Last week Stephan released the neat “Where Did You Edit?” webpage. A world map indicates where in the world you have been editing OpenStreetMap (OSM) nodes. Unfortunately it is based on a full history OSM planet dump which is nearly two months old. Also, the map does not include any tools to zoom into or drag the map. However, Stephan mentioned that he is working on these functions. Keep up the good work, Stephan!

Based on my OSM changeset table of “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap ?” I created a slightly different webpage and used a different approach. I used the weekly OSM changeset files and I presented the results in an OpenStreetMap including zoom and drag functions. Your contributions are indicated by a “Heat-Map-Overlay”. For this overlay I am using Bjoern’s OpenLayers addon. For better performance I generalized the total changesets of each OSM contributor. This means that it is possible that not every little contribution from a member is taken into account and displayed in the map. Anyway, I think the results are quite impressive, aren’t they?

Most of you might already know that the OpenStreetMap project will celebrate its 7th Anniversary this month. Several events will take place on Saturday, 20 August 2011 at different locations around the world! You can read more about it here.

A small gift that I would like to contribute is a website which allows you to get some information about your “OSM-Age“. The functionality is similar to “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap ?“. Type in your or any other OSM username and your or the corresponding user’s OSM-Birthday will be displayed. To be more specific the website will show your OSM-Age and your rank within the OSM contributors list. Remember: Not every OSM member contributed to OSM (cf. „Nominal Members“ of OSM). So it is possible that your rank is better than you might have expected. The date of a user’s birthday was collected from each users OSM User Wiki page (“Mapper since: …”).

The following image shows an example search result:

One of the many bottle necks of today’s web services are network latency and bandwidth. While I was working on a research paper, I recognized that G**gle encodes some information when you calculate a route on G**gle Maps. This process reduces, besides the gzip compression, the response from the server. This means that this is a speed improvement for the server client communication besides the zoom-level-generalization. You can read more about the “Encoded Polyline Algorithm Format” and how it works here.

We integrated this nice feature into the code of the Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) project. The following table shows a few results for some sample routes comparing the old and the new file sizes (@ zoomlevel 18):

And if you are not a numbers person, let us put this in perspective: The fast routes just got faster! And that’s not all. As a second new feature the web frontend of the OSRM has shortlinks for the calculated route now. You can find the link of your route at the route summary. Try it out here: http://map.project-osrm.org/

During my Easter holidays I created a web-fronted for Dennis Luxen’s Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM Project). The OSRM project (http://project-osrm.org/) is in my opinion probably the fastest Open Source software which is using data from the OpenStreetMap project. “In contrast to most routing servers OSRM does not use an A* variant to compute shortest path, but Contraction Hierarchies.” You can read a little bit more about Contraction Hierarchies in Wikipedia.

The website that I created contains in its first version an address-search (geocoding) and of course routeplanning. For the geocoding I integrated the Nominatim search from OpenStreetMap. You can find a How-To on the MapQuest-site. Unfortunately the OSRM routing service covers only most parts of Europe for now. The current version of my web-fronted can be found here: http://map.project-osrm.org

Nearly three months ago I saw a tweet by mapperz (here). The tweet introduced http://www.openheatmap.com (OHM) : “Turn your spreadsheet into a map” . A very interesting tool. Unfortunately I completely forgot about it in the past weeks until last night. I was looking for an easy method to present some data on a map.

Using OHM is really simple. Upload your CSV file, which suits a certain format, and your data is more or less presented on an OpenStreetMap basemap 🙂

In my case, I used the TMC data of Germany for one week (since 2010-09-12) to present it on a map. For each intersection I counted the number of traffic messages for that specific week. The red areas in the map represent those intersections with a high concentration of messages. My result-OHM-map can be found here: http://www.openheatmap.com/view.html?map=OverestimatedOdessasShevat

The visualization of the CSV file looks pretty cool, doesn’t it? Especially the Berlin area shows a very nice representation of TMC messages.

Since last week there is a website available, which is able to display how you contributed to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project: http://hdyc.neis-one.org

Today, I made some small updates. The picture below shows the changes in the website. First (1) I imported the new planet data (Planet Dump 09/15/2010) that shows you on which OSM objects you are the most recent modifier. *NEW* is that the timestamp of your first contribution to OSM is displayed (see (2)!), further a link to your first OSM Node is attached (3).

How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap ?

So: “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?” Use your UserLink and share it with other OSM members (3) … 🙂