CloudMade’s Andy Allan wins Cartography Award
Great news from the British Cartographic Society, who have awarded CloudMade Tech Lead, Andy Allan an award for his work on the OpenCycleMap. OpenCycleMap.org was awarded a Commended Award in the Avenza Eelectronic Mapping category of the British Cartographic Society’s annual awards which were held in the UK last week.
OpenCycleMap.org is a specialist map created for cyclists. It uses data from OpenStreetMap.org to highlight cyclepaths, bike parks, cycle shops and other features that are relevant to cyclists
Unfortunately Andy couldn’t make it to the awards ceremony to pick up his prize as he was en-route from Aberdeen, having represented OpenCycleMap and CloudMade at the Society of Cartographers Summer School. The award was collected by long-term cartographer, Steve Chilton, who helped Andy put together the application for the award. Speaking on the OpenStreetMap mailing list, Steve wrote:
[Andy and I] were in a category against some heavyweight commercial entries, as you may see when the full results are available. This is fantastic recognition from peer cartographers of the excellence of this particular use of OSM data. So, congratulations to Andy, and all others who have had input to this particular development.
OpenCycleMap’s award is testimony not only to the hard work of Andy, but also to the dedication of the 61,000 OpenStreetMap volunteers who collected the data that allows such a unique cartographic achievement as OpenCycleMap, as well as the work of Steve Chilton, who lead the creation of the OSM cartographic style that the cycle map is based on. Because OpenStreetMap lets people get access to underlying vector data it is possible to create custom mapping sites like OpenCycleMap.org.
Andy will be at FOSS4G 2008 in Cape Town at the end of September, so if you are heading to South Africa for the event make sure you drop Andy a line.
Note: CloudMade are pleased to be sponsoring Andy’s work on the cycle map by providing web hosting and tile serving for the project. If you go to OpenCycleMap.org and start to dig into Andy’s code, you’ll see that tile requests are being made to *.andy.sandbox.cloudmade.com. Sandboxes are testing grounds for personal development projects of people at CloudMade and are not our production servers. We don’t make any promises about uptime, speed or reliability or Sandbox services, but if you want to see the cool stuff first, its the place to look.
September 8th, 2008 - Posted by Nick Black in Uncategorized | |
on September 9th, 2008 at 12:10 am
Congratulations Andy! After all the months of people saying “Great map… but by the way could you change such and such?”, must be nice to get an award.
on September 13th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Love your site it is very informative am going to research the other posts to see what else I can learn, cheers! and keep up the great work!
on October 9th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Great work.
Will the cyclemap for the different countries be available on your download pages? including contour lines and hillshading?
on October 9th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
@lunken - At the moment the downloads page only holds vector data, so we wouldn’t put the cyclemap on it. We may by integrating hillshading and contours into our main tile sets in the future though, so watch this space.
on October 9th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Ah, the cyclemap in .img format was what I was thinking of. I guess hillshading isn’t vector but the contour lines are. So if shading excluded would be a possibility it would be great.
cheers and thank you for a great site.
on October 9th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
@lunken - We’ve thought a bit about CycleMap IMGs - Andy hosts come on his personal site. The main purpose of downloads.cloudmade.com is to support OSM though, so cyclemap IMGs would be a bit off course.
Vector contours are a possibility though - I’ll see if we can add it to the roadmap, but I can’t promise anything in terms of priorities. We’re working on some other GPS formats at the moment…
on November 27th, 2008 at 8:18 am
[...] OSM data and renders it slightly differently, giving emphasis to features relevant to cyclists. OCM was recently commended by the British Cartographic Society and is an example of the technical innovation that free access to the underlying geographic data [...]
on November 30th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
[...] OSM data and renders it slightly differently, giving emphasis to features relevant to cyclists. OCM was recently commended by the British Cartographic Society and is an example of the technical innovation that free access to the underlying geographic data [...]
on December 1st, 2008 at 10:35 am
[...] de manera levemente diferente, dando enfasis a caracteristicas relevantes para los ciclistas. OCM fue premiado recientemente por la British Cartographic Society y es un ejemplo de la innovación tecnica que el acceso libre a los datos geograficos subyacentes [...]