OpenStreetMap party at Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Apparently, yesterday we had the first OpenStreetMap event in
Taiwan!
We met in a café/restaurant equipped with power plug, wireless
network and overhead projector and we had a bit of an introduction,
chat and lunch.
Then we split in groups and exploited the fact that the newly
built underground (KMRT) system is still free of charge, to spread
around and map around the stations.
Finally, we reconvened at someone’s house to see how to put the
data together, draw roads, tag and upload.
Highlights of the day:
-
How to turn a
serial GPS into a data logger with 6 hours battery life
. Then attach it to your bike using
magnets from broken hard drives. Totally rocks! - Previous OpenStreetMap data was collected by
only one person,
who took the fancy new High Speed Rail from the
opposite side of the country and joined the party. This also made
discussion
about standardising tags for Taiwan rather easy. - A group of people appeared wielding a number of
“totally insane in every regard” Garmin GPSMAP units: it turns
out they are a civil action group that goes around mapping
historical trails, abandoned railroads, aboriginal routes and
mountain crosses and so on. Apparently, they did not know about
OpenStreetMap: hopefully they’ll join in.
Technical bits:
-
The eeePC
was very popular, and very handy for going around storing tracks,
as you can just chuck it in one bag. JOSM runs fine, although it
could really use an interface redesign to fit in the small screen.
In fact, it could really use an interface redesign to fit in the
standard 1024×768 screen of my laptop. - We could not use the tracks made with the Garmins because we
did not know we had to do “Setup -> Map -> Lock On Road =
Off” and it was on by default. Now we know it for next time. - Something like a SirfStarIII really helps in a city made mainly
of very tall buildings with lots of steel and glass. My Sony-based
cheap gps receiver that worked ok in the Bolognese countryside was
next to useless here, continously losing the fix and producing a
crazy zigzagging track of doom, only useful to figure out big long
straight roads. - Geocorrelation of digital camera pictures rocks! Who needs to
store waypoints when you can just take pictures with the digital
camera and have them show up as waypoints in JOSM? The trick of
taking a picture of the GPS time and use that to compute time
offset is great. Also, we found it easier to just fire up gpscorrelate
to do the geocorrelation rather than figuring out how the tools in
JOSM work.
Issues to address:
- There is a strong need for a
zh_TWtranslation
plugin of JOSM; I’ll try to find out how to do it and pass on the
information to who can do it. - Road names could be written either in English or in Chinese
characters. Currently English has been used for the
nametag because osmarender cannot render Chinese
characters. There is some planining to create an OSM mirror in
Taiwan which renders twice, and allows to choose the rendering
language for the map. I will try to get a planet.osm
extract for Taiwan that people can use to experiment with this;
thanks to people in#osmfor giving me names of people
to contact. I will try later after Europe wakes up from this
even-earlier-than-usual sunday morning.