Simon Willison’s Weblog

Gaza OpenStreetMap Update. “We’re looking into purchasing satellite imagery for the north or the entirety of Gaza. There’s actually B/W imagery available from yesterday!” # 7th January 2009, 11:10 pm

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits (via) Stunningly beautiful visualisation of the year in OpenStreetMap. # 2nd January 2009, 10:34 am

Oakland crime maps XI: how close, and how bad? Michal Migurski’s experiments with heat maps for Oakland Crimespotting, using OpenStreetMap data as that allows him to position his heat map layer underneath the street labels, keeping them legible. # 30th December 2008, 10:16 am

cascadenik: cascading sheets of style for mapnik. Great idea. Mapnik (the open source tile rendering system used by OpenStreetMap and others) has a complex style configuration based on XML. Michal Migurski has build a CSS-style equivalent which compiles down to XML, hopefully making it much quicker and easier to get started with Mapnik customisation. # 30th August 2008, 10:04 am

Around the world and back again. Flickr are using data from OpenStreetMap to provide street-level detail of Beijing for the Olympics. # 13th August 2008, 11:05 pm

OSM routing, A*, cycle-filtered, python (via) A python library for finding routes using OpenStreetMap data. # 5th July 2008, 3:13 pm

Berlin Zoo on OpenStreetMap. Someone has added all of the animal enclosures in Berlin Zoo (with German animal names) to OpenStreetMap. # 5th July 2008, 3:07 pm

OSM Super-Strength Export. Awesome new feature on OpenStreetMap: you can browse to anywhere on the map, then hit “export” and download a rendered bitmap or vector (PDF and SVG) image of the currently displayed map—and because it’s OSM there’s no watermark and a very liberal usage license. # 22nd April 2008, 9:56 am

i am near (via) Inspired by wikinear.com and powered by FireEagle, currently just showing nearby pubs from OpenStreetMap but with more stuff planned. I love the URL scheme—pubs.iamnear.net. # 4th April 2008, 7:53 am

OpenStreetMap on the iPhone! Via an ingenious hack. The Google Maps iPhone client caches downloaded tiles using SQLite—to display your own custom tiles, you just need to dump them straight in to the “cache”. # 22nd October 2007, 3:30 pm

Information Freeway (via) Really lovely interface to Open Street Map, sadly suffering from a horribly vague name and almost no publicity at all. # 14th October 2007, 11:58 pm

AND donate entire Netherlands to OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap just got a whole lot bigger. # 4th July 2007, 8:26 pm

OpenStreetMap Baghdad. OSM has mapped the streets by tracing from aerial imagery, but needs help with the names of the streets. # 22nd February 2007, 7:48 am

Yahoo! aerial imagery in OpenStreetMap. Tracing is allowed. This should speed things up an awful lot. # 4th December 2006, 1:17 pm