[OSGeo-Discuss] Geodata & Education

[Jo Walsh]

dear Malcolm, sorry i didn't reply to this sooner,

On Fri, Mar 24, 2006 at 09:35:40PM +0000, M.Blackmore wrote:
> Excuse me if I am asking stupid questions - I am an utter newbie to the
> cartographic world so don't know zilch ... so assume nothing can be
> assumed when educating me, if you see what I mean! 
> 
> So, if in the UK we could find an old 2 inch/mile or larger Ordnance map
> from the 1920s or 30s or 40s or whenever they are out of copyright, one
> could get some poor sod in India (or wherever currency exchange
> craziness makes it cheap to first world economies) to digitise it and
> then it would be yours to update as appropriate?

Last year, Schuyler in particular did a lot of collaboration work with
the Mumbai Free Map project initiated by Shekhar Krishnan of
http://www.crit.org.in/ , who do a lot of intense land-use research
and advocacy work in Mumbai. (Shekhar is at MIT now, doing GIS/Social
theory of technology and urbanism work).

They built a lot of http://mumbai.freemap.in/ by scanning local
development plans and digitising them in AutoCAD. Schuyler spent a
couple of days writing utils on top of GDAL/OGR to georeference and 
warp the vectors that were produced by the CRIT team in DCW form, perhaps 
he can tell more of the story about that. I had some promising results
attempting to digitise old Brooklyn public transport maps with QGIS'
vector drawing mode, which was then still very new, last year:
http://mappinghacks.com/2005/08/16/the-lost-light-rail-of-brooklyn/

We did talk to CRIT about the prospect of getting their associates to
help work on digitising the last out-of-copyright set of Ordnance Survey 
UK maps, which Richard Fairhurst put so much time into running around
second-hand map shops and investment into scanning of, and which maybe
you have in mind already as I think you know one another from the
Oxford geek scene: http://systemed.net/blog/entry041216225441.html

http://mumbai.freemap.in/ is built on Mapserver/PostGIS and i think is
using chameleon as a client at the moment. It lives on a system which
we bought last year, thinking about offering a hosted service to open 
mapping projects, but haven't done much with outreach for.
I forwarded your mail to the freemap list, perhaps it might spark some 
interest there, http://lists.crit.org.in/mailman/listinfo/freemap


jo