User:Jlerner/Aude

Talk given at Wiki-Conference NY at NYU Law School, July 25, 2009.

User:Aude - OpenStreetMap integration with Wikipedia

• Recently got involved to integrate maps into Wikipedia (part of a team)
• ~25% of articles on Wikipedia have or could use a map
  • Place articles need location maps 20% (of Wikipedia articles)
  • Biography 29%
  • Places 20%
  • Culture 19%
  • Species 6%
  • Sports 5%
  • Science 3%
  • Politics 3%
  • Military 3%
  • Other

Use cases

• Locator maps
• WikiMiniAtlas (little globe icon, upper left corner, on the toolserver now, who even knows about it?, needs better infrastructure and development)
• Northern Bald Ibis listed as featured, but included only a primitive thematic map
  • Wouldn't it be great to provide a user like this with tools to generate nicer maps? Make it easy for the non-technical
• March: German Wikipedia chapter started "automated map" initiative
  • Database server for OSM data
  • Rendering server to generate tiles and maps
  • Map toolserver for development and experimentation

OpenStreetMap

• Using GPS unit, walking around, taking GPS traces; relatively simply to upload to computer
• Then in OpenStreetMap, can view and edit (when logged in at http://www.openstreetmap.org/)
• Takes some time for cached tiles etc. to expire
• Idea is that all data used is free of restrictive copyright
• OSM project uploaded Tiger, then maps looked fairly complete
  • But if you look closely, you can find many errors, plenty of room for folks to improve upon it with own GPS units
  • In Europe, not such data in the public domain, has to be created from scratch (did I hear that correctly?)
• OSM is customizable, however you want to use it
  • UMD built this: http://seamster.cs.umd.edu:8090/map/ - TerpNav Pedestrian Maps

Back-end

• OSM -> Wikimedia-OSM dataabse server (postgres) -> rendering server -> SlippyMap extension -> endusers (possibly via squid)
• Easy to localize maps

Front-end

• SlippyMap extension
• Embed maps in wiki pages, where <slippymap> tag isused
  • Static maps by default
• Interactive maps if requrested
• Pop-up maps available for pages with coordinates
• Caching: cache static map images, map tile images
• Special pages: Make a map (guide users to initializing variables)

Future

• Each set of maps styles or layers with full global coverage and zoom levels requires substantial disk storage for all the map tiles
• We are limited in the number of custom styles that we can provide with full global coverage and zoom levels
• But, it may be possible to provide custom map making tools for maps with limited spatial coverage and zoom levels. With PostgreSQL ...
• More at Wikimania

• OpenStreetMap usability improving (but still harder than editing Wikipedia)

• More at OpenStreetMap