OpenStreetMap
Blackspots
A while ago we created this:

It's a heatmap of addresses that cannot be linked to any closeby street, an imperfect but effective way to detect missing roads. These addresses are from a database used within the company I work for and cannot be made public. We use this heatmap internally to determine the 'black' spots on the map and detect missing objects.
What would be even better is to share this with the OSM communty in Belgium! We have these calculations for the Flanders area because that's the area we do deliveries in and have addresses for. I can share the 'blackspot' data, not the source of the calculations, the addresses.
Question is: how do I do this, sharing the data? I don't really have the resources needed to do this I think. Is there anyone that can help me out with this?
OSM Inspector: Routing View
I found OSM Inspector via this blogpost; We have started using the same tiles as in Potlach in our application using an OsmSharp tile layer. After doing a small update to allow the tiles to be transparently overlayed on top of our regular mapnik layer, the errors detected by OSM Inspector show up in the application we are building.

A few errors/bugs in osm have already been fixed!
Thanks GEOFABRIK! It would be even nicer if I could convince the company here to sponsor a view!
OpenStreetMap & Humanitarian Stuff
This weekend we organized a session with some OSM-enthousiasts (like myself) and Africa4U. Africa4U does very small-scale development projects in several african countries and they did a mapping experiment exactly like HOT does/did in Haiti but without knowing about OSM or HOT (how is that even possible!). We wanted to set the record straight and introduce them to OSM and HOT!
We introduced OSM in a technical sense, showed what the project was all about, what HOT does and teached the Africa4U volunteers to use Potlach2 and some JOSM.
An important part of the introduction, that became more of a discussion after a while, was about copyright and using existing map data in OSM. We made it very clear it was not an option using sources without permission of the authors! This introduced another problem; asking for example the cartography department of Kinshasa would pose no problem (maybe after paying an "administrative fee") but would this be a legal source to use? Where did they get the data? Do they own the rights to the data themselves? A solution was not found for this problem and this remains open.
At least we hope Africa4U learned some usefull stuff, maybe even recruted a new member and that they will start to contribute to OSM with their development projects. We suggested asking for aireal imagery for specific regions but we have yet to recieve a list of regions to focus on.
We did a small presentation with slides taken from some HOT presentation(s):
http://www.slideshare.net/xivk/africa4u
We also showed these videos:
Geospatial Revolution / Episode Four, Chapter Four: Mapping Power to the People
State Of The Map
I am going after all:
If it's just half as nice/interesting/productive/fun as SOTM-EU it will be a great succes and I expect nothing less!
Using OsmSharp: Calculate a vehicle's range
Along each point in the route the range of the vehicle is recalculated and the points that can be reached are shown using the little black points. A convex hull alorithm is used to display the area polygons. This can be updated to show a more realistic area.
Update: The demo project generating these images/movie can be found here:
http://osmsharp.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/osmsharp/trunk/Demos/RangeApp/
Osm Fight!
Arrived in vienna
Finally arrived in Vienna yesterday for State of the map Europe! Looking forward to the conference and Vienna itself! We have rented a small appartment, my girlfriend came along to see the city, for a few days very close to the TU Wien.
I'm a bit nervous already for my own talk because this is going to be a first for me!
OpenStreetMap for Beginners Part 2: trace roads and areas
OpenStreetMap for Beginners Part 1: Add points of interest
OsmSharp - v0.3
Added a filter for changesets based on a bounding box.
For now only a custom oracle database scheme can be used as the target database. Data sources can be the regular osm xml format (also zipped), simple pgsql, api pgsql and again the custom oracle database scheme.
Updated the M-TSP code
- Updated the M-TSP code and it's best placement algorithm. It can now be used with or without a depot and a crucial bug was fixed
- Created a M-TSP generator to initialize the population of the GA applied specifically for a problem with maximum and mimum time constraints per round
- Created a M-TSP preprocessing step to estimate an upper bound the number of required vechicles
- Some minor bug fixes
Some of this is based on research from different sources:
- A Hybrid Algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Window
- Route Planning in Road Networks with Turn Costs
- A Hybrid Genetic Algorithm for the Travelling Salesman Problem
- ...



