Tagzania doesn’t want to deal with just one provider, that’s why we use Mapstraction, and specially OpenStreetMap. Until today, you had to add a new parameter to the URL to see your places in OSM, now it’s a little bit easier, you just need to click on the OpenStreetMap link (below the map, see the black box on the image).
The Forbidden city, Beijing, from GMaps to OSM:
I’m back from my Camino after nearly 800 km with my bike and gathering a lot of interesting data: hostels, restaurants, churches, etc. Now starts the hard work, taking all the data to OpenStreetMap.
I’ve started with three interesting places every pilgrim should visit in the Way of St. James: Roncesvalles-Orreaga, O Cebreiro and Samos.
Roncesvalles – Orreaga before:
And after (see it in OSM):
O Cebreiro before:
and after (see it in OSM):
And, finally, Samos before mapping it:
and after (see it in OSM):
I gathered data from a lot of other places, but I need time to upload it to OpenStreetMap.
by Mikel Lizarralde
Last weekend we attended the State of the Map annual conference in Amsterdam. Apart from taking part in the lightning talks we also sponsored the event. In our talk, we mentioned how we use OSM in Tagzania and we showed our new project Mapapel.
You can read some comments about Tagzania’s experience in the SOTM09 here.
The presentations and videos can be found in the SOTM wiki.
Next week we’ll attend the international State of the Map conference in Amsterdam,and we’ve got a few questions for the OSM experts.
We’re talking with Josemari Aranburu, chief of B5M, the Geographical information office of Gipuzkoa (a Basque region), about getting their data licensed for OSM. Gipuzkoa is the smallest province in Spain, but their GIS infrastructure is probably one of the most exhaustive and detailed. Have a look and zoom in, don’t forget to try their bird’s eye view too: Donostia
Josemari is interested on sharing data with OSM, but there are some open questions that would like to have answered before going further:
We’ll try to get some answers on this questions from Amsterdam, but don’t be shy and help us from now on!
We’re working hard to improve the new version of the site. Some bug repairing and optimization is taking place these days. Thanks for your feedback and stay tuned as new features are coming.
But we just wanted to advance and present you a little hack in Tagzania.
In most of Tagzania’s maps, we don’t use the Google Maps API directly. We’re using an intermediate smart library called Mapstraction.
From their website:
Mapstraction is a library that provides a common API for various javascript mapping APIs to enable switching from one to another as smoothly as possible. Developers can code their applications once, and then easily switch mapping provider based on project needs, terms and conditions, and new functionality.
It’s a cool tool. Thanks to Mapstraction, we can plug any mapping service into Tagzania. Now you can see your Tagzania places with Yahoo, Microsoft, or even OpenStreetMap maps.
For now, you can test it just adding a parameter at the end of your URL in Tagzania, and you will get the requested map layer. For instance:
So, if some of the mapping services has better coverage in your area, you can hack the Tagzania URL, just adding ?map=yahoo or ?map=microsoft or ?map=openstreetmap . For example, see the Forbidden City in Beijing mapped in OpenStreetMap.
You will need to hack the URLs to access this feature for now, but we are thinking about how to implement it so that it can be used by any user, maybe depending on user preferences, or a combo box somewhere, or depending on the place editors choice or… What do you think about it?
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