A map with that, sir?
A quick search this evening revealed that the “proper name” for someone who likes maps is a cartophile. No Wiki reference, yet, but everything comes along in time. Remember, I started with maps at a very early age; there wasn’t much else for a pre-reader in the CNR stations a lifetime ago. A map of the rail route, with each station as a circle. I’ve since learned that there’s a whole other story behind the maps that the railways produced in those times. Anyhow, let’s blame it on Hansel and Gretel, dropping crumbs and pebbles to mark their route. Blame the pigeons for the rest.
Now that the GPS has dropped to an affordable price, I’ve found that “saving” my routes was of some minor value; I did it because I could. Besides, how else could I find out how fast we were rolling along when I was asleep? Well, great minds think alike and geeks seldom differ. People around the world have been collecting their routes into datasets. Finally, someone who was of a properly OpenSource mindset decided that it was time to put all that good stuff to use; create an atlas of the world that was free of the dreaded copyright symbol. Maybe it didn’t fit well with all the others on the legends so loved by cartographers.
A project is now underway to allow all those who wish to add their pebbles to the forest floor: the openstreetmap.org is growing on an hourly basis. I signed up this afternoon and spent a few minutes uploading about sixty datasets from the last couple of summer holiday trips. Perhaps I’ll fill in the hole in the map where no man has gone before. I won’t know for sure until next week when the database is updated, but all of my submissions are stocked, ready to show where the road goes on a section of my beloved Island.
The world needs crazies people with vision who are willing to contribute to the bigger picture. My few edits on Wiki have been overwritten, but at least someone else took the time to decide that they did know “better”. May it have given them a good feeling for the afternoon. As the “guardians of copyright” flail about, we need to place more content in the public domain. Is there anything more public than a map of a roadway, I wonder?
