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Open Canal Map


Amber34

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On 28/08/2017 at 01:23, reg said:

Tom

Richards posts 36 and 40 raise some very good points and also point to some suitable resources. 

Following on from them i had a quick look at openstreetmap and found a large amount of the information is available from there. How it is extracted and input I haven't looked into but certainly on the section I looked at all the canals, bridges and locks were there. May be worth a detailed look at some point.

Issue of openess I am with Richard on this in that it may be a good long or medium term aim to make the data fully open. Current problem with the crt licence is that anyone using 'your' data downstream of you may not be in compliance with the crt licence.

Other problem with the crt data is that it has a lot of inbuilt redundancy which will take some weeding out. The redundant data also leads to some of the overhead when the data is being loaded. Example of the redundancy in attached photo below. Completely meaningless info in the description field for non crt employees.

 

Map splitting

I have a table which shows the close approximation to the Nicholson guides and also the BCN network. Need to do a bit more work on the Pearson guides close compatibility break down. Can let you have what I've got on these very soon.

Screenshot_2017-08-28-01-14-50.png

Hi Reg,

I'll get the data cleaned up soonish. Been thinking about what you've been talking about separating it into areas. Wondering if it might be an idea to just split the county up by bounding boxes. We could draw a line roughly under Manchester, one underneath Birmingham etc – with some overlap so you don’t have to change map to see near points. What do you think? It would mean we can just write a little script to output anything within the bounding box of the area. It doesn’t need to correspond to Nicholson’s guides. What do you think?

 

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50 minutes ago, ronnietucker said:

Ironically the Open Canal Map loads and works fantastically well in Chrome on my Android phone, but almost kills my desktop browser, Vivaldi (based on Chrome). Very odd.

Yea - it's mainly about getting it to work on the Android app. I had the same problem using Chromium which Valvadi is based on - Try actual Google Chrome - it's a different branch of the browser - does load a lot faster on my machine.

I'll be putting a web map editor on the site some point so that will work as a faster browser map.

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On 28/08/2017 at 01:23, reg said:

Issue of openess I am with Richard on this in that it may be a good long or medium term aim to make the data fully open. Current problem with the crt licence is that anyone using 'your' data downstream of you may not be in compliance with the crt licence.

 

The CRT licence was obviously written by a lawyer who was asked to make it as vague as possible. I'm so tempted to ask CRT on Facebook if they can provide a simple and clear licence rather than something that leaves you wondering if you can use their data... We suspect that Canalplan can't use the data because we run advertising and because we'd combine the CRT data with our own data and with data from Geograph, Facebook etc.

Quote

“Commercial Purpose” includes-
a.  offering a product or service containing information or derived information for direct
monetary compensation, such as the sale of a book; or

b.  offering a product or service by a commercial body, or by any other body where the charge
is greater than cost recovery, which does not contain information or derived information from the
Data but which has used that Data, thereby obtaining indirect monetary compensation such as
provision of advice based on that Data, or charging for advertising space in a product that includes
that Data.

so probably falls foul of paragraph b... but we're not totally sure...

Edited by StephenA
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On 29/08/2017 at 14:31, toms1 said:

Hi Reg,

I'll get the data cleaned up soonish. Been thinking about what you've been talking about separating it into areas. Wondering if it might be an idea to just split the county up by bounding boxes. We could draw a line roughly under Manchester, one underneath Birmingham etc – with some overlap so you don’t have to change map to see near points. What do you think? It would mean we can just write a little script to output anything within the bounding box of the area. It doesn’t need to correspond to Nicholson’s guides. What do you think?

 

Sorry been out of internet range for some days. Sat on top of a hill at the momment. Did a long reply to this but lost the lot by accidentally touching the wrong button.

Basically if it's easy to split the way you say then I would go with this at this stage of the Dev cycle I'll let you know why I don't think it is important at this stage of the game.

For the offline version I have done some work on this and produced a lookup table of canal splits, once a proper database is in place then it will be a simple to generate any maps by adding an entry to the lookup table and running a query against the core data. This is down the line but happy to set up a model for consideration.

Posting this but before I lose it....

...Continued

Sorry will have to post layer ,rain coming in battery running out and I have to go and pick up my new pc

 

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On 8/30/2017 at 18:39, StephenA said:

.......

so probably falls foul of paragraph b... but we're not totally sure...

