The Freemap blog, revisited

A significant update since my last post: you can now create and modify routes on OTV’s main page. As you’re probably aware, the key thing about OTV is to allow contributors to connect photos together, to make a route of interlinked photos which end-users will be able to walk along to create a StreetView like experience. The essentials of this are now done – you can create a new route (select “New route” on the main map page) by connecting together existing photos, and you can also add photos to an existing route by selecting “Move” on the main page and dragging the chosen photo onto a route. More information on the Howto page.

So do have a go contributing some of your own photos and making routes. Being in development, the odd bug could well come up so do let me know if you’re having problems.

As already suggested, next thing will be to start working on a prototype viewer for end-users though a range of other things like work commitments, moving house and a holiday are going to be occupying most of my time for the next three weeks or so, so it *may* be some time before the next update. But don’t go away, in the autumn and winter months I’ll hopefully be doing a fair bit of OTV development!

No huge OTV updates over the last couple of days, but a few things relating to panoramas:

- Panoramas are once again displayed as panoramas on the main page. Rather than using vanilla JSPanoViewer, they’re now using a <canvas> tag based approach, which means they’re not visible in IE (sorry if you’re using IE, but you could always use Firefox or Chrome ), the code is based on JSPanoViewer and is available here.
- OTV will now autodetect whether your uploaded photo is a panorama; if the width is more than 1024 pixels and the height is less than half the width, then it’s treated as a panorama. You can of course change this on the photo manager page.

Anyway that’s it for now. As I said before, next will be working on the interface for end-users and for making routes of connected photos.

Some significant developments in OpenTrailView in the last couple of weeks. As mentioned in my last post, I’ve been working on a nicer photo upload system; in particular, one which allows multiple photo uploads. This makes use of Andrew Valums’ JavaScript library for doing just this, which is available at valums.com/ajax-upload and is now done, though it only works on newer browsers (tested on Firefox 3.6 and Chrome 5.0). Other browsers such as Opera only allow one file to be uploaded at a time.

The other new development is the photo management system. Via a “photo album” style system, you can specify the lat/lon of any unpositioned photos, and group together photos taken from the same point in different directions, specifying the angle of each photo in the group relative to the first member of the group. This hopefully makes the whole upload process significantly easier than the rather clunky system in place initially.

Note also that I’m shifting my focus – for the moment at least – from panoramas to regular photos (and groups of photos taken from the same point in different directions). Panoramas still appear, but owing to incompatibilities between the JavaScript of the pano viewer and some of the other JS libraries used, the “immersive” pano viewing is disabled for the moment.

Next stage will be to work on the key features of OTV which make it different to regular geolocated photo sites: namely the ability to connect photos together and allow an end user to “walk along” a series of connected photos. I hope I’ve made the contribution process easier, so the next step is to focus on the end users of the site.

One of the things that isn’t great about OTV at the moment is the rather clunky file upload system, something that one or two people have mentioned on the OSM mailing list too. Would be much nicer to allow multiple file upload, something like this:

http://valums.com/ajax-upload/

So that’s what I’m planning to do next. In conjunction with this, I’ll also be changing the workflow on how to group photos, e.g. link two photos in opposite directions from the same place. Rather than the current approach of doing it at upload-time, the new approach will involve uploading all photos to the server then doing the organisation as a separate step.

Thanks for all the comments so far.

Quick update on OpenTrailView, which I’ve started working on again after a break in May and June due to work commitments. Anyway, gave a presentation on OTV at State of the Map in Girona earlier this month, and got a bit of interest… in particular, one suggestion made by two or three people was to allow users to contribute ordinary photos as well as panoramas, reason being that the process of creating a panorama can be a little long winded.

So now you can do that on the upload interface. You can contribute single georeferenced photos, panoramas or sets of photos taken at the same point. Since one of OTV’s aims is to allow users to “preview” paths or trails before walking them, it would make sense
to allow users to virtually “walk” the trail in both directions. So if contributing ordinary, non-panoramic photos, it makes sense to take *two* photos from the same spot, facing in opposite directions. The upload process allows you to do that, you can upload the first photo in a pair and then add a photo to the same ‘set’, specifying its orientation with respect to the first.

Another recent development is that you can now link photos together (select the “Link” option from the main page) to create a route.

For the moment OTV should be very much considered a “work in progress”, in particular I want to do quite a bit of work on the viewing interface which may be prone to interruptions in service. However, the facility to *upload* photos should continue uninterrupted. Check here for updates!

Also updates on my other projects: to be honest, work and other “real life” commitments have been really significant this year, so it’s very unlikely, unless I get a lot of interest, I’ll be working on any other OSM-related projects other than OTV (sorry about that!) However, longer term I’m hoping to tie in the “Footnav” mobile navigation project in with OTV, and if anyone is interested in working some more on the Freemap code, that’s available in OSM SVN.

First of all, OS release the Vector Map District data today, yet to have a look at it but apparently it does feature wood boundaries quite accurately which is good news.

