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State of the Map US: San Francisco 2013

Saturday Schedule

Saturday
Sunday
9:00am

Opening Session, Martijn van Exel

Editors
Education
9:30am

1

Tom MacWright, iD, a New Editor for OpenStreetMap

Track 1

iD, a New Editor for OpenStreetMap

Tom MacWright

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iD is the new in-browser map editor for OpenStreetMap that focuses on usability and simplicity. It’s designed to radically improve the first-time editing experience while providing a fast and intuitive interface for anybody mapping on OpenStreetMap. This will session will demo iD and talk about the dynamics of building this editor, the roadmap ahead, and the potential for similar open source projects in the OSM space.

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2

Patrick Wilson, Zombie Based Learning OSM Style

Track 2

Zombie Based Learning OSM Style

Patrick Wilson

Geography is becoming less and less emphasized in the Florida public school curriculum partly due to the standardized assessment system. In an attempt to inspire our youth and promote geography as a life skill, Patrick has spent some of his free time volunteering at local schools. In this talk he’ll talk about Zombie-based geography lessons that utilize OpenStreetMap data and other open tools he’s used in an effort to grow students’ interest in contributing to OpenStreetMap and learning how geography will benefit them in the event of a zombie apocalypse.

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10:00am

1

Coleman McCormick, Pushpin, Stats, and Mobile Editing

Track 1

Pushpin, Stats, and Mobile Editing

Coleman McCormick

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In the fall of 2012, the mobile OpenStreetMap editor for iOS devices - Pushpin - was launched. It’s now been used by thousands of people in over 100 countries for casual editing, mapping parties, and humanitarian aid projects. Pushpin has lowered lower the bar for mappers, making it simpler for newcomers to make meaningful contributions. This talk will review some of the experiences of Pushpin’s development, statistics on its usage worldwide, and how Spatial Networks wants to grow the app in the coming year.

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2

Nuala Cowan and Richard Hinton, I'll Grade Your Edits: OpenStreetMap in Higher Education

Track 2

I'll Grade Your Edits: OpenStreetMap in Higher Education

Nuala Cowan and Richard Hinton

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For the last few years, George Washington University’s upper division GIS class has integrated OpenStreetMap assignments into the course curriculum. This past semester, the class worked closely with the International Services Division at the American Red Cross to map disaster prone communities in Columbia and Indonesia. These efforts were in conjunction with the National Red Cross chapters in these countries that are using the data toward disaster mitigation efforts. The students loved the assignment - contributing to real data.

Nuala and Richard are interested in formalizing the workflow developed to assign, operate, and grade this type of assignment for undergraduate classes. The result would be a small module that could be used in any undergraduate class (not just GIS or Geography) that promotes the collective creation of open source data. This session will discuss experimentations with various editors, task managers, and desktop GIS software to achieve this module, and will open the floor up ideas from you on how to make this better, more concise and more accessible.

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Break
Infrastructure
Traffic
10:45am

1

Frederik Ramm, The Geofabrik Download Server

Track 1

The Geofabrik Download Server

Frederik Ramm

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Ever since the planet file became too large for the average end user to process, Geofabrik have made country extracts available for people to download. It was just a few countries initially, but meanwhile there are daily updates for most countries in the world, and even sub-regions for some of those where OSM is big. This technical talk explains the chain of open source tools that powers the download server, explains the problems and limitations of the approach used on that server, and compares it to other ways of producing daily or even sub-daily regional OpenStreetMap extracts.

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2

David Emory, Adding Traffic to OpenStreetMap

Track 2

Adding Traffic to OpenStreetMap

David Emory

This session is all about using real-time GPS data to add traffic and roadway speed data to OpenStreetMap. Kevin will discuss traffic-engine, the open source platform for data processing and analysis. As a bonus, he’ll also walk through how to leverage large amounts of GPS data to improve OSM center lines.

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11:15am

1

Grant Slater, OSM Core Architecture and DevOps

Track 1

OSM Core Architecture and DevOps

Grant Slater

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This session will provide an introduction to the OpenStreetMap operations team, the core OpenStreetMap setup, and its operational management. It will discuss the website and API architecture, including infrastructure, monitoring and stats, its frontend and backend, testing and deployment, and future plans. Grant will also briefly touch on the tile and caching architecture. If you’re interested in what powers OpenStreetMap and make it tick, come to this session.

