Bath Data Capture Project

Peoples Map and Bath Spa University are working together on two data capture projects. The Bath Spa 2nd year GIS students are mapping the city of Bath and beyond and the 3rd year GIS students are mapping the entire Isle of Wight.

Getmapping and Geosense, both shareholders in the Peoples Map, have had a long standing relationship with Bath Spa GIS Department where students have been working on Knowledge Transfer Projects (KTP’s). Getmapping/Geosense has also employed a few graduate students into their permanent teams. This relationship has worked well in the past as Bath Spa and the students specifically benefit from working with and in a commercial environment and we as a commercial entity, gain from the skills and expertise of the academia.

With this latest Peoples Map/Bath Spa venture, the Peoples Map benefit as Bath and the surrounding area is accurately mapped in the Peoples Map, but more importantly, the students not only learn and experience how data is captured and processed, but will also see how this data forms part of a commercial product. This gives them insight on how the data they capture, can be used within a commercial project.

In this data capture project, 15 Bath Spa students are using the Peoples Map, Getmapping Aerial Images and tools like GPS, MapInfo & Peoples Map Editing Suite to survey and digitise the entire city of Bath and beyond. In total they will cover an area of 10 square kilometers. Each student have the opportunity to cover urban as well as rural areas where they are collecting roads, point of interests and land use polygons. This project started at the end of September and the students are now one month into their data capture module. The project is scheduled for completion by the 1st of December and we will see the final data displayed in the Peoples Map by the end of this year. All the data created by the students will be put through the normal Peoples Map verification process to insure that this data is correct and up to date before it is loaded into the final Peoples Map layer.

I am really excited to see how the Bath data set will evolve over the next month, but more specially look forward to meet the students and discuss how they experienced this project, what was the pro’s and the cons, etc. The Peoples Map is changing and improving by the day and by receiving feedback from our users, we can keep our improvements relevant to the task at hand!

People's Map Aerial Photography

I am often asked about the photography which is used as the basis for the People's Map. The photography comes from Getmapping's Millennium Map, which was started in 1999. Our idea was to create and maintain a map-accurate, seamless colour photograph of the whole of Britain and make it available to all users at affordable prices.

Detail of the New Digital Aerial Photography

It is extraordinary to think that in those days most people had never seen an aerial photograph of their house or village. Most aerial photography was commissioned by individual Local Authorities which owned the data outright and did not make it available to anybody outside the council. The market was limited almost entirely to 'oblique' photographs taken by private pilots and sold door-to-door.

In the early days we used film cameras to capture the photography on 9 inch square negatives, and the first complete photograph of England and Wales, which was completed in 2001, used 27 kilometers of film which all had to be developed and scanned. We had over 200 people working to stitch all the 34,000 photographs together into a seamless map-accurate 'mosaic' which at that time was the largest seamless photograph ever made. We then put the whole of the Millennium Map onto our website (http://www.getmapping.com/) so that, for the first time, everybody had access to aerial photography of the whole country. We also started to make and sell various products based on the photography such as the England Photographic Atlas (the heaviest book ever published by Harper Collins) and Photoscape (a 3D DVD that allowed users to fly around the country in 3D.

In 2004 we switched to digital cameras and the resulting photography is much sharper and easier to manage. We aim to renew the photography on a 5 year timescale, but the terrible summers we have had for the last two years have put us rather behind schedule. We are hoping for a long hot summer next year.

Intergeo 2008

The recent annual trade show in Bremen – Intergeo2008 – highlighted the rapid growth in demand for geographic data, and in particular the need for more flexible solutions in the future.

Amongst the new technology on show were a large range of vertical and oblique survey cameras, web-based data services, and a growing number of ground based image acquisition systems.

However, a common theme of all of these was the need to set them in a real geographic context, and in particular to have good up to data mapping to support them – such as the People’s Map.

Many were interested in the People’s Map concept, and were impressed by the way it strikes the right balance between open access, flexible licensing and a sound commercial framework (to maintain consistency, accuracy and continuity in the data). They also agreed this was the best way to meet the needs of a changing market.

It was encouraging to see so many new pioneering technologies on show, and to realize that the People’s Map is not just a geographic information source in its own right, but will also become a platform on which the developers of tomorrow can build new and innovative solutions in an environment free from concerns over copyright infringement and uncertainty regarding data maintenance.

Working with the Swindon Link!

We are excited to announce that Peoples Map is now working with the Swindon Link newspaper to get Swindon mapped.

The Swindon Link is a community magazine that is published on a monthly basis. It was first published for the West Swindon community in December 1978 and then in North Swindon from January 1994. Swindon Link is distributed monthly free of charge over 23,000 homes in West and North Swindon. A further 3,000 are left in public places around the town.

Roger Ogle, the Swindon Link editor, realised the need for up to date maps of the Swindon when he moved there more that 30 years ago. He has been creating and publishing maps of West and North Swindon since then. These maps are free to the public as it is paid for by advertising on the brochures and is distributed in the same way as the magazine. These maps, regularly updated by Roger, is still the most up to date maps of this area as he receives the details of new developments direct from the Local Council. Towns like Swindon have undergone major development over the past 30 years as illustrated by the two Getmapping aerial images below. These show how North Swindon has developed in 6 years from 1999 to 2005.

Image 1: 1999 Getmapping Aerial Image of North Swindon

Image 2: 2005 Getmapping Aerial Image of North Swindon

Conventional Map companies are struggling to keep up with rapidly expanding towns and that is why collaboration such as this between Peoples Map and Swindon Link (the public) are so important. I asked Roger what his reason was for creating these maps and he mentioned that Swindon was expanding rapidly, and still is, and because of the layout of the modern day developments, it was very easy to get lost. He was local to the area and felt the need for a up to date map of his local area. A example of one of these maps he created for North Swindon is illustrated in Image 3 below.

Image 3: North Swindon Map by Swindon Link

The Peoples Map is now working with the Swindon Link to involve the Swindon community to get mapping. Together, we want to excite Link readers in the People’s Map and get them actively involved as users and contributors. The two parties will work closely together over the coming years to develop a relevant and up to date map of Swindon. The Swindon Link recently published this article regarding the collaboration between Peoples Map and Swindon Link: http://www.swindonlink.com/features/show/84

Swindon is still ‘virgin territory’ in the People’s Map. We hope that the people of Swindon will react to Roger's article and join in to help keep the map of Swindon up to date. Over the coming months the Peoples Map Blog and the Swindon Link will be keeping you informed on the map progress, so watch this space - and get mapping for yourself and your community.

If you think the Peoples Map can contribute to your community in the same way as we do with Swindon Link, and you have any ideas on how, we would like to hear from you. Please contact us at info@peoplesmap.com and we can discuss this in further detail.

Rasterization Issue Resolved!

The rasterization issue has now been resolved. The map renderer is currently running through the entire Peoples Map database to re-render all the maps. This process has now been running for the past three days and you will notice a significant improvement to the data displayed in the Peoples Map and Unverified map layers, especially on the small scales.

The Peoples Map team wants to thank you for your patience and again apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Rasterization disruption

We are currently fixing a bug in our rasterization process which has caused us to temporarily suspend rendering your modifications to the People's Map.

You may have noticed that gaps have started to appear in the road network and features appear on the rendered layer, but the vector data is absent in edit mode. The patch will fix these problems and others, but force us to re-render amost the entire map at each scale, which will take some time to complete.

We will keep you informed and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.