Most of you have probably generated bike routes on Ride the City. But how many have contributed to the Ride the City basemap? The background image at Ride the City is provided by Cloudmade, a company that's all about services and applications that are based on Open Street Map (OSM), the volunteer effort to map the world. Open Street Map provides the data, Cloudmade makes services that help to get that data to the end user. With Cloudmade's Style Editor, developers can customize their own map style or copy other maps. Here are some of the map styles from the Style Editor:
It's great to have a good looking map, but ultimately it's the accuracy of the data that makes any map really useful. So we'd like to invite you to add your knowledge, your neighborhood data to OSM. Editing OSM data is not hard; in fact, our lead programmer developed a simple process to make it very easy. When you're on the Ride the City map, just right click any street, and you get the option to "Edit map in OSM," as seen here in the image below.
When you click "Edit map in OSM," you're instantly redirected to the Open Street Map website and taken to the exact point in the map that you just clicked on (of course you have to sign in to OSM first but once you've signed in, you're automatically brought there in the future). The OSM map looks a lot different from Ride the City (see below). In OSM, you can click on any line (their called "ways" in OSM) to see what data is associated with the line, which could be a road, a river, a boundary, etc. When a line is selected, you can add information to it if it's lacking or incorrect. For example you can: add names of streets, mark whether or not a street is one way, add a new bike lane, etc. Here's how OSM appears in the default Potlatch editor:
This all might sound a bit confusing but it's actually quite easy and fun. You just click a street in OSM, then touch a button to add data, and then put in a couple words to define the line, like name=Broadway or cycleway=lane. All you need to do is learn a couple of the terms and norms that people use in OSM to define the lines because there are accepted norms. And here is a list of those norms from OSM's Map Features. If you don't want to read through that, we put together a six minute video for a quick summary of Ride the City and to give you a little overview on how to use Open Street Map.
For anyone who enjoys maps or city planning, OSM is easy to get hooked on because it gives you an opportunity to be part of an effort to map the world and to add those places that you see every day. Plus, every time you improve the map by adding a new park or a new bike path, you improve location-based applications like Ride the City. Here's a list of other applications that use OSM and Cloudmade's Application Gallery.
In some Ride the City locations, including the cities in Australia, Iceland, Chile, and a couple cities in Canada (Vancouver and Victoria), Ride the City is based entirely on OSM, whereas in our flagship NYC the background image is based on OSM data but the point-to-point routing comes from our own concoction of other data. As we bring Ride the City to other cities using OSM, know that you can be a tremendous help by adding your own local knowledge to the map.
