Central London is already mapped to a high level of detail (not astonishing given that OSM originates from UCL!), so we decided to focus on a much neglected topic, ie wheelchair accessibility mapping. Wheelmap.org, a relatively new initiative to highlight wheelchair accessible places, made it painfully obvious that almost no accessibility mapping had been done so far in and around UCL!

Catherine Holloway, a wheelchair accessibility specialist from our department, gave a great overview of relevant attributes to map, and even brought along a couple of wheelchairs for the students to sit in! Two of the student groups experienced the difficulties when trying to move about in a wheelchair, hitting obstacles, bad dropped kerbs and rough surfaces, a valuable insight into the very specific mobility problems of London’s wheelchair users.
The mapping party was also kindly supported by members of the OSM community, ie. Gianfranco,  Derick Rethans, and Alex who shadowed groups and supported them.

The first day was taken up with data collection, and the weather god(s) were very kind to us, with atypically warm and sunny weather for this time of the year, ideal to explore the different areas around UCL’s main campus. We subdivided the area into map slices, and 4 groups went off to collect data, each group recording their progress on walkingpapers print outs. After some initial confusion over what to capture, the groups soon got to grips with the task and went their separate ways to record: if shops and building entrances have step free access and if the toilets are wheelchair accessible; where dropped kerbs are; as well as pavement quality and minimum widths.

My group did south of UCL around Tottenham Court Road, and sadly we found a whole row of shops not wheelchair accessible in Store Street (see photo above). I must say that I was shocked by the number of businesses, pubs and buildings which today are still not wheelchair accessible, just in the very small area we mapped around UCL. After a productive two hours of mapping, we reconvened at the Department, to go for a well deserved pint of beer in the Jeremy Bentham pub (an essential part of any proper mapping party!).

On day 2, the students sat down to add their collected data to OSM, using Potlatch2. Andy Allan, one of the lead developers of Potlatch2, joined us for the lab session to support the students, but also importantly to experience how first time editors of OSM are using his software. In parallel, I setup screen recording software to gather new data on first time users interactions with OSM’s editing tools, in this case Potlatch2, in continuation of earlier work done in usability analysis, reported here before. Apart from some of the previously discussed problems in the usability of Potlatch2, of which Andy took keen notice and I am sure he will report back on as well, the students got on well with the editing. Soon the first changesets appeared on OSM, and the first tagged shops were updated as well on wheelmap.org. Some students even managed to finish early, taking the opportunity to edit and add information around their homes.

The results of the mapping party can be seen in the changesets generated by the students, as well as the numerous classified shops and amenities along Tottenham Court Road and its sidestreets, visible in wheelmap.org, where before there was just a sea of grey unclassified Points of Interest.

You can see the rest of the pictures in my Flickr feed!

This small research project from us then represents the first of an ongoing effort to better embed and implement a usability engineering culture in this great project!

We just finished our data collection exercise, which included eye tracking and screen recording ten OSM novices through their first experience registering, adding and editing information to OSM. A OSM test server enabled participants to complete registration, search for a specific scenario area, add and edit 11 features using Potlatch2, while being tracked and observed by a researcher. Although we will present comprehensive results from this study at the conference and the proceedings, I want to give just a quick glimpse into some of the very basic issues we have uncovered so far.

Where is the OSM Search?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o3ZiosKtnA

We discovered that users have difficulty locating the Search on openstreetmap.org. This has been highlighted before. This video shows the gaze plot of one participant looking for the OSM search. The participant first tries to find the search functionality at the top of the page, scanning from left to right and back in vain. Only after having spent 6 seconds looking at the top, the participant starts to scan and read down the left-hand side of the page, before stumbling over the search at the bottom of the page.

Questions arise over the natural way in which users scan a webpage,and preconceptions about where they would expect a search functionality to appear. According to Nielsen, user reading behaviour of websites exhibits a dominant reading pattern which looks somewhat like an F, with two horizontal movements across the top and middle of a given page, before moving on to a vertical movement scanning the left content section. This pattern has been recognized and adopted by many prominent websites, creating in turn preconceptions in users as to where to expect prominent content/functionalities. Google for example consistently locates their search box on the top-left to middle of a given website.

