WightIntro

From OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap Project and the Isle of Wight Workshop

Over the 5th - 7th May, the Isle of Wight became the centre of a global mapping revolution. Contributors to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project met on the Island with the aim of mapping as many of its roads and footpaths as possible.

The OSM project was started to enable people to use maps in creative, productive or unexpected ways. The use of traditional maps is hampered by legal and technical restrictions that severely curtail their use. The aim of the OSM project is to create free geographic data, like street maps, that can be used by anyone, anywhere.

OSM contributors, including some travelling from as far as Germany and Norway, drive, cycled, and wandered the Island with GPS (Global Positioning System) units recording the routes of as many of the roads and footpaths as possible. The tracks recorded will be put online in the OpenStreetMap.org database where anyone in the world with access to the internet can browse, name, edit and use the data in any way they want.

Collaborative mapping is an emerging and rapidly growing activity that has developed alongside other activities like geo-caching, that is being driven in part by technology (cheap GPS equipment and online collaboration tools, like OpenStreetMap.org). What makes projects like this one stand out is their ethos on knowledge production and ownership. Under open-source models the rights of authorship are de-centred and the ownership of knowledge is seen as a common resource that can be distributed and re-used without restriction or license. Opening up map making in this way has real potential to empower people to create their own knowledge and encourages re-use of cartographic resources in novel and creative ways.

The map data produced over the weekend will contribute to OpenStreetMap.org, one of the leading projects in the open-source mapping field. Currently, OSM has mapped 15,000 miles of roads in the UK, including all the motorways. The majority of this data is for London and Birmingham and many other areas are hardly mapped at all. We hope that an intensive effort to build a map of the whole of a county in a weekend will inspire others and help to build momentum across the country.

Sample maps

For an example of the sort of map which can be produced from the data see the following example for the Weybridge (Surrey) area:	Although still in progress this is an example for Bembridge, Isle of Wight. Most footpaths have not yet been added to the data:
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