Hi all,
I’ve been really getting stuck into performing on-foot surveys of areas where the street names are missing. Luckily for me, I live in the city where Nearmap is headquartered (Perth, Western Australia) and having the roads traced out on openstreetmaps isn’t usually an issue, just getting the names.
I started thinking about an “easier” way of recording street name data for later use. Walking papers is fantastic (and I still use it to print out where I need to survey), but I was looking for something less fiddly than writing names onto a sheet of paper. Also more importantly, I was thinking of a way to engage with people not living in an area to enable them to still help with updating maps in an area.
Having written a few J2ME apps in my time, and some of these involving Location Based Services (i.e. GPS), I created one to help record name and POI data. I guess you could say it’s based on the tourist guide principle (“if you look over there you’ll see…”). That is, if you record the position, the direction and the surveyor’s comment, others should be able to determine what the street’s name is, what the park is called, what shops are at the shopping centre etc. The data entry process is quite simple:
1: Press button to record the current coordinates
2: Enter the bearing (TODO: using on-board compasses - still testing the practicalities of this idea, so I’m reluctant to sink too much time into it)
3: Record point: enter the (compass) bearing and name of the street or comments on the POI
When a point is recorded, the GPS coordinates, heading and comments entered are saved onto the phone. At the end of the survey, choose “Send” from the menu and all the stored data is sent to a server via WWW/CGI. After that, it’s relatively simple to render these points using Open{StreetMaps,Layers}. I’ve included a small screenshot from my recent alpha test of the application here:
As you can see, I’ve selected a data point where I’m saying that the street heading directly north is called Jasmine Avenue (I’ve already used this set of data to update the map, hence the street names are present).
It’s my hope that this application will be useful for the following reasons:
1: Not so much writing down of stuff in the field, meaning that people running surveys don’t have to carry around as much stuff.
2: Dissociates surveying from the editing of the map. If you like doing the surveys but aren’t so keen on the data entry, someone else could theoretically lend a hand by using your survey data to update the maps. Same for people who can’t perform the survey (particularly our OSM friends overseas) but don’t mind helping out with the data entry.
There are some definite TODOs in here such as using a phone’s on-board compass (my phone doesn’t have one, so I’ve been using an ‘orienteering’ compass) or coding for more popular platforms (Android etc). In the mean time, I was wondering if anyone out there:
1: Thinks my app has a role helping the surveying effort?
2: Would be interested in helping test the (ASCII) phone app (J2ME phone with on-board GPS required - e.g. Nokia E71)?
3: Would be interested in helping to test the usability of the data generated, by trying to enter in street name / POI data provided by users of the J2ME application (I think this is quite important, particularly to write guidelines on recommended use of the application)?
Thanks in advance,
Voon-Li.
) I’m also allowing for the possibility that the people that love the surveying might want to pass the way-editing to someone else.