I spent this past weekend at the annual OpenStreetMap conference, State of the Map, held in Denver this year. [While I think that pairing it with the FOSS4G conference was a terrific idea, I was not able to stay this week for the latter event, but I'm excited to hear from my Azavea colleagues, David, Justin and Matt about that event].
I’m going to walk through some highlights of the event from my own perspective. I’ve written a lot about OpenStreetMap in this blog, so it’s no secret that I’m a big fan of this project that sets out to create a shared and open map of the planet. A lot has happened in the past year, but here are some of the things I saw as important or just plain cool:
- MapQuest and OSM – MQ has been a big contributor and user of OSM. They are working on new quality assessment software tools and hope to release them to the community soon. This will help to highlight the major swaths of the US, in particular, where the data needed for routing and geocoding needs to be fixed.
- Bing and OSM – Steve Coast did an overview of Bing contributions to OSM since he joined Microsoft:
- Bing aerial imagery – Bing has agreed to share its high quality aerial imagery with the OSM community. This is a big deal, as it will enable more mapping to be done without physically traveling to a site and Bing’s imagery is much higher quality than was previously available to the community
- DetectRoad API – deriving street vector data from Bing aerial imagery
- Windows Phone 7 OSM Editor – the MS Bing folks are working on this
- Frontdoor Addressing – a free and open app to move points that were geocoded to the rooftops of residences to the front door. 150 million records. Microsoft has agreed to share all results with OpenStreetMap under the OSM Open Data license.
- ArcGIS and OSM – Esri continues to invest in tools for editing and using OSM data. The ArcGIS OSM Editor was upgraded in the spring to version 1.1 and Esri is working on version 2, which was just released in beta. Some new directions Esri is taking include:
- Overall objective is to add support for OSM throughout Esri stack.
- Initial objective is to add support for publishing OSM through ArcGIS Server, including support of editing via the Javascript API.
- OSM in Japan - two presentations by Daniel Kastl on the history of OSM in Japan; challenges specific to the Japanese language, addressing systems and urban structure; and use of OSM for earthquake/tsunami response and recovery. Nostalgia for me as I recognized all of the unique and wonderful things about living in Japan.
- Mapnik – David Zwarg told me about a lightning talk about Mapnik2, which he says “has TONS of awesome features”
- Gameification – Peter Batty pointed to the need for a more game-ified OSM editing experience that might bring in a larger audience of editors. I think there is a lot to be said for this. There was an ad hoc session on Sunday focused on this question and the potential for a game-like user experience to potentially expand the OpenStreetMap community but also to potentially negatively affect data quality.
- Walking Papers – Michel Migurski (Stamen Design) summarized recent work on his Walking Papers project to a standing-room-only crowd, including interesting applications of Astrometry algorithms to geolocating map images taken from phones. Other highlights include support for multiple languages, atlas (cutting up a scene into 4-up, 16-up, etc.) and tweaks that support other audiences (crisis mappers, educators and museums).
- Migurski followed up this performance on Sunday with a rousing plea to make creating and using OSM data a lot easier. I have to admit, if you are new to the OSM community figuring out how to either use or contribute is daunting.
- Cool Tools I Didn’t Know About
- TopOSM - OSM maps overlaid on topographic elevation maps
- Cartagr.am
- Acetate - attractive stylesheets for data visualization
- TileStache - renders vector and raster tiles from contemporary map sources – think of it as a next generation TileCache
- ImpOSM – next generation importer for OSM data
- Cascadenik – cascading stylesheets for working with Mapnik


















