[Fsf-friends] OpenStreetMap project ... and India

Frederick Noronha [फ़रेदरिक नोरोनया] fred@[EMAIL-PROTECTED]
Tue Oct 9 02:32:10 IST 2007


Dear IndiaGII,
Rolf Kleef <rolf at drostan.org> drew attention to the OpenStreetMap
project and wrote something of relevance to our part of the world.
Rolf commented as below, but meanwhile could you please help to take
these initiatives ahead, if you see something good coming of it? --FN
PS: Apologies for cross-posting, just trying to build the links...

Rolf Kleef <rolf at drostan.org> wrote:

- The Dutch company AND has provided their data on Dutch roads, and
that data is now included on www.openstreetmap.org. And there seems to
be an import underway of public domain data for the US (could take
months to complete).

- AND said they will also donate their data for China and India (which
covers major roads only). I'm copying a message I found with possible
contacts, and especially want to point out possible work by FSF India
on uploading map data via SMS and possibly developing free GPS
devices. I don't know anything further about this. Maybe Frederick or
others in APC have access to more information? It could be a valuable
development to enable more participation worldwide.

          /-- Kind regards,
         /--- Rolf.

-------- Original Message --------

Subject: Re: [OSM-dev] OSM, AND & India
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 09:50:20 -0700 (PDT)
From: Mikel Maron <mikel_maron at yahoo.com>
To: Ante Wessels <ante at ffii.org>, dev at openstreetmap.org,        Schuyler Erle
<schuyler at geocoder.us>
CC: OpenStreetMap NL discussion list <talk-nl at openstreetmap.org>
Newsgroups:
gmane.comp.gis.openstreetmap.devel,gmane.comp.gis.openstreetmap.region.nl

Hi Ante

I'm also very interested in mapping India.

A couple notes on those data sources...

I've talked to Schuyler about this, he's one of the organizers of the
Mumbai Freemap. Mumbai Freemap is an impressive data set -- it covers
all of Mumbai, from digitized municipal documents. Issue is that it's
currently not in a form usable for OpenStreetMap. The digitization was
done in CAD, and is pretty directly a trace of those original
documents. For example, both sides of the road are drawn precisely,
but there's not single object
representing the road itself.

So a second workshop would need to be organized, to transform the
current freemap into OpenStreetMap. Technically this is quite simple
-- the mumbai freemap can serve WMS, which can be read into JOSM. In
JOSM, that imagery is retraced in the "OSM way". It's a lot of work,
but my impression is that there's a lot of people in Mumbai willing to
work very hard on this, and that with some organizational effort it's
entirely doable.

I'd be up for helping on this.


AND in India is basically VMAP0. So we're talking major roads,
somewhat out of data, but no detail within cities. VMAP0 contains
other layers like rail, not sure if that's included in the AND data
set. When I was last in India, VMAP0 was actually pretty decent for
major roads, though anything built within the last few years was
missing.

Still a good start, and since that import path is already worked out
for the NL data, it makes a lot of sense to push that ahead too.

Mikel

----- Original Message ----
From: Ante Wessels <ante at ffii.org>
To: dev at openstreetmap.org
Cc: OpenStreetMap NL discussion list <talk-nl at openstreetmap.org>
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2007 12:59:47 AM
Subject: [OSM-dev] OSM, AND & India

I met Nagarjuna G, chairman of the FSF India. One of the projects he
is working on is open map data in India. They are experimenting with
things like uploading tracks via sms. They would like to buy gps chips
and build their own devices. Especially in Mumbai mappers are active.

I told him AND offered the main roads of India to OSM. He was very interested.

I'm rather ignorant about OSM's international contacts, so I just
tried google. This seems to be the project Nagarjuna talked about:

http://mumbai.freemap.in/

These pages suggest there are already contacts between
openstreetmap.org and mappers in India:

http://www.freemap.in/
http://wiki.freemap.in/moin.cgi/HbcseWorkshop
The second one mentions the openstreetmap editor JOSM. Actually, I see his
name as a workshop leader there too. If JOSM is used in India too, it
should be doable to exchange data.

India is rather empty on our map yet:
http://www.informationfreeway.org/?lat=15.686938643550643&lon=76.86136902852583&zoom=5&layers=B000F000

Converting the AND data should be rather straithforward since we
already have a conversion script. Intergrating it may be not too much
work since most of our map is empty. It will be more difficult to
integrate it with data collected by the India project. But that is
where it starts to become interesting.

vriendelijke groet,
cordialmente,

Ante

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Frederick Noronha http://fn.goa-india.org Ph 0091-832-2409490
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