#josm

If you wanna see your current position in JOSM (Java OpenStreetMap Editor), but your mobile computing device lacks a GPS chip, this could help:

You need:

an iOS device

enabled tethering

the GPS 2 IP app

installed JOSM

We're going to install gpsd (and cygwin, socat) on windows and connect it with your iOS device and JOSM.

First, download and install the GPS 2 IP app to your iOS device. Enable tethering, then open the app and use following settings:

NMEA messages to send:

GGA

RMC

Connection method: Socket

iPhone IP selection: Hotspot

Then, install cygwin: Download and run the setup-x86.exe and use the defaults until you reach the Select Packages step. (you'll have to use the 32 bit version, else you have to compile gpsd yourself)

Search for socat, open the Net category and mark it for installation with one click. Then continue with next. A lot of dependencies will be installed, too.

Now download the gpsd binaries from http://home.arcor.de/ulf.lamping/gpsd/gpsd.html (look for gpsd-2.37-1-win32-bin.zip). Extract the contents of that .zip directly into your cygwin\bin dir.

Open the cygwin terminal twice. In the first one, input

socat GOPEN:/dev/gps,ignoreeof TCP:172.20.10.1:11123

(where 172.20.10.1 is the IP displayed by the app).

In the second one, run

gpsd -n -N -D 1 /dev/gps

You can check if everything works correctly by opening a third cygwin terminal and typing gpspipe -w.

Now, open JOSM and install the LiveGPS plugin (Go to Edit > Preferences > Plugins and look for LiveGPS. Enable it, then close the window with OK. The plugin gets downloaded and JOSM restarts itself.

Enable the display of the gps status information panel by enabling Windows > LiveGPS. Then activate the gps position tracking with GPS > Capture GPS track. If everything works correctly, the status field in the panel should read Connected and a new Live GPS Layer should appear in your layer list.

On Tuesday (27 March) I was lucky enough to see Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing  http://pigsonthewing.org.uk/ share the delights of mapping using Open Street Maps (OSM) www.openstreetmap.org.  It's truly enlightening to see how much data has been created and kept up to date by volunteers. I'm not ashamed to say I've always been a Google Maps kind of girl but seeing the level of detail available on OSM was bit of an eye opener! The information which can be used for many different purposes has very few restrictions, this includes using it for commercial purposes (although there may be some restrictions for icons etc). The other very interesting thing to discover was how easy it is for local people to start contributing and keep the data up to date.

There are several editors for contributing to OSM data. JOSM  http://josm.openstreetmap is one such an editor written in Java 1.6. Currently it supports loading stand alone GPX tracks and GPX track data from the OSM database as well as loading and editing existing nodes, ways, metadata tags and relations from the OSM database.

Sounds technical? Trust me when I say it's not. To be truthful  I haven't undertaken mapping on any scale since my undergraduate days, but as Andy was showing us the various technics you can use, my mind was ticking away as to how I could contribute.

I know it's unrealistic to expect every citizen to take up ownership of their own piece of England (or any part of the world for that matter) and keep it up to date, but, as the well-known retailer says 'every little helps'.