It's cold outside and it's trying to snow. My plan for today had been to ride ncn_ref=66 in either direction of Bradford, but that clearly wasn't going to happen in this weather. So instead I spent time playing with the Cadastre data and have added quite a lot of buildings and roads up in North West France. It obviously all needs checking on the ground to add in the correct road types and names, but it gives an easy way of getting initial mapping done.
I've also been playing around with dbpedia to see if I can increase the amount of villages showing in Turkey. I couldn't. There aren't many places in Wikipedia that aren't on the map and most of them were being encoded horribly. I do however now vaguely understand how to pull geographic data out of wikipedia in an almost useful manner.
SELECT ?subject ?lat ?lon WHERE { {
?subject rdf:type .
?subject geo:lat ?lat.
?subject geo:long ?lon
} UNION {
?subject rdf:type .
?subject geo:lat ?lat.
?subject geo:long ?lon.
} }
Whilst it's great to be able to get this mapping done from a warm(ish) desk, and feels great to get so much mapped with so little effort, it's never going to be as accurate as actually venturing outside to take GPS readings.
Discussion
Comment from BlueMM on 2 February 2009 at 00:39
We thought about using Wikipedia for place position information, but since the lat/lon might of been obtained from Google Maps, we couldn't because of copyright issues.
Comment from kaerast on 2 February 2009 at 21:35
Hmm, good point. Oh well, at least I got to play around with sqorl a little.