That’s pretty exciting: just came back to Vienna, spent the morning poking around in OSM and the OSM wiki to figure out who the mappers are and if there are any community activities planned and ended up reading a press release saying that Vienna is completed in OpenStreetMap.
Awesome! Big kudos to the local mapping community! The quality of the map is impressing!
As for the rest of Austria, there is a huge data import going on since Fall ’08. More information on the process you’ll find at the wiki page. People all over Austria with good local knowledge are needed to support the import process, help identify errors and improve OpenStreetMap in rural areas.
If you want to make your town visible in OpenStreetMap, sign up and start mapping. It’s very easy and can be done using nothing more than an internet browser. Even better: spread the word, host a Stammtisch, tell your neighbors about OpenStreetMap and create your own map of your village.
For interested people in and around Vienna, the next Wiener OSM-Stammtisch is scheduled for Friday Jan 23rd ’09, 2pm, at the Metalab.
Alex and I would like to take the opportunity and introduce, talk about and discuss our project timatio. And I would be interested in doing a session about OpenStreetMap – advantages, use case scenarios or licensing issues compared to other map sources for instance.
Great experiences at former BarCamps let me look forward to an interesting event next weekend. Be there!
According to Google LatLong they’ll appear as option when directions are 10km or less.
It’s still beta and you’ll notice that junctions and frictions of certain pedestrian paths don’t seem to work correctly. For instance drop the start and end points outside the park and Google Maps makes you walk around and not through the park. Even though using the park paths would be the shorter (and quicker) route.
The problem: friends live in an area which is not covered by any map – it’s not in the local street map, Google map or any navigation system. Every time they give away the address, they have to explain where it exactly is and how to get there.
The area is old, but it was formerly used for garden plots only. As it happens often in Vienna, people started building small houses in their garden plots, then small houses start growing and transform the area into a (legal) residential area for permanent living with all necessary infrastructure provided.
Maybe their street doesn’t appear on a map because it’s a small and not a new area. Landuse slowly has changed over the past years, streets and pathways have been there for a long time but weren’t always publicly accessible. Maybe that’s the reason this area is still not in the radar of the big 2 street mapping companies: the area isn’t flagged as “recently developed, please map”.
The solution:
I showed them how to map their street in OpenStreetMap, with the result that they finally can point visitors to a nice map when asked where it is and how to get there. Mapping in OpenStreetMap through the browser interface is very easy and they will probably map their neighborhood too since it’s a totally blind spot on maps.
Mr Ice T once said that Sade is the most stylish singer he has ever seen live.
Even though I never had the chance to attend a Sade concert, I have to say that after the performance of Madita today at a free afternoon Jazz Fest Wien concert, I think she’s on the best way to become Sade’s successor. Madita combines a light soul voice with smooth lounge sounds, and she does it in a very easy and stylish way when she’s on stage.
It was a really great show and we need more afternoon concerts of that kind!
Seems like the soccer event has some more impact on maps in Austria: on Google Maps you’ll find now real time public transport information too. The maps not only show the station locations, but also provide timetable information about what bus, tramway, subway or railway line there is available, when the next one departs and let you choose between car or public transport directions.
Not as mind-blowing as 3D Vienna in MS Virtual Earth, but probably very useful to arriving Euro 2008 tourists. Well, since gas prizes are increasing rapidly, locals who made the switch to public transport will appreciate that information too.
