This weekend, Tim Waters (chippy) noticed that the WhiteHouse is using OpenLayers mapping library and OpenStreetMap basemap tiles in their new Delivering on Change page.

Whether you were already serving your country, or are responding to the President’s call, share how you are delivering on change in your community.Whether it is an hour per month helping those struggling in the current economy, tutoring kids in your neighborhood every day, or anything else, we want to highlight what Americans are doing to strengthen our country.

This is very interesting on several levels. Foremost is the use of government provided (TIGER/Line) and crowd-sourced data (OpenStreetMap) in an official US Government Site. This is definitely an indicator that what were cutting edge tools have reached a critical mass to provide broad usability and appeal. Open Source? check

Looking underneath the hood, the data is provided via a KML feed (), so you can pull the data out and upload or map it however you want. Open Data? check

The site itself, Delivering on Change, is asking citizens to contribute stories and media about their personal engagement with change. This is an incredibly exciting step to ask for people to contribute to national storytelling and character. Citizen-sourced data? check

The new US administration is continually doing amazing, and open, initiatives. There is incredible excitement around Recovery.gov as a testbed for the next generation of transparency and embrace of technology and open data feeds.

Small next steps

My thoughts on interesting applications wouldn’t be complete without pointing out a couple of suggestions. While many defend the default OpenLayers controls – I personally think that implementors should take that next step and apply minor customization to better integrate the look and feel of the map controls into their site. I’ve talked before about how easy it is to change some CSS to replace the controls. Perhaps even just a darker blue background to match the White House blue in the logo. Customized?

Another, less highlighted but very important for Government sites is the integration of accessibility controls. OpenLayers supports map navigation using keyboard inputs – which provides for alternative interfaces to navigate the map. It’s not clear if this is official “508 compliant”, but at least demonstrates the potential. Accessible?

How you can help

So do you want to help make Change, especially with mapping data and technology? Come join us at the Washington, DC mapping party – currently planned for June 20 + 21, 2009 somewhere in DC (details coming soon). Or join a mapping party near you.

I spent many hours on Thursday configuring and installing OpenStreetMap tile rendering, via Mapnik and mod_tile and at the very last step ran into a glaring issue: Japan, China, Korea, Thailand fonts (often referred to as CJK) were just [] symbols instead of the appropriate characters.

Out of the box, the OpenStreetMap style, osm.xml, doesn’t have fallback font support. What this means is that when the default font, DejaVu Sans, is missing the specified character then Mapnik doesn’t know where else to try to get the character. Mapnik has support for this, but for some reason the default OSM style or package doesn’t include it.

Thanks to the late-night help of Dane Springmeyer (and looking past the very bad April Fools joke of telling me Mapnik now has Ruby bindings and KML rendering support), I managed to get it working.

Steps to Reproduce

The solution is quite straight-forward, and I have added my notes to the OSM wiki on Mapnik.

1. Download the GNU Unifont Glyphs.
2. Unpack and put the ttf file in your /usr/local/lib/mapnik/fonts (or appropriate path) directory with the other Mapnik fonts.
3. Modify your osm.xml. Replace face_name="DejaVu Sans Book" with fontset_name="DejaVu Sans Book".
4. Underneat the <Map/> declaration, add the font set styling for fallback:

   <FontSet name="DejaVu Sans Book">
   <Font face_name="DejaVu Sans Book" />
   <Font face_name="unifont Medium" />
   </FontSet>
   
   

5. Repeat for Bold and Oblique.
6. Delete your tile cache and re-render.

You can view my modified osm.xml here.

It is really impressive how well Mapnik and OpenStreetMap work together, and the simplicity of styling. The next step is to figure out how to add English names to all the local language renderings, so that someone can look at תֵּל־אָבִיב-יָפוֹ and also recognize it as Tel-Aviv.

In the OpenStreetMap community there is a known problem with the applicability of Creative Commons licensing to geographic data. The CC licenses are truly meant for creative works and not for the creation and aggregation of factual data.

To address this, the OpenStreetMap Foundation Board has pursued the development of a more applicable and friendly Open Database License, ODbL. The goal of this license would be to make it clear the legal protection of geographic data gathered and how it can be used with other data or derived from.

It is a sign of maturity that an open-data project like OpenStreetMap is dealing with the legal issues that surround the otherwise grassroots crowd-sourced community. Similar parallels occurred with the development of GPL and BSD with open-source software and the Creative Commons in user-generated media. Open-Data is following in the footsteps of open-source, from grassroots “hackers” to disrupting some industries and redirecting others.

