaboration project “OpenStreetMap”. I’ll show various examples of how OpenStreetMap has helped in disaster response and developing world situations.

But first let me explain what OpenStreetMap is…

OpenStreetMap.org is a website which displays a map. Here is a map of where we are right now for example. The site lets you zoom in and pan around the map, much like google maps. But you can already see some interesting details which you wouldn’t get with google maps.

OpenStreetMap is much more than just a map…

(more…)

As well as giving a talk at OpenTech, I also did little interview about OpenStreetMap for VisionOn.TV:

On VisionOn.TV site this is in various categories, or this individual interview is on blip.tv, or youtube

The “Documentation” link I mentioned is wiki.openstreetmap.org. Find out all about the OpenStreetMap project there.

The video featured here is an animation of OpenStreetMap edits back in 2008 (It’s stunning. Watch it full-res for the best effect) There’s even more worldwide editing activity on OpenStreetMap these days.

The talk I gave at OpenTech earlier in the day, is described in the previous blog post (also available as a video) That was going into more depth particularly for developers interested in using OpenStreetMap

Video

Thanks to the nice folk at VisionOn.tv for organising an interview in their “pop-up studio” there. VisionOn.TV is a pretty interesting citizen journalism project. Their approach was to do almost all their editing (e.g. dropping in the OSM animation video) “live” as they recorded the interview. This probably gives them a more fun live TV feel to their “studio” activities, but it also seems like a clever approach to avoid endless faffing with editing

…which is a big problem with creating video. I spent hours and hours on this tutorial video. The results were not really worth the time it took (That tutorial is now out-of-date for several reasons too) At the time I realised that I could have achieved almost as good a video by practising a few times and then recording the whole screencast in one take, rather than doing things piece by piece and editing clips together, which just takes forever.

I’m interested in this stuff because video is the way to reach out to the masses. Make stuff which appeals to the short attention span of the youtube generation. The Video approach is a no-brainer. The process of making video is difficult. For OpenStreetMap we need better promotional videos and video tutorials. Compare videos on that list, with the “guided tour” video (well flash animation actually) which is front and centre on waze.com . It’s a slick persuasive pitch to ordinary non-technical people (Important note: Don’t be persuaded! waze.com is one of several companies who get people to contribute geo-data, and then hoard it for their own commercial benefit. You should be supporting the not-for-profit OpenStreetMap project instead!)

This interview video is not a slick pitch. I’m concentrating on trying to explain OpenStreetMap in a persuasive way, and as a result I’m furrowing my brow and looking too serious. And when I first watched it back I thought I’d really failed to get various important messages across, particularly about the open data aspects of OpenStreetMap. But I guess that’s the short video way. Dumb things down and miss out the details. I feel better about it when I see a facebook comment from my (non-techie) sister saying “good explanation, I get it now!”.

I gave a talk at OpenTech 2011 yesterday. This is a big open source open data London technology conference. A lot of fun.

I gave an overview of the developer ecosystem around OpenStreetMap data, how web and mobile app developers can use OpenStreetMap, and how the OpenStreetMap tile server is only a small part of that. This included a whole sequence of shiny new slides to illustrate these points by gradually building up a nice diagram.

Watch the talk video on youtube

Slides on SlideShare.net

The session listing on lanyrd has some photos etc linked from there.

The following is the slides in a form which is less likely to crash your browser, along with notes

Open Technology enthusiasts will have heard of OpenStreetMap before

If you’ve only taken a quick look, you’ll perhaps have the idea that OpenStreetMap is an open source competitor to Google maps. It kind of is that, but that’s not really the whole story.

It’s more accurate to compare OpenStreetMap with wikipedia. It is very much the wikipedia of maps. Similar for a number of reasons….

(more…)

I made a bus map.

Not just an image, but a dynamic “slippy map” rendered at several zoom levels.

This was my “hack” for the RewiredState, National Hack the Government Day”, a gathering of hackers who build something in a day, with the aim of tackling government/society problems, working with government data. Projects are presented at the end of the day.

I created the bus map by “rendering” OpenStreetMap data. By this I mean starting from raw map data, the underlying vector data, the coordinates and connections of every road etc, and creating raster images arranged in tiles at several zoom levels, for the map display linked above.