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2

Robert Stack, Telenav Traffic Locations: A Perspective on OSM Data

Track 2

Telenav Traffic Locations: A Perspective on OSM Data

Robert Stack

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This session will look at Traffic Locations, which will provide an OSM map based view of real-time traffic information for display and consumption. These locations are derived from a division and recombination of the more important highway classes. This process has created some unique insights and posed challenging questions regarding OSM data. For example, wide scale variations in OSM highway classification between some metropolitan areas becomes evident. While the primary motivation for Traffic Locations is to create and report real time traffic information, the development of this new resource can help stimulate further improvements to the OSM map.

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11:45am

1

Artem Pavlenko, The Secrets of Mapnik

Track 1

The Secrets of Mapnik

Artem Pavlenko

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Artem Pavlenko, creator of Mapnik, will lift the hood on the open source rendering engine. This will be an almost non-technical snapshot of tricks that can lead to awesome performance for the user, debunking a few myths along the way. As planet OSM gets bigger, speed and scalability become paramount - but meanwhile users want more features. This session will look at ways to reconcile these two (or not), and where the balance should be. It will also examine possible directions the Mapnik project could take, with the aim of kickstarting a focused discussion in the OSM community.

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2

Benjamin Blanchet, OpenStreetMap and Flight Simulation

Track 2

OpenStreetMap and Flight Simulation

Benjamin Blanchet

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This session will explore the use of OpenStreetMap data in flight simulation software and specifically in osm2xp, software that injects OSM data into flight simulators. Benjamin will show the evolution of terrain representation in flight simulators and discuss how OpenStreetMap can improve the existing landscape in this area. He’ll show how close to reality you can get thanks to OSM, discuss the pros and cons of using OSM in flight simulation, and talk about the different approaches out there.

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12:15pm

1

Andy Allan, Putting the Carto into OpenStreetMap Cartography

Track 1

Putting the Carto into OpenStreetMap Cartography

Andy Allan

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Earlier this year, Andy embarked on a rewrite of the OpenStreetMap standard Mapnik stylesheets, porting them to the CartoCSS styling language. This opens the door for developing the styles using TileMill, as well as making them easy to customize for other projects.

In this session Andy will discuss some of the background behind the rewrite, tips that he’s picked up, tricks that were developed, and advice on the common pitfalls when styling OSM data in TileMill. He’ll also explain how to wrangle the stylesheets to suit your own projects and how to help further improve our cartography.

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2

Robert Stack, Telenav Probe Trace Enhancements for OSM

Track 2

Telenav Probe Trace Enhancements for OSM

Robert Stack

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Telenav is making use of its internally sourced, fully anonymized database of vehicle navigation probe trace data to enhance the quality of the OSM map. These probe trails are matched directly to updated extracts of the OSM map. From this a variety of enhancements are underway. Free flow speed and probe trail count analysis suggests highways that should be substantially upgraded or downgraded from their current tagging, particularly in areas that have received limited data attention. Vehicle routing turn restrictions can be inferred from probe trail statistics. Since these results are often challenging to verify and validate, the results of these and similar efforts can be channeled through MapRoulette for verification and application to the OSM map. These enhancements will widen community use of and involvement with OSM by enhancing the navigation quality information within the map.

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Lunch
The Future of OSM
Turning Data Into Maps
1:45pm

1

Saman Bemel Benrud, A New Vision for openstreetmap.org

Track 1

A New Vision for openstreetmap.org

Saman Bemel Benrud

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What could a ground-up redesign of the OpenStreetMap website look like? In this session, Saman will discuss the strengths and shortcomings of the current site design, present a vision for a modern, user-friendly, and responsive openstreetmap.org, and outline possible approaches for implementing such a redesign.

Among other things, the redesign will introduce concepts for strengthening community aspects of the site, improving the on-boarding experience for new users, and defining a more logical information architecture that makes the relationship between the community, data, and map layers of the site clearer. Saman will present both wireframes and fully rendered mock-ups illustrating his plans.

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2

Christine White, I Dream of Data: Building Worldwide, Multi-Source Maps

Track 2

I Dream of Data: Building Worldwide, Multi-Source Maps

Christine White

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Start with local government content, add a dash of commercial navigation, a pinch of OSM, and wa-lah! You’ve got a recipe for creating the best in breed of authoritative maps. Simple? Not a chance. If your goal is to create beautiful, complete, and authoritative maps that describe essential data layers, using disparate sources is often required.

