Data Sharing (GoogleEarth for Sailors)

[ActiveCaptain]

Originally Posted by manimaul

OK, I think it's time to do this ... create our own creative commons wiki cruising guide / map.

Excellent! Every time someone decides to do this seriously, it ends up making our data more valuable. So please, go ahead. My honest suggestions would be to study carefully the 6 or so open source collections that exist today and figure out why they failed or are failing. What you'll find is that it takes an unbelievable amount of time to accumulate quality data. And it's all about quality. Anyone can generate thousands of point to clutter up the screen.

I'd also carefully watch the announcements coming out of the boat show">Miami Boat Show. There is a lot happening in this POI world with building relationships and sharing of this data that would make another collection just, well, another failed collection. The Miami Boat Show starts a week from Thursday.

The sad thing, I think, is that the huge amount of time you'll waste on this will take away from building openCpn into a good chart display engine. There is so much work to be done there that would have lasting value across many different uses. I mean, if the code were in a state today that could really compete against even the most basic of commercial apps, it could be argued that there was time to spread out. Doing this point-of-interest project now just seems like it's a recipe for spreading too thin on everything.

[idpnd]

Originally Posted by manimaul

I'm basing the wiki-map on openstreetmap, openlayers and mapnik
technologies. The map can (will) support the following features:

Anchorages, Marinas, Services (reviews, notes, pictures upload, video upload)
Private layer data such as routes, photos and marks upload and
download. (gpx, kml import and export)
Map layers (google {sat photo/street/etc}, openstreetmap, raster and
vector chart tiles, etc etc)

The most important bit would be an easy way of downloading, displaying and uploading (contributing back) to the database, as per hackoon's spec.

The services you describe really already exist, as activecaptain correctly remarks, in that there are any number of wiki resources with a bit of content, some of which are georeferenced and can be displayed as a google earth overlay. The creative commons content from those databases could be scraped/adopted for this database.

Perhaps this could be achieved through an extension of the GPX descriptors and data sets consisting of gpx files as suggested above. The uploading/downloading of the data from a central tool could be handled by a versioning system (CVS type) protocol.

[sinbad7]

Will...

100% with you there. OpenSeaMap is the way to go. It is also in the development stage and can be influenced by inovating ideas.

NONI MapViewer will also shortly become OpenSeaMap compatible for downloads and auto calibration of large map areas. It is already compatible with OpenStreetMap,
Google,Yahoo and Virtual Earth. It creates a tif map of the area plus a .map calibration file for OziExplorer charts,and the .map calibrations can be directly used
to create a CHARTCAL.DIR FILE.

I've enhanced the following .kap chart of the English Channel and added a few experimental sea markers: 4shared.com - online file sharing and storage - download EnglishChannel-m.kap

I look forward to see the new developments in this field but also feel it makes sense to make use of existing facilities which has already passed the development stage rather than re-inventing the wheel. More time should be spent developing and securing the navigation side of OpenCPN rather than digressing too much into other less important areas.

[sinbad7]

I would also suggest the addition of an interactive 'popular links' option in the right-click menu where the users could enter and save links which are meaningful in HIS area. GRIB collection,Marinas, Weather and so on...

[cagney]

OK, I think it's time to do this ... create our own creative commons wiki cruising guide / map.

In this spirit .... I had this idea popping up, to make OpenCPN the best planning tool for passage-making, ... if we want to!

With the end of the quickscat era COGOW has been updated and is now based on all qscat observations during 2000 - 2009. Some of these data could be imported locally and displayed in OpenCPN.
The "infrastructure" is not there yet, but as an experiment I converted a gif to a transparent xpm and made a "marker" of it.

Imagine OpenCPN version 1.4.0.... Near 7.25N 78.25 E in early January... you right click and from the menu choose "COGOW" and this is what you see

Thomas

[Psyches]

Originally Posted by ActiveCaptain

My honest suggestions would be to study carefully the 6 or so open source collections that exist today and figure out why they failed or are failing. What you'll find is that it takes an unbelievable amount of time to accumulate quality data. And it's all about quality.

Just curious...which 6 or so are you thinking of? I agree quality is vital. I'm a member of ActiveCaptain, find it valuable, like the incentives for contribution, but I'd be interested to compare it with the others you're thinking of.

I'd also carefully watch the announcements coming out of the Miami Boat Show. There is a lot happening in this POI world with building relationships and sharing of this data that would make another collection just, well, another failed collection.

I guess you'll highlight these to the AC members after the show...looking forward to seeing the announcements.