Clearly within the graphics routines this bright red routes data is drawn in a particular order, and in a sense it is laid on top of the map, but it’s important to realise the routes are baked into the raster images. This isn’t a javascript overlay. Rendering data in this way has advantages and disadvantages over javascript overlays. An advantage is that we can show all the bus routes of London when zoomed out, without crashing the browser. Other advantages are in the subtleties of how you can make the map look. I haven’t really demonstrated this very well here yet, but I hope to make some improvements. If you look closely some tube station labels are drawn over the routes, which at least shows it’s not an overlay. There are other (better) OpenStreetMap rendering examples elsewhere

Getting the data

You can download raw OpenStreetMap vector data for the entire planet. In fact I took an england extract in PBF format offered up by geofabrik. From this I just chopped out the London area (this bounding box) using the tool “osmosis” with this command:

wget http://download.geofabrik.de/osm/europe/great_britain/england.osm.pbf

$OSMOSIS_HOME/bin/osmosis \
   --read-pbf ./england.osm.pbf \
   --bounding-box left=-0.543 right=0.337 top=51.719 bottom=51.253 idTrackerType=BitSet \
   --write-xml ./london.osm

Once I had london.osm, it was time to put this through the Mapnik rendering tool. Very broadly the steps were:

• Install Mapnik. In fact this is several steps, but happily I already had it installed. The ‘Build your own OpenStreetMap Server’ tutorial by Richard Weait was useful for this
• Load the data into postGIS with a command such as ./osm2pgsql -S default.style --slim -d gis ./london.osm
• Edited ‘generate_image.py’ to render a single image in central london as a test
• Edit ‘generate_tiles.py’ to specify the london bounding box and zoom levels. Initially I’ve rendered zoom levels 7 to 15.
• Run ‘generate_tiles.py’ to create the tileset (png files in a directory structure)
• Made a HTML file with the javascript to launch OpenLayers fullscreen pointing at these tiles (do ‘view source’ on the site to see the javascript for this)
• Copied the stylesheet file ‘inc/layer-ferry-routes.xml.inc’ to make a new style layer for bus route relations (thanks to SK53 for suggesting this)
• Reference the new layer in osm.xml, and ‘inc/layers.xml.inc’
• Test using ‘generate_image.py’ before re-running ‘generate_tiles.py’ to re-render the tiles.
• Added more rules for varying thicknesses and a TextSymbolizer for showing route labels

My busmap stylesheet so far: style.tar.gz

öpnvkarte

Among the list of rendering examples linked above, is the one called “öpnvkarte.de” which shows bus routes throughout europe. In fact this is one of the best examples of customised OpenStreetMap rendering. Really nice colour and style choices with subdued colours for the background features enhancing the bold transport lines very clearly. So bus route rendering has certainly already been done. What’s the point in my map then?

öpnvkarte is very german. It’s named after a german transport network. The map is quite literally centred on Germany, and you’ll have noticed it has an un-typeable german character in it’s URL (although Shaun has provided openbusmap.org as a more sensibly named proxy). Petty irritations perhaps. So what else?

As far as I’m aware öpnvkarte hasn’t been updated in a while, so by re-rendering today’s openstreetmap data, we can see how the community has progressed with adding more routes. I was slightly disappointed to find that there wasn’t much difference in London actually. Just one or two details. Compare here with here. But OpenStreetMap people tend to be motivated a lot by renderings and other uses of the data they’re gathering. If the bus map stops being updated, then people stop adding bus routes.

There are other things which are less than perfect about öpnvkarte. It’s not a worldwide rendered tileset. It went worldwide for a few weeks but the server didn’t manage to cope. (I know my map is obviously not competing very well. I just rendered tiles for London!)

Wordwide tile rendering and re-rendering of updates, are tricky technical challenges. Obviously the developer of öpnvkarte is under no obligation to do these things, it’s just a shame that he doesn’t. More of a shame is that he doesn’t (as far as I’m aware) share his stylesheet config files. Again he’s not obliged to do so, and given the amount of work he must have put into it, perhaps it’s understandable. But sharing stylesheets would allow people with hardware and tuning know-how to have a go at tackling these other hosting challenges.

So those are a few weak justifications for starting all over again and attempting to build a different bus map stylesheet. My mapnik config files are hopelessly rudimentary so far, but it’s a start. Mostly though, this is just another baby step in my slow climb up the Mapnik learning curve. I wrote a diary entries back in January about this, but until this weekend I hadn’t tried anything further.

RewiredState
It was good to get up and present this rendering idea at rewiredstate, to a bunch of hackers and data mashers who I think would find this sort of thing interesting to play with themselves. I know a lot of them will reach for the boring old google maps toolsets for their map mashing work, but hopefully I gave a hint at some of the raw power and rendering fun offered by OpenStreetMap. Perhaps I should have made this important point again though: You can just use the familiar google maps javascript API on top of OpenStreetMap basemaps!.

The important point I did remember to make in my 2 minute slot: Next weekend we’re having a London OpenStreetMap hack weekend. I must try to prepare this time!

Thanks to the hard working RewiredState organisers and their sponsors (wired uk, tso, dxw) for a great day, and for all the free penguin biscuits and beers in the pub afterwards.

UPDATE: New transport map from Andy Allan. My friend Andy is creator of OpenCycleMap and all round Mapnikmeister. Unveiled today (14th April), his transport map is auto-updated and rendered worldwide (how are your local buses looking?) with beautiful pale shaded background cartographic choices. I think we can safely say I’ve been outdone on this one