Open content printed travel guidebooks using OpenStreetMap

Jani Patokallio

jani@wikitravelpress.com

Overview

What's Wikitravel?

A Brief History of Mapping on Wikitravel

Integrating Wikitravel and OSM

Future plans

Website

"Wikipedia meets Lonely Planet"

Launched in July 2003

Almost 50,000 articles in 20 languages

~19,000 in English version alone

10,000+ edits/week

Webby Award for Travel in 2007

Printed guides and
Wikitravel Press

Addresses an obvious need

Internet is good, but sometimes paper is better

Current guides are 3-10 years out of date

A design goal since day one

Long, comprehensive articles > short stubs

"Can you sleep?" test for creating a page

The key: Print on demand

Book is printed after you order

Information in the guide is up-to-date

Flow betweenwebsite andbook:

1) Edit guide2) Publish guide3) Deliver guide4) Read guide5) Edit guide...

State of the Map, 2003

Virtually no usable open map data when Wikitravel was founded in 2003

OpenStreetMap?

Didn't exist

Wikipedia?

Maps vary wildly in appearance and licensing

Only rarely street-level

So we had to roll our own...

The First Map: Montreal, 2003

Mapping with DEMIS

DEMIS Web Map Server (demis.nl)

Semi-commercial software, free web demo

Generates nicely shaded maps of any spot on the planet

Output is GIF only

No street data

Minimal, often faulty city, road, rail data

License is almost-but-not-quite PD

Usable "region" maps with a little work

DEMIS:
Iriomote, Japan

Mapmaking Expedition

Standardize appearance

Listing icons

Document mapmaking process

Trace over satellite imagery

SVG format, so relatively easy to edit

Homemade: Helsinki, Finland

But nevertheless...

Intimidating barrier of entry

A number of prospective editors for WTP guides screamed and ran for the door

Time-consuming to create

More time spent drawing than editing

Painful to maintain

Bars and restaurants go bust, hotels change name

No link between guide data and map

OpenStreetMap to the rescue!

Vast treasure trove of detailed, CC-licensed map data

World map is improving continually

Web interface and tools being developed

Output can be customized by editing XML "style sheet"

How does Wikitravel fit into all this?

OSM v1:
Helsinki, Finland

Step 1:
Listings in OSM

Listings (attractions, restaurants, nightspots, hotels and whatnot) added as nodes to OSM

Verify that names are identical

either name or name:en used to match

The beauty of it:

No Wikitravel-specific tags needed for OSM

No geodata needed in Wikitravel itself

Step 2:
Export and merge

Wikitravel listings are also XML
Great
place!

Mashing the two together just requires a little XSLT magic

End result:

OSM data dump with Wikitravel-listed nodes changed to use icons and the rest removed

Dump of matched and unmatched listings

Step 3:
Generate SVG

SVG output customized for printability

Large fonts

Contrasty colors (even in grayscale)

Unnecessary stuff removed

Main file has the map and icons

Second file has an automatically generated key to the listings

Put them together and you get...

OSM v2:
Helsinki, Finland

Problems (1/2)

OSM not very friendly for adding listings

Current: Need to add "nodes", "tags" etc

Wanted: Drag-and-drop little restaurant, bar, hotel etc icons into the map

Ideal: Drag-and-drop from Wikitravel page into the map (so name etc are automatic)

Matching can be a little hit-or-miss

If two places have exactly the same name, Wikitravel can't tell them apart

Solution: Add OSM IDs to Wikitravel?

Problems (2/2)

Osmarender SVGs and Inkscape

Can edit and export, but corrupts when saved

No Recent changes

Who changed what and why?

Example: We added boundaries for Paris arrondissements, but they were removed

After lots of detective work, it turned out that boundaries should be done as relations...

Future plans

User-friendly icons into Potlatch

A slippy map server for Wikitravel

Sights, restaurants, hotels etc as layers that can be turned on and off

...

Thank you

http://wikitravelpress.com