Openstreetmap and annotation
A few weeks back I joined lots of people mapping the isle of wight for openstreetmap, it was a good weekend, we mapped a lot of the island, collecting a lot of tracks and taking lots of photos, people are still editing the tracks, especially adding names. Is the area around where we all stayed - a caravan, right on the beach at Grange Farm, which I can definately recommend!
Openstreetmap is going along very well collecting roads, but it's still quite hard to make quick little edits or to add information to, mostly this is down to the applet. What we really want is the ability to make it as easy as wikipedia to add some information to a map. If you're looking at a map of your local area and know a road has just become one-way, or the cafe has closed down, or the church is now a wine-bar, it would be great if you could actually change it, or at least add comments to regions.
Osmarender, is an XSLT script that generates SVG, I think this would make a great editing layer, you could view the SVG map, and also edit, writing the editor on top of Osmarender is pretty simple I think - the bigger problem is the speed of current SVG user agents, hopefully that will change in the future.
Unfortunately I don't really have any time at the moment, I'm busy doing real work, which is nice in some ways, it would be really good as it's pretty interesting stuff, unfortunately there's a lot of overhead, detailed tracking what I'm doing when, irrelevant travel to meetings, endless 28meg SVN diff's eating all bandwidth, forced to use particular software - just lots of overhead, rather than getting stuff done. Still the other people are all very good so I can stick with it a bit longer before jacking it in and heading off to the beach. Which won't get OSM-wiki-annotation written either, but still I'll be happier.