On to the main point of this post though, which is to announce the latest developments on OpenTrailView. There’s now an easier upload system, where you can upload a series of panoramas at once. You can also set the latitude and longitude of each panorama while uploading by clicking on the accompanying map, or, if you also provide a GPX trace, you can automatically calculate the position of your panoramas using the timestamps of the GPX trace and the panoramas themselves.

Main thing though now is the display of the actual panoramas themselves. I’m now using JSPanoViewer, a very interesting, plugin-free pure JavaScript panorama viewer developed by Bart Van Andel. This looks very promising: performance is pretty decent on Firefox though slower on Opera or Chrome. View the panoramas by clicking on the photo icons.

No new developments on Freemap itself just for the moment though am still hoping to switch servers: watch this space!

So the OS releases free data today. I have to admit though that it is a very disappointing set of data, and, to be honest, doesn’t really cover anything that is either in OSM already or could easily be surveyed for OSM anyway. The lack of countryside data such as exact courses of rights of way, and more particularly, field and wood boundaries, will continue to make countryside mapping harder than it would be otherwise.

This is the sort of data OS really need to release. Not A roads, which are on OSM already. Not road names, which can easily be checked up on the ground. But things like field boundaries, which are almost impossible to survey on the ground without incurring the wrath of some irate landowner. Or wood outlines or countryside landuse. These are sort of things we really need.

Oh well, at least I can continue to spend my Sunday afternoons surveying footpaths for OSM, I guess. And it’ll give me more motivation to develop OpenTrailView as a navigation aid which can offer much more than a basic map…

Have mentioned this on the OSM list already but I’d like to announce a new project: OpenTrailView. Having been – I have to admit – just a little impressed by the current state of Google Street View, with the whole of the UK now covered, it’s inspired me (or re-inspired me, I was playing around with this idea about a year ago) to think about developing something similar for the countryside, hence OpenTrailView. (why “Trail”? Well it sounds better than something like OpenPathView and hopefully it’s a bit more internationally-friendly too!)

The idea is to build a collection of geolocated panoramas (i.e all-round photographic views from a particular point) which will, hopefully, be sufficient to produce a StreetView like effect. You take a series of photos in all directions (maybe 8 to 12) from a given point, then use photo-stitching software such as Hugin to stitch them together. Anyhow, more on the OpenTrailView site. At the moment you can contribute a panorama and then use an OSM map to align with a path.

One last point if you’re interested in contributing to any Freemap projects. I’ve now added the source code for all the main things I’m hosting on the Freemap server to OSM SVN, under sites/free-map.org.uk, so if you’re interested in contributing, look there!

Am making progress towards the new version of Freemap, which for the first time will have a version number – 0.5 (why 0.5? Basically it’s the fifth major revision, starting with the pre-OSM days back in 2004, more on that when it launches) and hopefully, using a combination of home rendering and the SUCS tile server, I will manage to cover the whole country.
From a developer perspective I also now plan to use the main OSM SVN repository to hopefully invite contributions.

What I’d like to get though from you is a few feature requests. I’d like to make Freemap a genuinely useful site, basically “the OpenStreetMap site for walkers in the UK”, in the same way that the cyclemap and cyclestreets serve that purpose for cyclists. So if you do have any features that you think would be really good for Freemap to have, please let me know either on this blog or on nick dot whitelegg at yahoo dot co dot uk.

Note that due to server constraints it may not be possible to deliver features which require a full
installation of the OSM database on the server. However, if your suggestions do involve that and they’re interesting, do let me know anyway as I may be able to implement them in a small test area.

Have now finished with my initial experiments on home tile creation and can now give you an idea of what will be on the new Freemap. I’ve come up with a style I like which combines the existing Freemap style for rights of way and contours with the current full OSM style – so for the first time, Freemap will show the full range of landuse shading shown in the main OSM tiles.

Bad news perhaps is the area of extent. It takes five hours on this quite powerful machine to generate the tiles in the bounding box 2W, 50N, 0, 52N for zoom levels 10 to 15, and then almost an hour to upload the 500MB odd of data to the Freemap server. This basically equates to an area which just about includes Swindon, Oxford, London, Brighton, Bournemouth. This is therefore the absolute limit of data I can deal with. However, what I’ll probably do is ditch zoom level 15 (as that takes the majority of tile generation time and file upload size) and expand the area of coverage a little, west to 2.5W to cover a bit more of Wessex and the Cotswolds. As indicated earlier I may well also add in the Lake District and Snowdonia. Sorry guys if you’re out of this area but with the limited processing power available to me, that’s all I can do! However, as said earlier I hope to cover the rest of the country via the Swansea University Computing Society webserver – though as I don’t have admin rights it may be a little more restricted.

And if you do have the technical know-how (and if you follow the wiki, it’s really not hard to do your own tile generation, though it does require familiarity with a command-line) I’d urge you to set up your own Freemap server for your own part of the country. This seems to me the most effective way to deal with resource issues: distribute the load to several machines, each covering a small part of the country but when combined together, able to produce full maps of the whole UK. Do get in touch if you’d like more help on this!