This video is only an example of the consistent behaviour we have observed of participants exposing the F pattern when looking for Search. As the OSM website now stands, the Search functionality (which works well and is helpful once found!) is not in a clear and quickly visible area of the website, but “hidden” in a “drill-down” area last seen by the user.

As I said, lots more stuff to come out of this study, watch this space if you can’t make it to SOTM-EU!

First day back in the office after an exhausting weekend attending the WhereCampEU unconference here in London.  The conference was really well organised, with great venues and food, and all that at zero cost thanks to very generous sponsors and a great bunch of volunteers! Also thanks for the free beer at Smithy’s sponsored by Axon Active, I thoroughly enjoyed the pub evening.

Attendants came from over 13 different countries, with public and private sector attendants, web2.0 startups, core OpenStreetMap people and a strong presence of academics, specifically UCL!

Slowly, people seem to be uploading their presentations to the wiki, allowing a more complete view of the content presented. Altough in retrospect, I might have made some bad decisions regarding which sessions to attend, my conference highlights included definitely the Skobbler presentation, the Zen of Map Quality , and Steven Feldman’s business model workshops. On the Saturday afternoon, Bob Barr passionate analysis of the current and future state of the Ordnance Survey made for a great closure to the conference. I didn’t make it to the post conference drinks on Saturday.

Overall, I would have wished for less Openstreetmap presentations, at times it felt like a dress rehearsal for the SOTM2010 !!! But, I will definitely return to WhereCampEU 2011, as it is a great opportunity to network with a wide array of relevant players in the geoweb industry and OSM community.

The invitation is also available in PDF format with a detailed agenda

The Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, University College London, will be hosting an Introduction to Geographical Information Systems and Cartography Course on the 18^th and 19^th of February 2010. This course is aimed at novice or potential GIS Users interested in key concepts of geographical data capture, storage and analysis. After course completion participants will be able to generate, manipulate and analyse geographic information confidently and create high-quality cartographic outputs.

The course is organised into modules containing comprehensive overviews of fundamental topics relating to Geographical Information Systems, databases and cartography, alongside hands-on tutorials teaching participants the most important functionalities of GIS.

The course will introduce users to and use Open Street Map (OSM) data and Manifold GIS software. Participants will be tutored by leading GIS lecturers and researchers with extensive GIS expertise in a commercial and academic context.

Participants will receive a comprehensive training manual containing all of the course content such as presentation slides, tutorial worksheets, project files and datasets used. This training manual will act as a valuable reference guide after the course is completed.

Each participant can expect:

• Experienced academic tutors
• A workstation preloaded with all software and data for the tutorials
• State-of-the-art air-conditioned computer room
• Comprehensive course documentation folder
• Course Certificate from UCL on completion
• Lunch and refreshments provided

The course fee is £650 (incl. VAT) per participant. Please note that we have arranged a discount for organisations sending two or more participants. The course will be held on UCL’s main campus in Bloomsbury, Central London.

For booking and any further enquiries, please email Patrick Weber at p.weber@ucl.ac.uk or you can phone +44 (0)20 7679 2745 .

This is a significant step for map makers, as the OSM tiles offer a level of freedom in terms of usage license. Altough a acknowledgement of the OSM license is needed in any mapping products which contain any OSM data, this is a simple requirement when compared with the grey and murky licensing requirements for Google, Microsoft Virtual Earth and Yahoo tiles.

It remains to be seen with the imminent update to 9.0, if Manifold.net are going to support OSM XML as a Import/Export format. Altough there are existing scripts to enable the import of OSM XML data, these scripts have issues and don’t scale efficiently to bulk downloads. A native solution hopefully would enable bulk imports and the ability to save (or even upload directly to OSM) to OSM XML for update of OSM.

PS: AFAIK planet.osm, representing a database dump in XML form of the whole OSM dataset, is one of the largest publicily available vector datasets out there (over 364 million elements). Import and display of such a huge dataset could be a great benchmark test for upcoming versions of Manifold!