Community Map Builder

Empowering communities to build and share geographic maps..

About

The Vision

"Show me the back streets of Sydney"

Bicycle Riders in Sydney have a problem. The streets are narrow, congested and hilly. There are plenty of back streets ideal for cycling, but working out which streets connect and how to avoid the big hills is a black art. Secret bike routes which include back alleys, drainage lines, and blocked off streets are traded in dingy pubs between cyclists. While this is fun it is also elitist and many people never consider riding because they don't realise it is possible to cross the city safely on a bicycle.

What Sydney cyclists need is a map of Sydney bike routes. Some organisations have tried to produce these maps, but they have all had their limitations.

An outside contractor is employed to develop the maps
The maps are generally targeted at one level of bicycle use (either recreational, commuter, experienced, ammeter, someone scared of traffic or not).
The maps take so long to compile, they are out of date by the time they are in print, and do not get updated again for another 10 years or so.
It is difficult and expensive to survey the public, and consequently only a few ideas are added to the map and many valuable routes are missed.

How it works

The Community Map Builder provides a web page with a city map to a cyclist. The cyclist can then enter their favourite bike route on top of the map. Click, click, click, ... Submit. The bike route is collected from the web page and sent to a bike map database. After hundreds of cyclists enter their favourite bike routes, a comprehensive bike map of Sydney is built, updated and maintained and given back to the cycling community.

This use case has been for my pet subject of bike paths, but it is equally applicable for anyone community wanting to collect geographic information from a lot of people.

Mixing large and small communities

One beautiful thing about the web is that it has empowered small individuals to publish along-side large news corporations, allowing users to get both mainstream news and information alongside tailored specific information that only a few people in the world are interested in.

The Community Map Builder aims to take this one step further by empowering small communities to collect geographic data and publish it mixed with maps built for large scale use.

For instance, a small mother's group could build a map of the children's parks in their local area. They can then view the parks on top of a detailed streets basemap produced by the national mapping agency, as well as a weather map produced by the Burea of Meteorology.

This will be achieved by ensuring each component within the Community Map Builder is built to Open GIS Standards, allowing data and components to be mixed and matched.

Open Source

The Community Map Builder is something we would like to give to the global community - so we are developing it as open source code, and aiming to stitch in open source components where available.

I strongly suggest that maps built with the Community Map Builder are given away for free in a similar manner. It will encourage users to give you their geographic knowledge if they know you are not going to be profiteering from it as well as being good for humankind as a whole. For a list of potential licences, check out: http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Open_Source/Open_Content/Licenses/.

Development Env

Applet Map Viewer

mapserv
Web Map Server & Viewer

FreeFS
Web Feature Server

PostGIS
GIS Database