All posts tagged ‘maps’

File Under: Location, Mobile
Mar
8
2012

iPhoto for iOS Abandons Google Maps in Favor of OpenStreetMap

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Google Maps vs Apple's custom maps. Note the increased road/path detail from OpenStreetMap visible in the Apple version of this map of Vienna, Austria.

Apple has given Google Maps the heave-ho for iPhoto on iOS, Apple’s new photo management app for the iPad and iPhone. Open up a map in iPhoto for iOS and you may notice something a bit different — the familiar beige and yellow Google Maps are nowhere to be found. Instead you’ll see Apple’s homegrown maps.

The new low-contrast look for iPhoto’s map is distinctly Apple’s, but what’s more interesting is that much of the data behind the maps comes from the open source mapping project OpenStreetMap.

For those unfamiliar with it, OpenStreetMap is an open source project that maintains an editable map of the entire globe. Anyone can make edits and add data to the map, which is why it’s often called the “Wikipedia of maps.” Although OpenStreetMap has been around for some time, it’s recently become considerably more visible as part of Microsoft’s Bing Maps. Additionally some high-profile websites are starting to move away from Google Maps — like Foursquare, which recently ditched Google Maps in favor of OpenStreetMap.

Now, with iPhoto for iOS, Apple is joining the OpenStreetMap party as well.

Apple is using OpenStreetMap data to display maps around the world. OpenStreetMap developers have discovered that Apple is using OpenStreetMap data in Chile, Austria, Italy and many other countries. OpenStreetMap is not, however, being used for the United States. In the U.S. map data appears to be gleaned from a number of sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau and possibly the U.S. Geological Survey.

Interestingly, the OpenStreetMap data Apple is using appears to be quite old, coming from sometime around April 2010. That means that unfortunately several years worth of updates and corrections from OpenStreetMap contributors are missing from Apple’s maps. The result is a map that’s fine for something like adding location details to your vacation photos, but would likely not be accurate enough to provide navigation or directions.

In other words, don’t look for the maps in iPhoto to be the source of a revamped Maps app for iOS — in their current form these maps are just not accurate enough for navigation use.

It’s also worth noting that Apple is using OpenStreetMap data without the necessary attribution. OpenStreetMap’s Creative Commons license governing maps from 2010 requires that Apple add a notice citing the source of the data. As the OpenStreetMap blog notes, the maps are “missing the necessary credit to OpenStreetMap’s contributors; we look forward to working with Apple to get that on there.”

It’s been clear for some time that Apple is looking for a way to wean itself off Google Maps. Apple has even purchased several mapping companies, including Placebase, an online-mapping company and C3 Technologies, which creates 3D maps. Despite these moves Google Maps remain prominent on iOS. Even within the new iPhoto app Google Maps apparently still provides at least some of the data being used.

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File Under: Databases, Web Services
Apr
7
2011

OpenStreetBlock Gives Geodata the Human Touch

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Location-based web services are all the rage right now, but for most of us the actual geographic location isn’t very interesting — do you know where “40.737813,-73.997887″ is off the top of your head? No? How about “West 14th Street bet. 6th Ave. and 7th Ave?”

For the geographic web to become useful geodata has to be converted into something humans actually understand. Enter OpenStreetBlock.

OpenStreetBlock is a new web service that takes geographic coordinates (latitude/longitude pairs) and turns them into an actual city block description. The result is textual information which, in many cases, will be even more meaningful to your users than the ubiquitous pin on a map.

If you’d like to play around with a sampling of data from New York, head over to OpenStreetBlock and try out the New York demos.

If you’ve ever wanted to build your own version of EveryBlock — which pinpoints events, news stories and public data at the city-block level — OpenStreetBlock will go a long way toward getting you there. So long as you can pull geo coordinates out of your source data, OpenStreetBlock can turn that into more meaningful information.

Under the hood OpenStreetBlock relies on OpenStreetMap data and uses PHP in conjunction with a geographic database to turn your coordinates into block descriptions.

As cool as OpenStreetBlock is, getting it up and running on your own site will require a bit of work. Luckily, there are some good tutorials available that will walk you through the process of installing and setting up many of the prerequisites like PostgreSQL and PostGIS (I’ll assume you already have an Apache server with PHP installed).

To get started with OpenStreetBlock, grab the code from GitHub. The next thing you’ll need is a PostgreSQL database with all the PostGIS tools installed. Luckily those are also prerequisites for GeoDjango, so head over to the GeoDjango installation page, skip the Django-specific parts and just follow the Postgres and PostGIS installation instructions.

Next you’ll need to download Osmosis and Osm2pgsql to convert OpenStreetMap data into something Postgres can handle. Head over to OpenStreetMap, zoom into an area you’d like to query with OpenStreetBlock and then choose “export.” Select the OpenStreetMap XML Data option and save the file.