The sad thing, I think, is that the huge amount of time you'll waste on this will take away from building openCpn into a good chart display engine. There is so much work to be done there that would have lasting value across many different uses. I mean, if the code were in a state today that could really compete against even the most basic of commercial apps, it could be argued that there was time to spread out. Doing this point-of-interest project now just seems like it's a recipe for spreading too thin on everything.

This is actually not true; there aren't that many working directly on the app itself, and other folks time (wasted or not) don't take away from app progress. We have many great folks in the forum contributing in various important ways today, without working on the app code. Those that are working on the app won't be working on this. It would be great to have a bigger team on the app, but we're not there today. And this isn't the only project in history like that.

Mark

[sinbad7]

Here's another useful .kap of the New York rivers from Hastings on Hudson to Verrazano Narrows bridge and East to Locust Point at the beginning of Long Island Sound.
Download here:4shared.com - online file sharing and storage - download NewYorkRivers.kap

[idpnd]

Bluemapia Home Page | Web & Mobile Social Mapping for Boaters

Another creative commons licensed POI database..

[scotte]

Originally Posted by idpnd

Bluemapia Home Page | Web & Mobile Social Mapping for Boaters

Another creative commons licensed POI database..

This is great, thanks!

[Psyches]

Originally Posted by idpnd

Bluemapia Home Page | Web & Mobile Social Mapping for Boaters

Another creative commons licensed POI database..

Thanks idpnd - I'd forgotten about this one. Pretty cool, but I don't think it's nearly as useful as ActiveCaptain. Take a look at pretty much any marina here (at least near where I sail in SF bay) vs AC, and you'll see what I mean. AC includes captain reviews, important marina info, etc, all in a strictly organized form.

scotte, it looks like we may be in the same marina by your last position report

Mark

[ActiveCaptain]

Bluemapia has an iPhone app too.

For your nice complements, I'll point you to another: Bloosee although I'm not sure of their open source status. In that case, check out captainwiki which is open and has one of the better amounts of content.

[sredna]

I can't see bluemapia being usefull for importing locations to a navigation program, the type of data is not very relevant.

Personally, I think the activecaptain site is very nice, though I dislike them taking ownership of user contributed data. But on the other hand, the quality of data is a very good argument, I have not seen stuff like marina features in any of the free databases yet.

The idea of having a opencpn user location database is nice, we could tailor it very much to our needs. On the other hand, we would limit the possible contributors very much, so I'd much rather we used existing databases.

I didn't yet look at the data provided, but the free databases commonly use a system with an API key, which allows you to query the database and get XML data in return, in various formats.

Does ActiveCaptain provide a similar feature?

[antonm]

Originally Posted by idpnd

The Openseamap gurus would also concur I'm sure .

Found mention of OpenSeaMap in this thread several time, but did not get an idea what's wrong with it? Why not just use it?

It uses the same database as OpenStreetMap, actually it is OpenStreetMap. Just a different browser is used to view it like for example done on OpenCycleMap. Another browser or whatever tool can be created if needed that will grab data from existing API. Even no restrictions on tags, just some conventions that better to observe to make sure that everybody does it in the same way.

It is not about just reusing the infrastructure and tools, but the licensing stuff too. There is OpenStreetMap Foundation behind it that cares about data to be open.

Any objections?

[idpnd]

Captainwiki has tons of content, impressed! Unfortunately it's not geotagged and cannot be overlaid on google earth as of yet?

Skipperguide is actually already merged into openseamap, integration is by link to the wiki (see screenshot below).

I think the way to get this going on a grand scale is to make it more convenient and accessible. The interface on all those google map driven databases is horribly slow, and even the wikis take dedicated effort to open and edit.

The way to get this going would be
- regional data opening within navigation software, even if offline (prev downloaded)
- prior content is visible, notes can be added to dataset on the fly
- notes / comments are uploaded automatically when system comes online

That would simply make it the most convenient way for the skipper to make notes for him/herself (whilst simultaneously sharing them).

[Netsurfer]

I'm of the opinion that it is likely the same as with search engines for the web 12 to 15 years ago. There were at least a dozen of them, but none got it all. So users had a look at 3 or 4 of their favorit one's.

Maybe one day in the future one this projects reach the same status as Google today - maybe not, who knows.

Many of the (modern) marinas/ harbours have their own website nowadays. And I'll find it already very helpful, if there were this information (or even better a link) as overlay in the map.

And for gathering as much information as possible (all alone from the OCPN users) there should be some kind of OCPN-Server from/to which one can up-/download and update this information.
As idpnd already mentioned there should also be a possibility to gather information while you are offline and upload them next time you are online.

Additionally you can think about further (detailed) information, like a simple rating (1-5 stars) or whole user reviews.

Just my 2 cents ...