Firstly ive just checked your profile and would like to thank Nick and you for a fantastic resource. I appreciate the work that has been put into it, didnt realise you were canalplan man until I checked. On the point you made above personaly I dont think you fall foul as  you have both put in a tremendous amount of work for no financial reward. After 36 years I think it has been recognised as a very valuable resource to all on the canals, long may it continue. Giving you a greenie but you will have to share it with Nick.

My main intetrest in this project of Toms is the back end stuff i.e the database and the maintenance, once a core data set has been established, of the data via volunteer input. I would love to arrive at a point where a truly open set of data is available.

Currently looking at Schema and Lookup fields to hold the data in a format that could easily be converted to KML, GRX etc files.

May be asking to much but with your skill set and experience I would welcome your and Nicks  thoughts on the schema, lookup tables etc. What would you like to see from the data? Could be mutualy beneficial. Just an idea

regards and thanks again

Edited by reg
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On 31/08/2017 at 20:49, reg said:

Firstly ive just checked your profile and would like to thank Nick and you for a fantastic resource. I appreciate the work that has been put into it, didnt realise you were canalplan man until I checked. On the point you made above personaly I dont think you fall foul as  you have both put in a tremendous amount of work for no financial reward. After 36 years I think it has been recognised as a very valuable resource to all on the canals, long may it continue. Giving you a greenie but you will have to share it with Nick.

My main intetrest in this project of Toms is the back end stuff i.e the database and the maintenance, once a core data set has been established, of the data via volunteer input. I would love to arrive at a point where a truly open set of data is available.

Currently looking at Schema and Lookup fields to hold the data in a format that could easily be converted to KML, GRX etc files.

May be asking to much but with your skill set and experience I would welcome your and Nicks  thoughts on the schema, lookup tables etc. What would you like to see from the data? Could be mutualy beneficial. Just an idea

regards and thanks again

There's been a little bit of discussion on a post on the Canalplan Facebook page.. but obviously that's not the best place for it... neither is here... I'll talk to Nick and maybe open up a thread on the canalplan forum (used primarily to handle long rambling conversations about Canalplan).

 

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TOM

Sorted out how to split down into separate map areas. Could you PM me with your google maps accound id so I can invite you to look at the BETA of the first map split.

Once I have tidied it up a bit I will hand it over to you if you like. Should vastly speed up the User additions as they will only need to load the relevant map and not the hole shebang(which takes forever the first time).

How the First BETA map looks

 

ETA Ill tidy up all of the descriptions, labels, address and altitude in the BETA map POINTS, save you some work. This will not include the user contributed points so that I dont impact on your standards

 

opencanalmaps.PNG

Edited by reg
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15 hours ago, reg said:

TOM

Sorted out how to split down into separate map areas. Could you PM me with your google maps accound id so I can invite you to look at the BETA of the first map split.

Once I have tidied it up a bit I will hand it over to you if you like. Should vastly speed up the User additions as they will only need to load the relevant map and not the hole shebang(which takes forever the first time).

How the First BETA map looks

 

ETA Ill tidy up all of the descriptions, labels, address and altitude in the BETA map POINTS, save you some work. This will not include the user contributed points so that I dont impact on your standards

 

opencanalmaps.PNG

Nice one Reg! - Looking good - think I've updated the icons since this version but we can just include the new ones in the kmz zip files. Also on my list todo with icons will be to make all the turning, aqueducts and movable birdge to align by angle with the canals - I've half written a script to do it but it wasn't quite perfect yet. Presume we can get from the whole map to the part maps quite easily if I do update the core data?

Tom

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22 minutes ago, toms1 said:

Nice one Reg! - Looking good - think I've updated the icons since this version but we can just include the new ones in the kmz zip files. Also on my list todo with icons will be to make all the turning, aqueducts and movable birdge to align by angle with the canals - I've half written a script to do it but it wasn't quite perfect yet. Presume we can get from the whole map to the part maps quite easily if I do update the core data?

