Toronto OpenStreetMap Hack Weekend

Mar 212012
 

The Open­StreetMap project has over half a mil­lion map con­trib­u­tors and a fairly exten­sive devel­oper com­mu­nity. This past week­end, the first-ever Open­StreetMap hack week­end was held in Toronto, Canada (second-ever North Amer­i­can hack) at Ryer­son Uni­ver­sity. This event was jointly hosted with the Depart­ment of Geog­ra­phy, Mas­ter of Spa­tial Analy­sis and the Stu­dent Asso­ci­a­tion of Geo­graphic Analy­sis. Event coör­di­na­tion was taken care of by Richard Weait, long-time advo­cate of OpenStreetMap.

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Alternatives to Google Maps

Mar 102012
 

Late last year, Google announced that their Maps API and Google Maps Imagery would become a charged ser­vice for high vol­ume users. Any­one host­ing more than 25,000 daily map views would incur charges accord­ing to this pric­ing scheme. It is impor­tant to note that, not only is the API restricted, but the imagery (google maps lay­ers) is restricted in the same fash­ion. For those that use any other API but still call upon Google base lay­ers, the restric­tion of 25,000 daily map views still holds true. Now, this web­site cer­tainly won’t gen­er­ate that kind of traf­fic any­time in the near future, but there cer­tainly are those kinds of web­sites on the inter­net that have well over a mil­lion page views a day. Those that first come to mind are travel ser­vice providers and real-estate agen­cies. Both ser­vices use maps as spa­tial deci­sion sup­port tools (eg. where should I live? where should we visit?). I am tak­ing this oppor­tu­nity to round up the APIs that I am famil­iar with and would rec­om­mend to those mak­ing the move away from Google.

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