O.O'Brien

I’ve added 50 new extracts (based on Routegadget scans) – mainly for clubs in Scotland and the South-East of England.
This brings the total number of extracts to more than 160, or around 7% of the total. Additionally, on the Map of Maps, the flags representing maps with extracts are now shown with a yellow border.

The scale of the extracts varies, and all are cropped to 300×225. They are intended just to give you a “flavour” of the area. Google imagery of many areas in the UK now is very high, so try zooming in on the main map too. You can often clearly make out individual trees!

I’ve tidied up the database behind the Map of Maps 3 list of orienteering maps in the UK. The source database I got the data from lists old as well as new maps of the same area.

The process I’ve used to remove the dupes is:

1. Where multiple maps have the same grid reference, I’ve removed the ones which have an older year – or if the same year, a lower BOF reference number. This is done regardless of name or club differences between each map. This affects around 10% of the maps.
2. Where maps differ by grid reference but have exactly the same name and club, I’ve again removed the ones with the older year (or lower BOF reference number). I’ve then updated any map extracts pointing to the old grid reference, to point to the new one. This affects around 3% of the maps.
3. Where maps differ by grid reference and club, but have the same name and region, I’ve manually looked through the list and removed (technically, “succeeded”) the older one, and moved any associated map extracts. There are a couple of instances that mean we wouldn’t want to do this automatically, e.g. there are two genuine Bar Hill and two Victoria Park orienteering maps in the Scotland region. This affects around 0.3% of the maps.
4. There are still going to be some dupes out there that have maps with different spellings and slightly different grid references. These are going to have to be succeeded on a case by case basis. Use the “Alert!” button beside each map if you spot a dupe.

I’ve also added an About page so you can see who helped me build the page, and some stats on how many maps there are.

Google is currently ranking the UK Orienteering Fixtures Map around 30th or so (out of ~40,000,000) when searching for the word “Fixtures”. I’m quite chuffed that the page is ranking so highly for such a generic term – there must be a lot of fixtures pages for all the other sports right across the world. It must be the Googlejuice from the club websites – cool.

Interestingly it’s listed as high as 5th when I’m logged in to Google – I think it’s remembering previous pages I’ve been to and rating them more highly in future searches.

Map of Maps now has small extracts of some of the maps. These are photographs from my own collection, that I did for the original Map of Map 1 project several years ago. There’s only a few there currently, gradually I’ll add more from my collection. Around 3% of maps have the extracts, this should eventually rise to around 10%. The extracts are generally in Scotland and Southern England, as that’s where I typically have run.

Because, in most cases, the extracts are photographs of the maps I ran on, are only 300×225 pixels, and only show a small part of the map, I consider their inclusion on the website fair use.

Click on the “(Extract)” link after the map name to view the extract.

I’ve added a new feature to Map of Maps – you can now specify a club or region. Instead of displaying the 100 maps nearest to you, it displays all maps which have a club or region matching the text you specify.

e.g. Entering SOA will show all registered maps in the SOA region.
e.g. Entering SLOW will show all maps registered by SLOW.

When using this mode, the map will initially be zoomed out to cover the whole of the UK. Zoom in towards the o-markers to see the individual map locations.

Why is this useful? Mainly for tidying up the database. By entering a particular region, you can see at a glance maps which are not where they should be – either because they are in the sea or because they are well away from the mass of other maps correctly in the region. If you spot such maps, please use the “Alert” button to tell me about them. There are too many errors for me to proactively fix, so I’m concentrating on the ones you care and tell me about. This method will also list maps with no grid reference at all – they are at the end of the list, with an “Unknown” location from your home postcode.

My next task will be to reduce the number of “duplicate” maps, i.e. multiple maps in exactly the same location. This will reduce the number of maps listed by around 15%.

I’ve added a Map of Maps to go alongside my UK O-Events Map page. Both pages look similar as they have the same structural layout and stylesheet. The Map of Maps shows you your nearest orienteering maps registered with BOF, and from this lists your local clubs – possibly useful for someone wanting to join their local club or an existing orienteer moving house.

The Map of Maps page is much slower to render as it has to parse 3000+ maps. For each one it takes the OS grid reference, works out the latitude and longitude* and then the distance from your postcode, before ordering everything to find the 100 closest to you, showing them on a map, and on a handy table with weblinks to each club.

The main problem remaining is the quality of the source data – there are numerous grid reference mistakes, many maps don’t have grid references at all which means they will never show up – there are spelling and capitalisation inconsistencies, entities listed in the clubs field which are not actually clubs, and older revisions of a particular map remaining alongside the newest one.

Most of these I’ve been able to deal with in an elegant way, by creating my own clubs database table with the appropriate metadata. The one hack I’ve had to leave hardcoded into the page is NOC, which is normally Nottingham Orienteering Club, but is also the National Orienteering Centre for some Scottish maps (and so not a club.) It also appears as NATCEN. Grr!

The initial work is now complete – it took a couple of days of effort, including quite a lot of learning about PHP arrays and lamda functions – I’d managed to get away with not using these before. I also took the opportunity to tidy up my existing code, into something which was more efficient, with a lot less duplication and sloppy coding, which I’ll be able to extend easily for future mashups.

The next feature will be a slightly more intelligent “local club” calculation, based on the number of maps a club has, weighted by their proximity to you, rather than simply the club with the closest map being your “most local club” in the present form. I also need to automate the collection and processing of data from BOF, although this is lower priority as I’m only planning on sync’ing with them every few months, unlike the events map which is sync’d, in theory, on a weekly basis.

Announcement of my original Map of Maps, way back in 2004 – before Google Map Mashups took off.

*Technically minded readers will realise I could do this when doing the initial load of BOF data into my database. I could – it’s on the list, and will be done if the Map of Maps page performance gets worse.