Maps: can we help ourselves?

It's a good question. Maps and navigation software aren't the most expensive things on earth, yet it's still unclear to me why should one pay to obtain what in principle ought to be absolutely public information. There also is a far more worrying reason: since there is no other way to prove that you have been copying, commercial chart publishers DO insert false information in what they publish (see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Copyright_Easter_Eggs). If you are not afraid of loading a 670kb scanned article you can also read this.

Now, I'm 200% positive they tried hard to find harmless fake information, not for the love of us, but rather for fear of legal action, yet... what if they underestimated the implications of a wrong datum? Do we want to be first to find it out at our own cost and risk? Obviously no.

I can hear a perplexed mumbling :) Yes, now I'm going to say that we can have this for free if we make it ourselves. And I DO know that things in life aren't perfect, so once we do collect data ourselves there are going to be mistakes anyway. Yet isn't it what we are doing almost constantly on the mailing lists? Aren't we exchanging data about navigability, bridges' height and draft, currents? If we aren't ready to believe to each other, then what's the point in being here in the first place?

There is a more understandable objection, in the form of «I'm ready to believe to what a fellow DBA member says, not to what a possibly ill-minded teenager has put in the system». This is fair. We do know members of the club, anonym contributors are a question mark. Yet, is the man who made the fake streets on the maps more known than an anonymous contributor? No, and you even pay to buy his lies.

An even more understandable brake in the process is that it is «complicated». Welll this is where I have the biggest surprise for you: it is not. All you have to do is logging you GPS onto your computer and send me the resulting file (if you add the name of the canal I'll be very grateful). You do not need to spend money to do this, as there are two freeware softwares you can use:

• http://www.visualgps.net/VisualGPSce/
• http://www.outdoor-gps.de/odgps/ (this also has a guide in german)

Also: people do map entire towns by taking a GPS on a bicycle. So you can map that lovely small village in minutes and (most important) it takes a second to map the mooring place you chose, the marina you found, the chandlery, etc.

The result will be inserted here: http://openstreetmap.org/ and will become available to everybody. Contact me directly from my user form if you want to help, everybody is welcome, including those who do not sail barges and simply happen to know where a lock-gate or a bridge is, and can use a GPS to locate it.

Important: you can use the software either from a PDA or from a regular PC (notebook, etc). If you use a PC you should first download a free activesync software from here (for win XP SP2), while if you are on Vista you should not need any add-ons. Beware! The page will offer you two links, both are free, but the top (and much more evident) link will also subscribe you to a mailing list, which is probably not what you want.

MAC users: probably need to read this, but be aware that I do not have a Mac and cannot check whether it works or not.