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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Lets talk about QGIS for a lit­tle bit before we go ahead and install it on our sys­tems. QGIS is an open source GIS pack­age that is under the GNU pub­lic license. It offers enough func­tion­al­ity for some­one with a ArcInfo Stu­dent License (myself) to want to explore. The usage of QGIS in day to day tasks has me spend­ing less time Con­tinue reading »

 

I can think back and remem­ber strug­gling with being able to uti­lize Open­StreetMap (OSM) data in a project of mine. I wanted a free source of infor­ma­tion and geospa­tial data, where I was not bound to strict and lim­it­ing copy­rights. Open­StreetMap offered a one-stop-shop for free and open geospa­tial data. At the time, I was most inter­ested in uti­liz­ing their very detailed road net­work. How­ever, I ran into many hic­cups along the way, which ulti­mately deterred me from com­plet­ing the project. Some time has passed and I have returned to said Con­tinue reading »