Showing posts with label maps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label maps. Show all posts

Thursday, March 14, 2013

GPS, Mapping and picture taking

This news reminded me of how absurd it can sometimes be when doing mapping work. I was a couple of years back in Limnos, Greece on a two week holiday.

Mmm, good food


As I've been an OpenStreetMapper since about 2006 I of course wanted to check out the if it had been mapped or not. Only some very rough main roads had been drawn there. This was just a bit after OSM got the nice Yahoo/Bing aerial photos and luckily for me there where quite good aerial photos of Limnos. So mapping I went, from my home and couple of thousand kilometers away. And got it mostly mapped in time for my travels.

Limnos map, looks good or what ? :)


Yeah, whatever I hear you thinking, what does this have anything to do with China ?

Limnos has a heavy army presence, there are many military bases and bunkers all around and a large radar installation. And for example the airport/airfield is a military area (you can even make out the planes/helicopers in the aerial images). And of course you aren't allowed to take any photos anywhere near these places.

No, not a military base (but there is one not far from here). Myrina.


What makes this absurd is that everything is available on the Internet anyway. And if some neighbouring enemy country would like to bomb the hell out of some base, all they need to do is fire up Bing maps or Google maps to find them.3

So why the hell can't a tourist take photos of these places ? Just wondering...

Thursday, June 14, 2012

OpenStreetMap, Google, Nokia and Bing maps

Vepsä, a tiny island in the Turku archipelago on different map services. There is an enormous difference on the amount of detail available. And on two services the island itself is missing, looks kinda silly checking in on Foursquare on Nokia devices.

Update (02.10.2012): Added screenshot from iOS 6 maps. It has at least the island in place, but not much more.

Vepsä on OpenStreetMap. Roads and trails.

Vepsä on Google. No details. But plenty of tiny islands.

But these two suck, and suck really bad. The complete island is missing.

Vepsä on Nokia maps, nowhere to be seen

Vepsä on Bing maps.. where is it ?
Apple maps in iOS 6 from iPad