1. Open content printed travel
guidebooks using OpenStreetMap
Jani Patokallio
jani@wikitravelpress.com

2. Overview
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What's Wikitravel?
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A Brief History of Mapping on Wikitravel
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Integrating Wikitravel and OSM
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Future plans

3. Website
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"Wikipedia meets Lonely Planet"
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Launched in July 2003
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Almost 50,000 articles in 20 languages
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~19,000 in English version alone
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10,000+ edits/week
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Webby Award for Travel in 2007

4. Printed guides and
Wikitravel Press
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Addresses an obvious need
–
–
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Internet is good, but sometimes paper is
better
Current guides are 3-10 years out of date
A design goal since day one
–
–
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Long, comprehensive articles > short stubs
"Can you sleep?" test for creating a page
The key: Print on demand
–
Book is printed after you order
–
Information in the guide is up-to-date

5. Flow between
website and
book:
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
Edit guide
Publish guide
Deliver guide
Read guide
Edit guide...

6. State of the Map,
2003
●
●
Virtually no usable open map data
when Wikitravel was founded in 2003
OpenStreetMap?
–
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Didn't exist
Wikipedia?
–
–
●
Maps vary wildly in appearance and
licensing
Only rarely street-level
So we had to roll our own...

7. The First Map:
Montreal, 2003

8. Mapping with DEMIS
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DEMIS Web Map Server (demis.nl)
–
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Semi-commercial software, free web demo
Generates nicely shaded maps of any
spot on the planet
–
Output is GIF only
–
No street data
–
Minimal, often faulty city, road, rail data
●
License is almost-but-not-quite PD
●
Usable "region" maps with a little work

9. DEMIS:
Iriomote, Japan

10. Mapmaking
Expedition
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Standardize appearance
–
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Listing icons
Document mapmaking process
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Trace over satellite imagery
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SVG format, so relatively easy to edit

11. Homemade:
Helsinki, Finland

12. But nevertheless...
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Intimidating barrier of entry
–
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Time-consuming to create
–
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A number of prospective editors for WTP
guides screamed and ran for the door
More time spent drawing than editing
Painful to maintain
–
Bars and restaurants go bust, hotels
change name
–
No link between guide data and map

13. OpenStreetMap to
the rescue!
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●
●
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Vast treasure trove of detailed, CClicensed map data
World map is improving continually
Web interface and tools being
developed
Output can be customized by editing
XML "style sheet"
How does Wikitravel fit into all this?

14. OSM v1:
Helsinki, Finland

15. Step 1:
Listings in OSM
●
●
Listings (attractions, restaurants,
nightspots, hotels and whatnot) added
as nodes to OSM
Verify that names are identical
–
●
either name or name:en used to match
The beauty of it:
–
No Wikitravel-specific tags needed for OSM
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No geodata needed in Wikitravel itself

16. Step 2:
Export and merge
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Wikitravel listings are also XML
<see name=”Foo” address=”8 Bar St”>Great
place!</see>
●
●
Mashing the two together just requires
a little XSLT magic
End result:
–
OSM data dump with Wikitravel-listed
nodes changed to use icons and the rest
removed
–
Dump of matched and unmatched listings

17. Step 3:
Generate SVG
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SVG output customized for printability
–
–
●
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Contrasty colors (even in grayscale)
–
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Large fonts
Unnecessary stuff removed
Main file has the map and icons
Second file has an automatically
generated key to the listings
Put them together and you get...

18. OSM v2:
Helsinki, Finland

19. Problems (1/2)
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OSM not very friendly for adding listings
–
–
Wanted: Drag-and-drop little restaurant, bar,
hotel etc icons into the map
–
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Current: Need to add "nodes", "tags" etc
Ideal: Drag-and-drop from Wikitravel page
into the map (so name etc are automatic)
Matching can be a little hit-or-miss
–
If two places have exactly the same name,
Wikitravel can't tell them apart
–
Solution: Add OSM IDs to Wikitravel?

20. Problems (2/2)
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Osmarender SVGs and Inkscape
–
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Can edit and export, but corrupts when
saved
No “Recent changes”
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Who changed what and why?
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Example: We added boundaries for Paris
arrondissements, but they were removed
–
After lots of detective work, it turned out
that boundaries should be done as
relations...

21. Future plans
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User-friendly icons into Potlatch
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A slippy map server for Wikitravel
–
●
...
Sights, restaurants, hotels etc as layers
that can be turned on and off

22. Thank you
http://wikitravelpress.com