The new product immmediately reminded me Panamap from Urban Mapping that we now all know for their Neighborhoods products that’s now part of many online mapping portals. There are Panamaps for Chicago and Manhattan: when viewing the paper map at different angles, you see different topics of the same area such as a town plan, the transit network, tourist destinations, and neighbourhoods.

It’s great to see that features primarily associated with Web cartography such as zooming and switching layers are finding their way into paper maps. Hey, let’s not forget Walking Papers by Michal Migurski of Stamen Design: it provides a print out of OpenStreetMap that you can annotate with edits and additions. Next you scan in your print-out and use it as a background in an OpenStreetMap editor to further improve the map data.

The discussion tonight marks the launch of the New World Map tomorrow in The Hague. Graphic designer Herman van Bostelen has taken on the task to create a world map that takes into account the many disputed territories and their naming. Won’t be in The Hague myself, but I bet it’s going to be an interesting event too. See you tonight, anyway?

• Vinex Atlas
• Metropolitan World Atlas
• The Big KAN Atlas, mental atlas of the Arnhem-Nijmegen urban network
• Limes Atlas

[...] Grootens’s atlases are indicative of the moment, representing an extraordinary redesign of the atlas typology. The atlases made clear the relationship between geography and politics, representing complex data by graphic variables and symbols rather than by text.

It’s not often that a Dutch atlas makes it into the New York Times!

A few weeks ago, Google Maps already went through a major update of its maps of the US, as it had enriched its base maps with mapping data from sources such as the US Forest Service and the US Geological Survey. The more recent change was not just about adding more data just in the US, but marked the most significant change of its look and feel since Google Maps was first launched and impacted its cartographic styles right across the globe.

MapQuest’s introduction of vegetation and relief imagery can be seen as merely an attempt to match the current visual expectations. Google Maps and Yahoo Maps have these features since November and May 2007 respectively. Actually, Ask Maps was the first to introduce its physical maps already back in May 2006. Similarly, the addition of more building footprints and subway stations is only MapQuest catching up with Google Transit.

Both Google Maps and MapQuest have created a cartographic look and feel for the Map style that has a bigger contrast between the background detail of local roads and important orientation guides such as major thoroughfares. Particularly on Google Maps, the road casing is much more subtle and the local roads are much thinner on the larger scales, making it easier to pick out fine detail in the complex local road shapes. MapQuest change of colour of the interstates from red to blue is quite remarkable, although Rand McNally also uses blue for interstates. The labeling is much crisper and the thin halo sets it apart from the map, making for better legibility.

Another improvement that both mapping websites have pushed is the hybrid style. While Google Maps seems to have added more roads on smaller map scales, MapQuest appears to have removed roads. It’s always a very difficult balance to strike, really. Although the road casings on the map style have been thinned, they have been made more prominent in the hybrid style. Roads are much more easier to follow on the satellite or aerial imagery in the background.

All in all, it’s really encouraging to see these mapping websites embracing cartographic style as a means to differentiate and to make their maps more user-friendly and attractive. However, these mapping websites are so pervasive, that they are now very much establishing people’s expectations of what maps should look like. Any map, really. Even when the map is not for reference or car navigation.

For about a year now, Richard serves as a member of the Release Management Team for Quantum GIS. Also, he is the gatekeeper for the Dutch GUI translations. Already in Sydney, he caught up with some of the MapServer developers to join the Code Sprint on Thursday. There has been some discussion about adding the XML-MAP-format as an option in the QGIS-Mapserver export plugin. To get this working from the Quantum GIS side as well, Richard will hopefully get some developers in Vienna together to work en discuss different options for this.

Our aim was to see whether Layar may provide us with a new platform for location-based multimedia tours as we launched in the cities of Enschede and Utrecht. This certainly seems to be the case! Webmapper has already received a developer key, so watch this space!

Neither Google or Tele Atlas would ever go and take Spits to court over this copyright infringement, would they? The online proliferation of Google Maps makes it seem as if maps come for free and the Google Maps API automatically inserts a copyright statement. Surely, the Google Maps ToS and Tele Atlas EULA also allow you to make some prints for personal use, but to me this is definitely taking the mickey out of copyright law. Is online mapping now changing people’s attitude to copyright on maps and geographic data?

The other two presentations from Martin and Lambertus focused on using OSM data for route calculation. A great lesson to take away from their presentations, was that a quircky route is not always a bad thing, as it helps to improve the underlying OSM data.

Steve Chilton’s talk about his recent trip to Antigua as a result of the Pledgebank appeal after last year’s SOTM conference was certainly the highlight of the afternoon. Of particular interest were his observations about some of the issues he had to deal with that he would never have thought about beforehand. For example, why would people living along the main road of the island use any other name than Main Road to refer to that road? Also, he was quickly able to account for the name change of Boggy Peak to Mount Obama to honour the electoral victory of Barack Obama in the US presidential elections.

All in all, today was yet another succcessful day of an altogether successful conference! It was a great opportunity to discuss with other delegates about stuff put forward in some of the presentations or about completely different topics that were on our minds. For example, would crowdsourced geographic data be underpinning the majority of applications in the near future, leaving OS and the likes of Tele Atlas and Navteq catering only for some small niche markets with just their top-of-the-bill clients such as the utility companies, security and emergency services, and automative manufacturers?

The afternoon was full of workshops on Google MyMaps, OS OpenSpace and OSGB Web Map Tools, and OpenLayers. The OSGB Web Map Tools is basically an approach to run OpenSpace off your own servers using open source technology (PostGIS, GeoServer, Tomcat, OpenLayers).

During the evening, there was a drinks reception, the annual dinner and the Ceilidh. According to a long-standing tradition, there was a small competition guessing the duration of Steve Chilton’s speech, which was won by Bill Cartwright!

Also, check out MapAction. They are sort of a Cartographes sans Frontiers and go out to assist relief organisations and governments to map disaster areas.

In the afternoon, I finally had the opportunity to hear about Legible London, a new pedestrian wayfinding system to help people walk around the Capital. Having just passed through Schiphol airport, an icon in wayfinding, designed by Buro Mijksenaar, it was great to learn about the process the people at Applied Information Group went through to create this wayfinding system. Jonathan Rez, Senior Strategist at FWDesign, made the interesting observation, that from a users’ perspective, it is not about wayfinding, but thingfinding. First, you are looking for something, and then you find out where you can get it (although not necessarily from the authoritative source, but from someone else in the cloud). Another observation from Jonathan that brought a smile on my face was his reference to wayshowing, instead of wayfinding. If you are the expert putting up the signs, you are not finding the way, but showing it, right?