User:Joto
My name is Jochen Topf, I have been an active OSM contributor since 2006. I live in Karlsruhe, Germany. You can send me an email or talk to me on Jabber/GoogleTalk at jochen@topf.org.
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OSM Book and Presentations
Together with Frederik Ramm I wrote a book about OpenStreetMap. The 1st German edition was published at the beginning of 2008. A year later we published the 2nd edition and the 3rd in 2010. We created an English edition together with Steve Chilton, it came out in October 2010. More information about this book is at www.openstreetmap.info.
I gave my first talk about OSM at FOSSGIS 2007 in Berlin (PDF-Slides) (in German). Since then I have also spoken at several other FOSSGIS conferences, SOTM 2008, 2009, and 2010, SOTM-EU 2011, at LinuxTag 2009, and many other conferences and events. For a more complete list, see this page.
Time permitting I am willing to talk about OSM (in general or on specific topics) at events, but (unless I am at the event anyway) you have to pay travel and accommodation costs. If its a commercial event, I'll probably also ask you to pay a speakers fee.
Community activity
I am a member of the German FOSSGIS e.V., a non-profit that supports Open Source Geo-Software and Open Geodata.
I am involved in lots of OSM community activities. This includes organizing the FOSSGIS Conference, a yearly German conference on the topics of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) Software and Geodata thats also the most important OSM event for Germany. I mainly focus on the OpenStreetMap side of this event, but also help out with some other parts.
Other things I had my hand in are the free GPS lending project and organizing and administering the servers run by FOSSGIS. I also created the German OSM web site which I am now maintaining. (Incidentally: We are looking for people who want to help with the site and a new maintainer. There are lots of things to do there and I don't have the time.)
I have (co-)organized several other smaller events:
- Karlsruhe Mapping Party in March 2007
- Essen Developers Workshop in April 2007
- Address Mapping Workshop (where the Karlsruhe Schema was invented) in April 2008
- German Community Meeting in November 2008
- Public Transport Workshop in May 2009
- German Community Meeting in December 2010
I helped with organizing and/or manning booths at conferences like LinuxTag or Intergeo 2009.
My account on help.openstreetmap.org.
Software Development
I am especially interested in the technical side of OpenStreetMap and have worked an many different software programs for it. This includes database stuff (PostgreSQL/PostGIS), converting OSM data into other formats (such as shapefiles used in the professional GIS world), renderers (back in the 2007 and 2008 I worked on Osmarender, small patches for Mapnik), quality assurance (OSM Inspector) and many other random things.
| Joto commits code to OpenStreetMap under the name jochen. |
Currently I am working on these things:
- Taginfo
- Osmium
- Some experimental renderers: [1]
- The Tirex tile rendering system
- When I have the time, I keep improving the OSM Inspector
Some older stuff I have done thats not really relevant any more:
- OSMGarminMap program to create maps for Garmin GPS units from OSM data (now obsolete, use Mkgmap instead).
- Stylesheet to convert OSM data for use by Google Earth. See OSM in Google Earth.
- I created the (now obsolete) Maplint checker.
- I am the author of the Ruby OSM Library (I don't use this anymore myself, its just too slow for larger datasets. I am looking for a new maintainer.)
Commercial
OpenStreetMap started as a hobby for me and it very much still is. But bills must be paid, so these days I also try to make a living from it. To that end I co-founded Geofabrik in 2007, a company selling OpenStreetMap consulting, data and services. These days I am a freelance developer again (but still mostly work on projects for Geofabrik).
Services and Web Pages
I have created some web pages and services and maintain them:
- German www.openstreetmap.de website including the tile server.
- Best of OSM
- OSM Inspector
- Map Compare
Odd and Ends
- How to invent tags, my personal list of do's and dont's when inventing tags
- I gave an interview about OSM during FOSSGIS 2007, see Moenk's podcast (in German) and many more after that
- I organized a mapping project at a high school in Germany: Mapping-Aktion_am_Elisabeth-von-Thüringen-Gymnasium
- Map errors I found
- My Homepage elsewhere on the web
