Helensburgh complete in just a couple of days

One of the People's Map contributors has already mapped the entire town of Helensburgh, Scotland since the launch of the new site this week. Here are a few images illustrating what progress can be made in just a day or two:

This aerial photo shows the extent of Helensburgh.

This image shows the original data that existed in People's Map before our contributor started to map Helensburgh.

This image displays the data created by the contributor on top of the aerial imagery.

The last image shows the new data already rendered into the People's Map unverified map layer, ready for validation.

All in four easy steps! Why not map your own town and let us know about it?

The New People's Map is Launched

Many of you who read this blog on a regular basis will know that we have been working on the new People’s Map website for several months. Well today is the day we launch the new site and we are thrilled with the results.

Starting off with the new features you will notice at once that the new map window is much larger, which means less panning and zooming. In Edit mode nodes do not appear unless they are selected, making the mapping interface much less cluttered and easy to use.

We have also improved the map search capabilities, which produce better more accurate results... give it a try and let us know what you think.

Website performance is considerably enhanced especially in terms of panning and zooming. Many data structure improvements were also implemented to improve editing performance, but we will let you be the judge of that.

We have enhanced the discussion forums facility and we’ll be adding topics as they arise. We hope this will encourage better more focused feedback to the benefit of all.

More help is at hand too in the form of data capture guides and screen casts to provide all users & editors with better guidance on the various functionalities. We will be adding to these over time, therefore any feedback or input will be gratefully received.

That’s it! On behalf of everybody in the People’s Map team...Enjoy!

Map Layers in peoplesmap.com

Most of you have probably noticed that there are four different raster map layers in http://www.peoplesmap.com/, but what do these maps represent and how can you use them?

1) The Getmapping Imagery layer contains the aerial photographs used as the base to create our mapping data from.

2) The People's Map layer contains all the verified map data and information created by our various private or commercial contributors. This map only contains data that was verified by our team of professional cartographers and will therefore be visible in the People's Map WMS layer used in GIS applications or our Open Layers API embedded into customer's web sites.

3) The People's Map Unverified Layer contains both map data verified as part of the process briefly described above and all other data created, whether verified or not. All unverified data is highlighted in purple.

4) The Out of Copyright Map is a 1940's map of Great Britain that is used as a reference to create and verify new mapping. Since this map is out of copyright, our users are allowed to use this data freely for our purposes.

Top Contributors for February 2009

Congratulations to Laurence Newman who has overtaken the long standing "Mapman" on top of the All Time Road Creation rankings.