This session will discuss issues for achieving this goal - data quality assessment, metaphors for contribution, handling imports and data conflicts, and licensing paradigms. Christine will discuss the Esri Community Maps program, its results from a recent assessment of integrating OSM data into Community Maps, and ways OSM and Community Maps can learn from and benefit one another in the near future.

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2:15pm

1

Tom MacWright and Eric Fischer, OSM Data Report: Visualizing Our Progress

Track 1

OSM Data Report: Visualizing Our Progress

Tom MacWright and Eric Fischer

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How complete and how well maintained is OpenStreetMap’s data around the world and in different cities? How has it grown over time? Who has been doing the work? What needs more attention? Tom and Eric have been working to answer these questions by visualizing the data behind OpenStreetMap contributions in helpful ways. They’ll present their findings and show the true state of OpenStreetMap’s data and identify areas where growth and improvement can be made moving forward to make OpenStreetMap a better map.

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2

Andrew Hill, Using OpenStreetMap Data to Build Your Dynamic Maps

Track 2

Using OpenStreetMap Data to Build Your Dynamic Maps

Andrew Hill

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Many projects today are collecting data continuously and want to build maps that show the latest trends. Whether the data is documenting street congestion, air quality, human movement, or a host of other subjects, this data can be combined with OpenStreetMap to build dynamic and real-time maps for the web. This session will demonstrate how CartoDB can be used to store, manage, and sort OSM data, and then be used to combine dynamic data with OSM layers to create real-time maps. While publishing dynamic maps on the web has traditionally been a technological challenge, CartoDB now makes it easier than ever before. CartoDB serves maps from a live database with on-demand filtering and styling. It also utilizes caching strategies that mean your maps are always fast but never get out of sync from the data on your account.

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2:45pm

1

Mikel Maron, All I Want for OpenStreetMap is Social and Attention

Track 1

All I Want for OpenStreetMap is Social and Attention

Mikel Maron

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OpenStreetMap is a strong social environment for data, and that’s key to its success. Maps, tags, places, and code are the result of online and offline conversations, not top down dictations, meaning OSM is more expressive for more situations. Yet the core tools to connect mappers to talk about maps and monitor an area are still the same as five years ago. There are overflowing gardens of cool organizational tools and hacks. How can we bring these tools together to reach more mappers?

This talk will survey the current social functions in the OSM ecosystem, envision where the community can go, and suggest concrete development steps.

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2

Steve Kashishian, Cohesive OSM Experiences Across the Screen and Paper

Track 2

Cohesive OSM Experiences Across the Screen and Paper

Steve Kashishian

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In this session Steve will discuss his last year working as lead developer on an ambitious successor project to the popular Field Papers platform called CaerusGeo, currently being tested in Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya.

CaerusGeo is different than the typical web mapping platform in that an substantial amount of conceptualization and testing was undertaken to ensure its viability in “frontier” environments where analog mediums such as paper and verbal communication solely rule data collection. This talk will focus on the extensive amount of work needed to create an system that gelled with the environment’s workflow, as opposed to replacing it outright, and also the trials and tribulations experienced in integrating with Mapfish Print, an extremely powerful but lightly documented component for producing excellent wallmap and atlas PDFS.

Steve will also discuss the fork brought into the Mapfish codebase to meet the project’s needs, why he chose Leaflet for the frontend, and how contributing multiple pulls to that project has made him a better Javascript programmer.

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Break
Vectors
Imports
3:30pm

1

Steve Gifford, Vectors, OpenStreetMap, and Mobile

Track 1

Vectors, OpenStreetMap, and Mobile

Steve Gifford

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Vector maps are hot right now, with Google and Apple deployments in the news. On the web side, HTML5 and WebGL make vector maps workable and fast, respectively, and on the mobile side, we have the two above examples to show us it works. So what do we do for OpenStreetMap?

mousebird consulting makes an open source toolkit called WhirlyGlobe-Maply - WhirlyGlobe for the 3D interactive globe and Maply for the 2D map. Both are based on OpenGL ES, and both are very fast for iOS (iPad, iPhone) and (soon) Android. The openstreetmap.us server is returning vector based tiles for several levels. This gives us a nice, semi-official platform to try out high performance vector map display on iOS. This session will present a simple experiment in that area. It will take a lot of work to match the quality (Apple jokes aside) of the commercial vector maps. Our hope is that a nice framework for fetching and displaying vector tiles can nudge us further along that path.

