Oxford Bierbarians 2010 Team Photo

OpenStreetMap, the game

Introduction: Location Aware Games

Since recently getting my new HTC Desire I've been quite impressed with a little location aware game called The Great Land Grab and by the looks of it I'm not the only person. The game is pretty simple; you load it up and you're presented with a Google Maps view with your location displayed, also shown is an overlain grid of parcels that are each individually priced. Moving to a parcel gives you the opportunity to buy it, this costs money, but also earns you rent. The more often a parcel is bought, the higher the price of it and the higher the return. There's a bit more to it than that, but essentially you move around buying parcels, some more often bough than others.

I started thinking about the data collected by this. Apart from some simple user stats, there's not much we as users can look at; presumably, however, the game developers query for the most expensive parcels to see where most game users are. Plotting the price of parcels for a large region, the UK for example, would produce an interesting map of gamers' locations. Animate this into some depiction of a period of time and you might have something really interesting.

That's great for the people behind the game, but I wondered if we could produce a game that would get people contributing to OpenStreetMap whilst ostensibly doing nothing more than playing a fun game. I came up with a quick specification of what an OpenStreetMap game must be:

• Fun as a game in its own right
  
• At first glance nothing to do with open spatial data
  
• A means of contributing new data, or preferably, validating existing OSM data
  

Such a game could (and should) take a number of forms. In effect all we're doing is taking the same location aware ideas that lie behind The Great Land Grab and providing the data to a non-gaming community for the purpose of improving OSM. We'll need to include a disclaimer explaining that, but the game should be enjoyable without thinking about the improvements you're making to the map. In a perfect world you'd play not even knowing OpenStreetMap existed.

My game proposal: Droidenteering

This game presents no map display to the player but sets a number of challenges to be completed. Challenges are comprised of finding a number of things within the real world; 10 pubs, for example, or 5 supermarkets.

Players could have running a number of challenges at a time, up to 5 or 10 perhaps, and would progress through each challenge when completed. A first challenge may be to find a single pub, or supermarket or bike shop; completing this challenge then moves you to the next level, upon which you have to find more examples. Players are judged on the speed at which they can find the required level of features and also how much information they can provide about it. This would all go into an online scoring system.

I picture it working something like this:

Player starts the game and is told they need to find 10 pubs, 3 of which they may have already found. "Finding" a pub means getting as close to it as possible and clicking the "feature found" button; a lookup is performed to see if this is already in the OSM database, if it is the pub's name is returned and you are asked to confirm that you are outside it. If the feature is not found, you are asked to enter the name of it. Either action would be enough to qualify it as found, leaving the user free to find the next pub. Extra points would be awarded, however, for adding details such as house number, road name, telephone number, food details, etc. Each type of feature being searched for would have their own possible fields for entry.

You could cheat this by going to the middle of nowhere, saying you've found a pub, and moving on, but the game would include a validity score to check that other players were finding the same thing. Players would check online to see their progress against others and would aim to find features the quickest, or to earn the most points through the level of information provided. Weekly challenges may be presented to see who could find the most topically relevant features of the moment. Special awards could also be given for a whole range of arbitrary achievements.

Feeding this into OSM, and back to the game

Whilst players are running around collecting features to earn points, the data would be collected and entered into OSM on a regular basis. The same validity score that is used to check the correctness of data; if you see 10 dots on the map for a new pub found by 10 unique users you could be fairly confident in adding that POI to OSM. Hopefully one or two of the players would have entered as much metadata as possible to make the POI as rich as possible. Once entered into OSM, this would give feedback to future players, possibly with the option of reporting spurious features from within the game.

Last December I worked out that about 39% of UK pubs were on OSM. Such a game as suggested above could help rapidly improve this figure. Whilst I've been typing about pubs, the same could be said of any feature. At any one point a player would have in mind a number of POIs that need to be found to move onto the next particular challenge. Whilst they do that, a group of volunteers could check the submitted data and add it straight to OSM.