From there you can check out the guide to importing the OpenStreetMap XML Data in the OpenStreetBlock read me.

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File Under: Location, Web Services
Oct
7
2010

Personalize Your Map With a Custom Map Marker

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If you’re adding a map to your website, why settle for the vanilla design when you can customize it and leave your own personal mark?

This tutorial will show you how to create a custom map from scratch, then add a little unique flavor to it by replacing the standard “map pin” icon with a custom icon of your own design.

To do this, we’ll be using Mapstraction, a library that creates map code that can be reused across all the big mapping providers (Yahoo, Google, et al). Mapstraction also allows for multiple types of customization such as custom info bubbles and graphics like the one we’ll be dropping onto the map.

Note: This tutorial is adapted from the book Map Scripting 101 by Adam DuVander. Adam is a former Webmonkey contributor and executive editor of Programmable Web. In his book, he shows how to use all of the features of the most popular mapping APIs, and how to mash them up with data from other sources like events calendars, weather services and restaurant review sites to make a variety of custom maps.

This exercise comes from chapters 1 and 2 of Adam’s book, and it is reprinted here with his permission and that of the book’s publisher, No Starch Press. It isn’t a word-for-word excerpt. It has been slightly adapted to work as a web tutorial. You’ll find dozens of in-depth exercises — including the full version of this one — in the book itself.

Create a Mapstraction map

Mapstraction is a little different from Google Maps and Yahoo Maps. Mapstraction is an open source JavaScript library that ties into other mapping APIs. If you use Mapstraction, you can switch from one type of map to another with very little work, as opposed to rewriting your code completely.

Using Mapstraction limits your risk to changes being made to an API. For example, if your site’s traffic takes you beyond the limit for your chosen provider, or the provider begins placing ads on the map, Mapstraction lets you switch providers quickly and inexpensively.

To use Mapstraction, you must first choose a provider. In this example, I’m using Mapstraction to create a Google Map.
Continue Reading “Personalize Your Map With a Custom Map Marker” »

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File Under: Location, Visual Design
Aug
19
2010

Beautiful Websites: Stamen’s Pretty Maps

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We’ve seen some colorful map mashups in the past, like Hypercities and HeatMap, but few are as abstract and beautiful to look at as Stamen Design’s Pretty Maps.

The aptly-named app pulls sets of geodata from various freely available open mapping projects and plots them atop one another. Pretty Maps grabs street-level data from OpenStreetMap (the “Wikipedia of maps”), land formation data from Natural Earth and place-name and place-shape data from Flickr shapefiles — Flickr’s outlines generated by the tags people have attached to photos taken in that place. So all the data is from crowdsourced databases and either public domain or licensed through the Creative Commons. The maps are generated using TileStache and PolyMaps, two open source tools developed in-house at Stamen.

The result is a map that’s not so much usable for navigation as it is pretty to look at. Cities degrade into abstract and unique blobs, with pastel colors overlaying one another. The shapes are alien looking in texture and density, but instantly recognizable if you’re already familiar with the terrain.
Continue Reading “Beautiful Websites: Stamen’s Pretty Maps” »

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File Under: Location, Web Services
Jul
9
2010

MapQuest U.K Teams Up With OpenStreetMap

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The grandaddy of online mapping sites is turning to an open source library for its cartography data.

Mapquest, which is owned by AOL, launched a new beta site Friday that uses data from OpenStreetMap. So far, the OpenStreetMap data is only available on MapQuest for the United Kingdom and some of continental Europe, but MapQuest says it will broaden the scope of this experiment in the future.

Just to show it’s not messing around, the company has also established a $1 million fund “to support the growth of open-source mapping in the United States.” So, we can expect MapQuest to start hosting U.S. maps from OpenStreetMap at some point.

OpenStreetMap is like a Wikipedia for maps. It’s a fully open source and crowdsourced project. All of the geodata in the OSM system is gathered and entered by volunteers, and all of it is freely available for all to use. Furthermore, if you find an inaccuracy in a map anywhere in the world, you can actually go in and fix it. Here’s what a year’s worth of OSM edits looks like.

There’s a wiki with more information if you want to get involved. We’ve written extensively about the project before — check out some of the links at the bottom of this article.

MapQuest is using OSM for tile images and all cartographic data. It is then applying its own user interface and routing algorithms on top of OpenStreetMaps’ maps.

Here’s what MapQuest’s Antony Pegg has to say about the project on the MapQuest developer blog:

The goal was to create a MapQuest experience for the United Kingdom using only OpenStreetMap data. As much as possible we tried to use the open source software used by the OSM community, so anything we did to these tools could be contributed back. We picked the UK first because we felt we had the best shot of getting use-able routes from the data without having to worry about a language barrier at the same time.

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