User:Jlerner/Aude
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Talk given at Wiki-Conference NY at NYU Law School, July 25, 2009.
User:Aude - OpenStreetMap integration with Wikipedia
[edit]- Recently got involved to integrate maps into Wikipedia (part of a team)
- ~25% of articles on Wikipedia have or could use a map
- Place articles need location maps 20% (of Wikipedia articles)
- Biography 29%
- Places 20%
- Culture 19%
- Species 6%
- Sports 5%
- Science 3%
- Politics 3%
- Military 3%
- Other
Use cases
[edit]- Locator maps
- WikiMiniAtlas (little globe icon, upper left corner, on the toolserver now, who even knows about it?, needs better infrastructure and development)
- Northern Bald Ibis listed as featured, but included only a primitive thematic map
- Wouldn't it be great to provide a user like this with tools to generate nicer maps? Make it easy for the non-technical
- March: German Wikipedia chapter started "automated map" initiative
- Database server for OSM data
- Rendering server to generate tiles and maps
- Map toolserver for development and experimentation
OpenStreetMap
[edit]- Using GPS unit, walking around, taking GPS traces; relatively simply to upload to computer
- Then in OpenStreetMap, can view and edit (when logged in at http://www.openstreetmap.org/)
- Takes some time for cached tiles etc. to expire
- Idea is that all data used is free of restrictive copyright
- OSM project uploaded Tiger, then maps looked fairly complete
- But if you look closely, you can find many errors, plenty of room for folks to improve upon it with own GPS units
- In Europe, not such data in the public domain, has to be created from scratch (did I hear that correctly?)
- OSM is customizable, however you want to use it
- UMD built this: http://seamster.cs.umd.edu:8090/map/ - TerpNav Pedestrian Maps
Back-end
[edit]- OSM -> Wikimedia-OSM dataabse server (postgres) -> rendering server -> SlippyMap extension -> endusers (possibly via squid)
- Easy to localize maps
Front-end
[edit]- SlippyMap extension
- Embed maps in wiki pages, where <slippymap> tag isused
- Static maps by default
- Interactive maps if requrested
- Pop-up maps available for pages with coordinates
- Caching: cache static map images, map tile images
- Special pages: Make a map (guide users to initializing variables)
Future
[edit]- Each set of maps styles or layers with full global coverage and zoom levels requires substantial disk storage for all the map tiles
- We are limited in the number of custom styles that we can provide with full global coverage and zoom levels
- But, it may be possible to provide custom map making tools for maps with limited spatial coverage and zoom levels. With PostgreSQL ...
- More at Wikimania
- OpenStreetMap usability improving (but still harder than editing Wikipedia)
- More at OpenStreetMap