Beyond The Map

Apart from The Map, there are precious few ways of interacting with OpenStreetMap data. The proposal above gives the data a value to people who are interested in being outside, rather than those interested in Free spatial data. By implicitly appealing to a wider audience, gamers in this instance, we can collect user data that can directly feedback into the project. This is just one example, but I suggest that we need many such initiatives to get a broad spectrum of people and their data into the World's finest data source.

GeoSpatial Open Source for Surveyors

Cameron Shorter sends word through the OS Geo discuss list about this video of his great recent talk at the International Federation of Surveyors conference earilier in the week. Anna's survey and GIS manual gets a good plug, as does OA more generally.

Well worth a watch if you're into surveying and want a round up of current Open Source tools available to you.

Weymouth Mass Burial 3D videos online:

Two videos produced as a result of our work in Multiple View 3D reconstructions are now online:

And for those of you with Red / Cyan 3D glasses:

See our fledgling YouTube Channel for more (including full HD):

http://www.youtube.com/user/oxfordarchaeology

"OpenStreetMap Saved Lives"

My two recent favourite videos about the potential of Open spatial data and tools. If you're interested in maps, GIS, spatial things, etc, they're definitely worth your time (less than 15 minutes combined):

Survey and GIS Manual updated

I've already blogged about the release of our latest version of the gvSIG OA Digital Edition, now Anna has updated her survey and GIS manual to cater to the new software.

Further details on our Open Archaeology site:

http://openarchaeology.net/project/survey-and-gis-manual

Route finding across a continent: Testing changes to OSM data

There's currently an impressive OpenStreetMap tidy-up effort quietly happening across the globe, you can read about it here. Of course, duplicate nodes aren't the only sort of messy data possible to see on OpenStreetMap, but it's a good place to start if you want to help improve the quality of data within the database. Personally, I'm most interested in mapping Africa, so I'm always keen to see how many red crosses are on this view. As it happens, we can look at how this tidy-up, and others, have impacted the quality of OSM data by trying to plot a route with CloudMade across the continent, but first some more introduction.

Mapping in Africa was given a fantastic boost relatively recently by Robert Soden at Development Seed when he was responsible for importing over a hundred thousand miles of Africover road data into OSM. Obviously this is absolutely fantastic, but I was finding that when clearing up dupe nodes, and looking at aerial imagery, that the Africover data was particularly liable to errors and broken segments. This isn't really a problem; OSM is a wiki and we're all able to tidy up this data - think of these roads as stubs and we've got an amazing starting point from which to build a free map of the continent. Tidying Africover data, and ways sourced from elsewhere, I began to think that it must be possible to measure improvements made to the map. The thinking is simple: You plot a route from A to B, the produced route isn't perfect but you note the calculated distance; you then improve the data and the route between A and B becomes shorter as the software you use doesn't have to route around errors and can plot a more direct route.

Such thinking isn't exactly new; people have long been using routing applications to test the quality of OSM data. You can do it now - try entering your home and your place of work into a routing application and seeing if it comes up with the way that you actually travel. If not, you might go home a funny way, or OSM might have some incorrect data about your part of the world. Regardless, if you record the same route at intervals across a period of time and you could start to judge how the OSM data in a region is changing.

With that thought in mind I was very pleased to revisit an old blog post at 27 Months that spoke of routing from Cape Town to Ethiopia; most importantly it contained a screenshot (reproduced below as I didn't want to leech anyone's bandwidth) and a link defining the start and end point. All we have to do is click the link and compare the results:

Before:

After:

In August 2009 the routed distance is recorded as 7298 km, taking in the south west and central countries of Botswana and Namibia; by March 2010, the route had shrunk to 6666 km and travelled south through Zimbabwe. This seems to show a great improvement in the quality of road data for south east Africa; as the recorded roads get more complete and contain less errors, shorter routes can be plotted along them. CloudMade allow you to download the route as a GPX file; a potentially very useful record of the state of OSM data. Also, note that in the first image you can read Zaire, something Wikipedia tells me hasn't existed since 1997; a further indicator that data improves over time.

