Honk! OpenStreetMap: Visualizing spatial data

Going into our third year of publication, World Streets thus far offers to our readers close to one thousand easily retrievable original articles and twice as many illustrative graphics on a broad range of tools, measures and topics that relate in some useful way to the up-hill push to sustainable transport policy and practice in and around cities, worldwide. But until now we have not published a single article on OpenStreetMap. This is a significant oversight of an important tool which we would now like to remedy.

To get moving on this, we are calling for volunteers to help us write one, most probably a fair number of articles which will introduce and explain this flow of collaborative knowledge building when it comes to visualizing and sharing spatial data. Then once we get the concept and tools properly introduced, we would like to help our readers have a good look at one or two examples which will give them a feel not only for what a good OSM looks like, but also some ideas as to how these tools can be put to work by volunteers in their city.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. For a quick introduction in case you are not in the loop on this, WP is not a bad starting place at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap.

More to follow and if you want to lend a hand, it will be great to hear from you.

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