You spilled your legal all over my data

However, one difference that has affected these two examples is a valuable guide with how the ODbL and other similar licenses should progress. Software licenses are currently a myriad of acronyms and terms: BSD, MIT, GPL, Affero, Apache, and more. SourceForge has a deprecated license guide and in fact offers at least 72 license options.

The result is a confusion to both software producers and consumers. What licenses enforce which restrictions and usages? How can I bring together software under different licenses and their miscibility. This is a question that even after a decade of mainstream open-source experts still ask for advice.

A working model

Creative Commons headed this off through some nice modularization of the most popular options. Through clear naming, definitions, and iconography users can understand the concepts encased in otherwise unapproachable legal contracts such as Non-commercial, Attribution, Share-Alike, and No-Derivatives with straight-forward choosing of which modules any user wants to apply to their work.

This results in easy, lightweight sharing – encouraging people to contribute to public repositories and also make use of these works. By having simple, well understood licenses, one example is Flickr’s simple search filter that makes it easy to find Creative Commons only images for use in third party materials and presentations. It’s even possible to visualize and determine how you can mix together content released under various modules.

The overall result is that the license has become popular and encourages both sharing and use of shared media – effectively ending the future of traditional stock photography.

Open Data Modules

My point of highlighting Creative Commons is to look at how simple mechanisms can promote effectiveness around licensing of information. The ODbL’s primary purpose is making it clear how to produce and use OpenStreetMap data, but in this action it is addressing the growing need to easily define how the true underlying strands of the web will be shared. You can read a draft version of the ODbL.

The opportunity is to lead the charge on clear, understandable data licenses that citizens can take to their governments to demand the data be released under these terms. There would not be the need for click-throughs of unique terms of service or agreements, but easily shareable data that magnifies the power of any available datasources.

One counter-point to the pre-defined modules is that users that want variations can “select, modify, or delete” sections as necessary. This is definitely not an option – as it will create unclear and probably invalid licenses. In addition, these variations and spin-offs will be unvetted and untrusted. By handling the majority of cases under one common umbrella, the validity and attractiveness of a standard license decreases the difficulty of any organization to claim it wouldn’t work for them.

I posited this question to the OpenStreetMap Legal mailing list hoping to spark a discussion with the various people currently involved with the license. So far the feedback has surprisingly been negative on the benefits of modular based licenses. OpenStreetMap has a long road ahead even after a new license in drafted in convincing the very large community to switch licenses – an effort I hope does not negatively impact the organization but instead illuminates the need for clear licenses from the start of any open data collection project.

With GeoCommons, we are spending a lot of resources gathering, annotating, and sharing out open data sources. Our metadata catalog is shared under a Creative Commons Attribute, Share-Alike license. And nominally all the data we bring in is somehow open, under different monikers. But right now it is very difficult to easily share out the terms of these licenses – so the onus is upon the user to properly use each dataset. With our goal of making geospatial data easy to use for non-experts, we have a very high interest in making geodata licenses as easy to understand as photographs or articles are under Creative Commons.

An open question to open data licenses

The question here is whether the module concept of Creative Commons is an effective mechanism that should be applied to the Open Data License. The goal is to make it so easy for anyone to share information that it would take more effort not to do so. That this type of easily shared information is highly preferential by consumers that other datasets under various and unclear licenses such that these other sources conform to best practices.

What do you think is the best path?

It’s just about here – we’re hosting the first Washington, DC area mapping party this weekend at the FortiusOne office in Arlington. You can also meet the GeoCommons team!

If you haven’t been to a mapping party – essentially anyone can show up throughout the day, borrow a GPS unit (or bring your own), get a quick tutorial on how to collect data for OpenStreetMap and then head out for a gorgeous day around the town gathering tracks, points of interest, road data, bike trails, walking areas, etc. It’s a great way to explore the city and also make maps that are useful to you! While the OSM map for Arlington and DC “looks” fairly complete it’s missing a lot of useful information such as directions, metros and more – so it still needs a lot of TLC.

Once you get back with your data we can show you how to upload it to OpenStreetMap. Of course, there is also typically post-mapping socializing somewhere nearby. Overall the day is very free and you can come for as short as an hour or two – but I’ll warn you that it’s very addictive.

The event is listed for both Saturday and Sunday – but my recommendation is to come on Sunday. Saturday is SocialDevCamp East up in Baltimore, and also on Sunday Mikel will be in town to provide his mapping expertise to the party.

Here are the event details (in hCal of course).

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.