I’m a senior CS major this year and I’m working on my senior project, which is an iPhone app specifically for the college. One feature I was hoping to implement would be a campus map that works in a similar way to the “Maps” application. Unfortunately, it ends up the “Map Kit” won’t cover all that I want to do, but it looks like OSM just might.
I’ve found a library here that looks like it can replace the functions of the default map kit (Google Maps-based), so the remaining functions, I think, are based on OSM’s capabilities. Here’s what I’m looking to do.
Colored overlays of the buildings for the non-satellite view, like typical maps.
Something like our current campus map, except on the OSM map. This will make the building layout more clear.
Mapped out sidewalks.
I guess I’d like for them to appear as tiny roads, except naturally not interfere with the street database. Is there a mechanism for this?
Walking directions based on those sidewalks.
I’m hoping not to have to include names for them, since they don’t have names. Would this be notably difficult?
Inner-building maps with room numbers.
What about multiple floors? Can OSM handle that?
I’m mainly wondering if there’s anything that isn’t realistically feasible, as well as if there are any links anyone could offer of similar projects or other help. I’m certainly willing to put the work in if it’s reasonable, I just thought I’d check with the experts to see if it is first.
I haven’t tried this out so I can’t tell you if it covers what you want, but another library that might be able to help you to get OpenStreetMap in an iPhone application is the one from CloudMade ( http://developers.cloudmade.com/projects/show/iphone-api ). CloudMade also provide a style editor, in which you can easily adapt the rendering to make it look more like the campus map you want, e.g. draw the buildings in the colour you want, or show the footways as little roads rather than as dashed red lines like in the default style. Alternatively, you could set up your own rendering with mapnik and adapt its styles to fit your needs.
Inner-building maps are a level of detail that so far hasn’t really been done as far as I can tell, so if you did want to do it you would probably need to invent some new tags for it. Also the multiple floors will be a bit of a problem as the OSM data model is only 2D and non of the tools really are particularly good in supporting multiple layers of data on top of each other. But given this is a CS major project, I am sure you could potentially fix some of this
Thanks for the feedback! I had briefly seen Mapnik but hadn’t yet figured out how it might integrate, so I’ll check into that. As for inner-building maps, these aren’t vital, but indeed, 2D mapping tools wouldn’t be effective. I’ll look into other options for the indoor maps. This whole mapping feature may take some work, but if done correctly, I think it has potential for the “WOW” factor I’m looking for.
My team (=6 people) in last year (5 years after high level) of engineering school are working on the same thing as you right now.
We would like to be able to model indoor maps for places like supermarkets, hospitals, airports and have a very open source system. In addition to this we want to add a wifi-geopositionning layer to show oneself on a map on android.
I don’t know for the first 3 bullets, but I think they must be feasible in OSM.
For the 4th bullet, look at the PDF link below. The person who accomplished the steps managed to have an indoor map drawn out of OSM but did not try to make floors.
There are some OSM building attributes in the proposed features section of the OSM wiki.
See here : http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Building_attributes and namely :
"Array:
building:level:-1
building:level:0
building:level:1
building:level:2
building:level:3 "
Apart from that spec proposal, I’ve thought more generally for a GIS system, that each indoor floor of a building could be modeled inside a separate layer. And pressing some button to change one floor would equate to change the displayed layer (hide the current one and show the newly selected floor’s layer containing the relevant POIS/shapes etc…).
Would you accept to collaborate with us to work on the same project / have mutual benefits and have our work open source ?
we will do SCRUM development for 3 weeks in January on this project, but have started documenting / pre-prototyping stuff on it.
Would you like to collaborate with us ?
Best wishes !!
Please contact me back if you’d accept to work with us.
I’m afraid something of that nature might be a bit out of the scope of what I’m trying to do. I am still working on my project, but maps are only a small part of that, and indoor maps were only a possible aspect of that. It’s an interesting idea that certainly holds great potential, but I expect I’ll be quite busy with the other parts of my main project and have little time to devote to another. I appreciate the offer, though, and good luck.
Hi Modus,
thanks for your reply and telling me about the orientation you’re taking.
Would you accept to see e-mails related to my team’s project though passing under your eyes ?
If so, just send me your e-mail address and I can cc you ocasionally for example, when I write to dev@openstreetmap.org.
Funny… I’ve been plodding away at generating more data sets (mainly in xml) that are meant to be used in a google map to do what you are thinking of doing.
So far I’ve got a fairly accurate gmap (v2) of our campus here: uwosh.edu/map/campusmap.htm
I’m trying to add walking/biking direction searches from building to building but Oshkosh is not a “big” city, so it seems like many of my attempts at correcting google map data are overlooked. Here’s a link to the walking map (still in-testing) uwosh.edu/map/walking.htm
I’ve also got a few other mapping projects in-the-works, like my Permanent Plantings Project. I have lat/lon of all of the trees and shrubs on campus grounds with their common name, genus, species, diameter, etc… fun fun fun
I think in order to create a map that would guide you from one classroom to another, you’d need some sort of split-screen thing. One side would have just the campus overview with highlighted routing, the other would have origin/destination building isometric views or something. Perhaps you could do some over-sized info-window instead of split-screen… in any case, I’m not sure how you’d program the routing directions to concatenate the interior and exterior directions. Verrrrry interesting idea though.
