O.O'Brien

This is a poster that I will be presenting at next week’s GISRUK conference in Durham. It is a summary of my Masters dissertation that I wrote last summer. The dissertation itself focused on areas and data in London, however thanks to LivingWithDragons‘ (and others’) excellent data-gathering for OpenStreetMap, Durham is similarly well mapped, so I customised the example map to be Durham itself.

The background, by the way, is a faded greyscale version of the map for much of London, which came from a “Slippy” street orienteering map of the metropolis that I’ve created but never got around to releasing, however it does show the extent of OSM’s London coverage now – pretty impressive.

Click the graphic to see a larger version, but you’ll have to come to Durham yourself to see the original in its A1 glory.

…and not just London. It covers 25 cities in the UK.

There are some omissions in the coverage of course – e.g. Chancery Lane is a notable missing street. But my home street in Hackney is there, and the imagery extends right out to the edge of the metropolis.

Here’s some fare-dodgers getting booked by the police, outside the main entrance to UCL.

Photo Copyright Google.

I noticed for the first time yesterday, that individual trees are being stored in OSM, and being rendered on the default OSM/Mapnik map:

The green dots are points tagged with natural=tree, here at City University London.
OSM documentation for the natural=tree tag

This got me thinking – might I be able to build a “proper” orienteering map using entirely OpenStreetMap? Street-O* maps can already be produced with OSM data – this was some work I did last summer, and also am working on – but being able to produce an ISOM** map directly from OSM data is quite appealing. (ISSOM*** might be harder, as this standard requires roads to be shown at their actual width, rather than being linear features with fixed-width cartography.)

Most of the orienteering-specific features, such as pits and earth walls, wouldn’t show on the “public” renders of OSM data – the ‘general maps’, but a customised rendering could show these and have specialised cartography for them. As well as adding these new features, some existing features (e.g. natural=woodland) which are rendered on the general maps could have tags added to indicate the runnability level – orienteering maps have four levels of “greenness” for woods, and sometimes tree canopies are shown in white – this could be inferred from a size tag associated with a natural=tree point, medium being shown as a circle with a 5m circumference, for instance.

Many other features are already on OSM – paths, tracks, minor and major roads, as used in the Street-O maps, and also vegetation types, gates, walls and fences, that would appear in an ISOM/ISSOM based map.

My local park, Victoria Park, could be having a lot more detail added to it soon.

* Street-O: An informal orienteering discipline, run in urban areas with simple maps showing the street and path networks, and little else. Typically A4 at 1:10000
** ISOM: International Specification for Orienteering Maps. “Normal” orienteering races use these maps, which are full colour and very detailed, typically A3-A5 at 1:10000.
*** ISSOM: International Specification for Sprint Orienteering Maps. A much newer specification designed for the increasingly popular urban and sprint races, the map is almost a plan view of the ground, with roads shown at their correct width, sometimes with pavements shown seperately. Typically A3-A4 at 1:4000 or 1:5000.