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2

Eric Fischer, Updating OpenStreetMap's TIGER Imports to TIGER 2013

Track 2

Updating OpenStreetMap's TIGER Imports to TIGER 2013

Eric Fischer

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A lot of the OpenStreetMap data in the United States was originally imported from the U.S. Census Bureau’s TIGER map data. Unfortunately at the time of the import, TIGER was in the middle of a multi-year project to correct misalignments and omissions, and most of these corrections have never been applied to OpenStreetMap. This talk is about Eric’s attempt to merge TIGER updates into OpenStreetMap and the things that make doing this difficult.

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4:00pm

1

Dane Springmeyer, Vector Tiles for Distributed, High Performance Rendering of OSM

Track 1

Vector Tiles for Distributed, High Performance Rendering of OSM

Dane Springmeyer

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The potential for custom and real-time maps from OSM is growing fast, but the size and complexity of the data increasingly limits new and creative uses. Many seek to craft beautiful maps from OSM only to find their energy and time mostly taken by importing the data into a database and massaging it into manageable pieces.

A powerful solution to this problem is to allow the rendering of OSM data directly from vector tiles. Vector tiles combine the strengths of image tiles - fast, cacheable, and easy to distribute - with the flexibility of source vectors - high resolution, interactive, and renderable in infinite ways. Supporting multiple named layers and containing a space efficient serialization of geometries and attributes, vector tiles once created can be cached and distributed to any number of map rendering clients.

In this session Dane will describe a new high performance and open source library for creating vector tiles and rendering vector tiles to various formats using Mapnik. Mapnik in this context becomes both server– producing vector tiles on demand - and client - rendering beautiful maps from vector tiles. After covering the details of how to write your own software to use vector tiles, Dane will demo an experimental version of TileMill that leverages this technology to enable immediate styling of a global set of OSM vector tiles.

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2

Serge Wroclawski, The U.S., Imports, and Bots, Oh My!

Track 2

The U.S., Imports, and Bots, Oh My!

Serge Wroclawski

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Imports are a sensitive subject in OpenStreetMap, usually frowned upon, often blamed, and not spoken about in polite company. In this talk, Serge will describe the changing landscape of U.S. imports and bot efforts, from manual imports to automated bots, and tool standardization.

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4:30pm

1

Aaron Ogle, Walkshed.js: Client-side Raster Processing with OSM Data Tiles

Track 1

Walkshed.js: Client-side Raster Processing with OSM Data Tiles

Aaron Ogle

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OSM is commonly used for map tile generation and routing, but much less so with data rasters. Rasterizing OSM data can open up a whole new set of mapping and analytical possibilities using map algebra. Walkshed.js is a project combining OSM data tiles and cost-distance raster calculations to measure pedestrian access for a location. This talk will be a technical dive into creating OSM data tiles and the JavaScript code used to do raster processing in the browser.

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2

Paul Norman, Address Import Review

Track 2

Address Import Review

Paul Norman

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In 2010 an address import was done in Surrey, BC, but no one has yet reviewed it to determine if it has been a success. This talk will look at how the import was done, examine how the data has been integrated with other OpenStreetMap data, and ultimately used by mappers.

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5:00pm

1

Jacob Beaudoin, Pure Vector Pathways for OSM Display

Track 1

Pure Vector Pathways for OSM Display

Jacob Beaudoin

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Since its inception, the primary display methodology for OSM data has been raster tiles. There are several problems with this approach, including size and inflexibility at runtime. This session will explore a pure vector pipeline for handling and displaying OSM data on mobile and desktop platforms in a performant way. Advantages include smaller file sizes, the possibility of on-device data, instant restyling and dynamic label placement.

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2

Jeff Meyer and Clifford Snow, Using Imports to Build Community: The Seattle Import Case Study

Track 2

Using Imports to Build Community: The Seattle Import Case Study

Jeff Meyer and Clifford Snow

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This session will discuss some of the traditional concerns with imports and review how the Seattle import into OpenStreetMap was designed to address those concerns and improve OSM map quality and community participation in the Pacific Northwest.

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