The above image shows us that we should perhaps be careful; shown on the map is a route from Morocco to Algeria, although the guide books tell us that this border crossing is closed. At least the data can be easily changed, however, and routing services used to check the accuracy.

Good news all round then I think: Routing services can be used to provide an analysis of OSM data over time (as long as you can find historic examples), it seems to be improving and, if errors remain, routing tools can be used to improve and verify road information across an entire continent. Whilst I've only demonstrated the concept here, if we compare regularly generated GPX files from CloudMade at some point in the future, we will likely be able to say a great deal about road coverage in the region; continuing to look at this in the future may reveal insights into the ongoing efforts to map Africa or elsewhere.

RIP Mark Linkous

Very sad news from the pages of Rolling Stone:

Singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Mark Linkous has committed suicide, his publicist confirms to Rolling Stone. Best known for his acclaimed work with Sparklehorse, who released four albums of imaginative ambient psych-folk, Linkous also produced Daniel Johnston’s 2003 album Fear Yourself and collaborated with Danger Mouse on Dark Night of the Soul.

Sparklehorse defined great swathes of the music I listened to in the last decade; I have memories of consciously thinking that I would write specific essays for my MA to read something like the band sounded. The Rolling Stone write-up is pretty good, and has plenty of links to further reading. I was also pleased to see the story made the BBC.

BBC: "The volunteer mappers who helped Haiti"

The Guardian and New Scientist have already reported on the OpenStreetMap response in Haiti, now the BBC has a very nice magazine piece on the same subject.

For more information, see the Project Haiti wiki page.

gvSIG OADE Beta 2 Released

Ben has announced to the gvSIG mailing list the availabilty of the second beta of our OA Digital version of gvSIG.

More details on our site

From the site:

Advantages of gvSIG OADE 2010

GvSIG OADE 2010 differs from the official gvSIG 1.9 release in the following respects:

* Completely new installer frontend.
* Comes bundled with many extensions.
* Includes Java Runtime Environment version 1.6r17 (Linux and Windows versions only).
* Complete and consistent English (GB, US) GUI translation.
* Heavily reworked and improved menu structure, keyboard shortcuts and layer context menus.
* Additional documentation and sample data.
* Better integration into all supported operating systems.

We hope that you will enjoy what we did with gvSIG!

Changes in gvSIG OADE Beta 2

* Improved labels and formatting in raster layer legends.
* Added some useful raster colour tables for elevation, slope, aspect and more.
* Corrected placement of affinely transformed layers.
* Added DWG CAD format support.
* Fixed a number of bugs that would cause crashes in the raster and remote sensing tools.
* Export of maps with advanced labels to PDF no longer crashes.
* Added missing symbols and label styles.
* Proper file type descriptions in all file selection dialogs.
* Unified native binaries: all versions use GDAL 1.6.3 and PROJ.4 version 4.7.0 now.
* Runs on Windows 7 (but see notes at end of this page!).
* Improved Windows startup performance: no more copying of large binary files on startup, no more write access required to installation folder.
* Updated Java runtime environment (JRE) to latest 1.6u18.
* Some translation fixes.
* Updated North Carolina sample data project to gvSIG 1.9 format.

Buzz me

Yann might be unhappy with Google and their new Buzz service, but I'd like to play with it some more and see how it pans out. Add me if you want to.

I've got a Google profile and, of course, an address: iknowjoseph at gmail dot com

Let's see if I can get more social... ;-)

Google Maps get interesting

Thanks to some new lab settings:

I'm sure that the geofolks will have already been all over this, but I like it. Enough to replace OpenStreetMap though? Probably not.

Open Source in Archaeology: Science at Work!

My last post accused archaeological science practitioners of failing at science, and quite often, archaeological theory too.

