Sunday 29 August 2010

Quiet time filled with toads

I've not been out gathering new OSM data very much in the past few weeks. I have been running through the OS Locator list of street names in Hull. Following it up on the ground means I have found streets I had missed first time around and ones that have been built since I last visited. All of this improves the quality of the map. I've been doing the same sort of thing in the villages and towns around Hull, but the East Riding of Yorkshire still has a large amount to do to get to the same level of completeness.

I have been experimenting with different ways to place markers on a slippy map. This was prompted by trying to display the locations of some statues of toads placed in and around Hull as part of the celebrations remembering the poet Philip Larkin who died 25 years ago. You can see one example of my efforts here.

I decided to document the process. I'm learning a lot about OpenLayers and that, as you might expect, there are various ways to do it. I am considering how to build a prompted process that helps people create a map on a web site with markers on it and how to help them make the markers respond to actions. It is interesting and in due course, if I get anywhere, I'll post more here. Someone might like to see the documentation at least but some kind of prompt-and-use system could be useful.

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