Tom

Yep relatively easy now I know how it's done. Only problem with beta is I'm using 5 layers in the beta, will need to flatten these into 2 layers one for the canals and one for the static points(your user data points will be on a separate layer) . Would like to keep use of 3 layers one a contingency. Leaving 7 layers for you and anyone else to play with. Will experiment with loading times versus map size. 

I'm happy to get the core crt data tidied up and Locus ready, you'll see what I mean when you access the beta. Your user contributions will be independent of the core data layers thereby giving you maximum flexibility  for expansion. All will be clear soon (I hope). Once I have tidied the core data up it will require minimum maintenance as it will be fairly static I. E locks don't change location etc. 

The core data is the CRT licence restricted data, see my next post for news on this. Your user generated data and icons etc are not subject to these restrictions and so you should be able to make them available under an open licence, might be worth taking Richards offer up on the best open data licence to use for that, just a thought. 

Edited by reg
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OPEN DATA THE CRT GIS VIEW IN SOME DETAIL. 

https://canalrivertrust.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=537fe924ce624c339b44fd6947110a20#detail

Looks good to me

If someone would like to run with following up on that I think it could be of great benefit to the community and to CRT. 

I'm a techie not a negotiator, so not best placed to follow through on this point. Looks promising though. 

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Aye - sounds good. With layers I've found that although there is supposedly a 10 layer limit in practice it doesn't work with more than 8 layers - causes random errors.

I've now got quite a lot of the locks in the user contribution layer (from non CRT waters) – these can be moved into the base layers once they are set to the correct angle.

On the data licence for user contributions I think we just want to pick the one that has most flexibly - i.e. free use with modifications for commercial / non commercial use and no need to attribute the data to any author - something like that anyway - no restriction on data.

 

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The most unrestricted licences are CC0 (https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0) or PDDL (https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/) - both are good. There's also WTFPL, which I'm rather fond of, because it expresses the appropriate contempt for all the unnecessary complexities of licensing. ;)

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21 minutes ago, Richard Fairhurst said:

The most unrestricted licences are CC0 (https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0) or PDDL (https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/) - both are good. There's also WTFPL, which I'm rather fond of, because it expresses the appropriate contempt for all the unnecessary complexities of licensing. ;)

Love it

Recently saw an open project who's readme  started. 

Updates:Completely removed the TOS as no one seemed to give a..... 

 

My kind of people. 

 

 

Edited by reg
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2 hours ago, toms1 said:

.... Presume we can get from the whole map to the part maps quite easily if I do update the core data?

Tom

On this point you will notice that I have added a canal ID to the beta records in the format AA-

for example Grand Union Leicester Line is prefixed GL-

These prefixes make it easier to split the data down and also will be of use if it ever gets to be a proper database system. Would he nice to have a prefix of this type on all records, currently they are visible but that may not be necessary to have them visible  in the future, BETA version will let us know. 

Not sure if prefix will be required on user supplied info as they will be on another layer, but if they are then maybe they can be added automatically post user submission, early days on that so well see how it pans out. 

Edited by reg
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5 hours ago, Richard Fairhurst said:

The most unrestricted licences are CC0 (https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0) or PDDL (https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/) - both are good. There's also WTFPL, which I'm rather fond of, because it expresses the appropriate contempt for all the unnecessary complexities of licensing. ;)

We're not going to touch the C&RT data until we are totally sure that canalplan's funding model doesn't contravene C&RT's rather odd licensing...

 

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  • 1 year later...
  • 1 year later...
On 08/08/2017 at 11:56, toms1 said:

Hi, I'm the author of Open Canal Map - It was build using Canal and River Trust Open Data but now you can all add places to the map - see the link below to add a palce to the map.

It's had a great response so far with over 4700 views and 57 user submitted places added to the map in just one week!

Go to http://opencanalmap.uk/ - to view the map and add local information...

 

 

hi @toms1

 

How's the redevelopment going?

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18 hours ago, divadiow said:

hi @toms1

 

How's the redevelopment going?

Getting there - here's a mock up of the new app - interface will change - trying to get my head round material design using Flutter and Dart. Got something running on the emulators now.

https://explore.opencanalmap.uk

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  • 2 years later...

Apologies for resurrecting a rather old thread, but need to update a particular place listed on Open Canal Map. I've used the email address in the footer on the website but this bounces back.

 

Are you still out there @toms1

Edited by Liam
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