Of course, there are people doing proper science and archaeology out there and they are talking about it too. More specifically, we're doing it. My last post was enough to encourage Benjamin to post the slides of a recent paper presented to the Institute of Archaeology:

Ducke 2010: Science Without Software no Longer: Archaeological Data Analysis and the Open Source Paradigm

The slides wonderfully demonstrate the point made by Professor Ince in his Guardian article, with examples from an archaeological perspective. Well worth the read.

We have other presentations available for download on our site:

http://oadigital.net/research/researchpresentations

Good Science Requires Open Source

There's a fantastic article on the Guardian's website about further revelations emerging from the UEA "Climategate" affair. The conclusion? Release the source code of applications you use in scientific endeavours. I said something like this at TAG 2008:

The Guardian 5 February 2010: If you're going to do good science, release the computer code too

Computer code is also at the heart of a scientific issue. One of the key features of science is deniability: if you erect a theory and someone produces evidence that it is wrong, then it falls. This is how science works: by openness, by publishing minute details of an experiment, some mathematical equations or a simulation; by doing this you embrace deniability. This does not seem to have happened in climate research. Many researchers have refused to release their computer programs — even though they are still in existence and not subject to commercial agreements. An example is Professor Mann's initial refusal to give up the code that was used to construct the 1999 "hockey stick" model that demonstrated that human-made global warming is a unique artefact of the last few decades. (He did finally release it in 2005.)

So, if you are publishing research articles that use computer programs, if you want to claim that you are engaging in science, the programs are in your possession and you will not release them then I would not regard you as a scientist; I would also regard any papers based on the software as null and void.

I don't know if anyone has ranted at Professor Darrel Ince, but the reaction I got was fantastic; amongst a general shower of scorn, one person flat out called me a liar and another said that such an issue was too theoretical for a meeting of the Theoretical Archaeology Group.

Open Source Software is gaining momentum within archaeological practice, but perhaps not as quickly as it could be. The reason why? Probably because of the nature of archaeological practice rather than the ability of the tools. Many of the practitioners of archaeological computing (in the UK at least, probably also elsewhere) are ivory tower academics interested in producing published volumes. "Archaeological computing", for most, is little more than producing pretty pictures for books. It barely matters for most if you can access the original data, or the black box software that turned it into an image, because there is no element of experimentation or reproducibility required; you've simply produced an image for a book. Other over worked areas of archaeological computing, such as least cost path analysis, view sheds and calorific analysis of landscape exploitation have such little merit from an archaeological perspective that they barely warrant trying to justify by any scientific measures. I tried to this second point a few years back during my MA and, although the only linkable mention of it I can find is on Jo's blog, I think it went down a little better than when I tried to point out the obvious at TAG. Whilst phenomenology critics may enjoy my paper for demonstrating holes in the practice, it also points out that people don't just walk along the easiest paths they can find, nor are they necessarily interested by the fact they can see something impressive on the horizon.

There's plenty of MSc Archaeological Computing types around, but few of them actually do anything scientific. There's no scientific rigour within archaeological practice; no reproducibility, little experimentation, no openness. No scientific hypothesis to stand up and knock down. Archaeological theory is sometimes played with by archaeological computing practitioners, certainly nobody could work in a theoretical vacuum, but it's often implicit, if not shunned. Many people want to make maps within an accepted and uncritical theoretical wasteland that has largely failed to see the emergence of post-processual thinking.

Archaeological computing is, more often than not, behind the curve on scientific practice and archaeological thinking. Professor Ince highlights the need for openness and scientific rigour; let's just hope that people start doing more to work that would actually involve a need for this approach.

Great writeups of Web 2.0 in a crisis

A great number of people, myself included, have been doing what we can to help relief work in Haiti. This is now, rather wonderfully, being picked up in the proper press:

NewScientist 27 January 2010: How crowdsourcing is helping in Haiti

The Guardian 4 February 2010: Meet the Wikipedia of the mapping world

See also Mikel Maron's blog entry, this one by Harry Wood and these video's of Haiti mapping by Eric Marsden: Port au Prince, Haiti.