This week on the DC National Mall there is the 2009 Solar Decathlon. It’s a contest between 20 student groups from around the world that build, on the mall, sustainable, energy efficient, and modern houses. The competition measures their efficiency, quality, resource usage, and design. It’s a one week miny village.

So of course, like any village, it needed to be mapped. I went down Saturday afternoon and captured the locations and names of all the buildings and paths that will be up for the week. These are then loaded into OpenStreetMap with start_date and end_date tags that notify the renderer when the features should be visible. It’s a similar model to how Burning Man is mapped year after year as it walks along the Black Rock Desert.

It’s ephemeral mapping – objects that exist in real place, but just for small slices of time. Important as any other building, yet typically relegated to flyers or verbal descriptions.

The fascinating part of projects like this is that OpenStreetMap allowed me to create a map that was useful and immediate. Within minutes of uploading the data, it was available as rendered tiles, vector data, and downloadable to GPS units and iPhones. People on the mall could immediately view the local map with this new information.

It’s a nice demonstration of how community projects like OpenStreetMap will continue to innovate faster, and more openly, then other ‘crowd-sourcing’ options.

I was lucky enough to be invited to enjoy the US 2008 election night at NPR main headquarters in Washington, DC.

Of course, within minutes of walking in I started getting feature requests from reporters and bloggers. One of these was the ability to easy page through reports by state (hint: http://votereport.us/?count=200&state=VA).

We did our best to get a quick web-based map visualization up that would be usable by a large number of people with basic browsers. This limited the number of markers to 200 (one reason we chose to use Flash for our current rendering tool). However, one way of addressing this was to offer a KML file that works very well in GoogleEarth for large sets of markers. Here are the 10,000 reports as of this evening.

Another feature we snuck in recently are some simple statistics on the number and time of reports today at http://votereport.us/reports/stats:

To close out this post – we searched the database to pull up this great audio report by keema: http://votereport.us/reports/9240 – I highly suggest you listen to it.

Like a good geo geek I spent my “holiday” digging fast and deep to contribute to the community around providing information assistance and monitoring around Gustav’s path through Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Louisiana. The result was a quick prototype map: http://crescentmaps.org/gustav/.

There were several issues at hand – one was the lack of available, accessible data. I started adding data sources to the wiki page, and when available uploaded them to GeoCommons Finder! tagged ‘gustav’. Sean offers great reasons on the importance of data sharing (and some more really great previews of Maker!).

Ed shares his thoughts on the overall experience and also questions the impact? Having spoken often with people such as Jesse Robbins and Mikel on their work in helping out in disaster response technology development and deployment the primary lesson I’ve picked up is: iterate.

Of course, Gustav fading out does not mean everything is clear and over. New Orlean citizens are still not supposed to come back into the city, there are still major power outages, and there was already a huge amount of work continuing from the Katrina recovery. There has been a marked neglect of public assistance on non-US regions such as Cuba and the DR. In addition, there are more storms coming up this season – so make sure and pitch in to help out if you can.

Erik Wilde was pointing out the disparities between Google Maps and Google Ditu, or their Chinese version of maps. However, Google Ditu doesn’t have satellite imagery.

There are several easy ways to fix this. The first was to look at the Ditu tiles, and confirm they are the same as Google’s nominal tiling scheme. Which means you can add the China Street tiles as a simple GTileLayerOverlay with Google Maps standard satellite view underneath. This was incredibly easy with Mapstraction and I put up a demo here.

For bonus points I even added a Mapufacture syndicated feed of Erik’s venues for LocWeb2008 and nearby Wikipedia articles from Geonames.

The other way

The terms of how mixing Google’s various tiles together isn’t clear. So the other way to address his issue is to use the freely available data.

Namely, OpenStreetMap for roads, OpenAerialMap or other remote imagery, and run in OpenLayers. Here is the same map done with open data and open source. The resolution or completeness isn’t there yet, but you can see where it’s going and the ability to be use the information as you want is very appealing.

Tomorrow I fly out to Victoria, British Columbia for next week’s FOSS4G conference (Free and Open-Source Software for Geoinformatics).

On Tuesday I’m giving a lightning talk, “Beyond GPS – Neogeography Data Collection”. I’ll give a quick overview of what people are now starting to map with for aerial imaging, environmental monitoring, traffic, mileage, and more. The conference looks really great – particularly because it’s covering the future of a number of subjects I’m interested and participating in such as APP, REST, GeoRSS, KML, and more.

I’m going early because over the weekend we’re having a OpenStreetMap Victoria Mapping Party. This will be my first OSM Mapping Party – but I’ve heard great things about them, and always lots of Pub time after the good workout.

The map below is the OpenStreetMap coverage of Victoria. I’m embedding it using GeoPress and Mapstraction (end plug). If you read this post before Sunday, September 23, 2007 you’ll see a several holes in the coverage of roads. Hopefully, after this Sunday you’ll see nearly complete coverage.

And if you’re in the area of Victoria (either side of the border) this weekend or Monday, then definitely stop in with or without a GPS receiver to join in on the fun.