The national highway and hospital data layers were actually made using openstreetmap data!To confirm, I compared the osm road vectors to the wms tiles and they match perfectly, and for many stretches osm now has more accurate data than what ISRO used when they created the layers.

Its strange that the national space agency would use data from the openstreetmap project rather than from the national mapping agency – Survey of India. Further proof that opengeodata is useful?

PS: The highlighted road is part of the Chennai port – Maduravoyal expressway under construction in Chennai. That road was marked by me and you would only find it in osm (link), nowhere else. The black lines are the roads from bhuvan.

Woo! Found two of my photographs included in the new Tamil Nadu school geography textbooks. They have been conveniently taken from my uploads to wikipedia (click pic for details). Too bad that the usage is illegal though, as it breaks the cc-by-sa license and does not credit the author. Public school text books with unlicensed photographs from the internet, good job Government of Tamil Nadu  (well, what do you know, the tidel park pic shows up on the TN govt website carousel as well)

I cant help but feel disappointed with quality of the textbooks, I guess thats the price you pay by cutting costs and doling out freebies.

+1

• Making the books accessible online in PDF format for free.
• Audio enabled textbooks for the visually impaired

-1

• Optimizing text for least size and not for interestingness. Make way for more kids who really dont know what they are learning and why.
• Poor choice of images, illustrations, typography and layout. Have any of these guys seen the quality of books elsewhere in the world?
• Lack of references or suggestions for further reading. If you cant explain a concept properly, atleast tell him where he can find a good explanation!

I feel sorry for the kids getting half baked education from these texts. It neither creates any interest in the subject nor promotes inquiry and discussion. It was for this reason that I hated school.

My travel plan for the summer, from Coorg to Kashmir

After dillydallying between the Northeast, Utarranchal+Nepal and Sikkim+Bhutan, i finally decided on Ladakh. It was initially supposed to be just me and my two roomates from NID backpacking all the way, but seeing the lucrative destinations on offer, the gang has now grown to seven with two girls thrown in.

My initial budget estimate was 5k end to end, but now my roomate who is sitting in Delhi tells me he’s booked some super luxury volvo bus to manali costing a bomb. If things go this way, i dont think i’ll be left with anything to pay rent next month. Guess there wont be much backpacking after all

Cutting a long (and interesting) story short, the chennai suburban rail map was my very first attempt at making a transit map. What i ended up creating was my best understanding of the info from the southern railway online suburban timetable. The weird division of the services managed to confuse me successfully which is quite evident in the end result. At this time i had still not used the trains in Chennai

My first rail map. Made in 2005 and can still be found on the IRFCA server

The accuracy didnt matter much, cause after posting it to a few places online, it became quite popular, for nobody had seen such a swanky looking map for a rail system in India.  Its even been ripped off in numerous local publications. Something that came to my notice when i had met the PR head of the southern railways to explore the possibility of having  schematic maps in the trains, and he told me these kind of maps were already done by somebody, promptly showing me a page from a local guidebook from his drawer. Not the first time i had somebody show me my own work, but i found it amusing nonetheless.

And then somebody told me that they were using my maps in the automatic ticket vending machines at the stations. Excited that the railways finally had some sense to use these maps, i got down at Guindy station on my way back from college to see what exactly they had done. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t my map, but one that some engineer in RDSO must have done using MSPaint. But it seemed like he had based it on something he found on the internet. Spot the difference, or err.. the similarities.

The map used in the ATVM's in Chennai

My version of the map, at the time

Anyway, years later, after becoming a self proclaimed expert on the public transit system in Chennai, this map went through several corrections and iterations. And finally this is what it has transformed into, 4 years later:

The map now. With information on connecting bus routes as well

One of my most interesting features i included is what i call travel time contours or the trains routes. Since the rail network had a radial pattern from central/beach and trains more or less stick to schedule, i’d figure it would be quite useful to encode travel times as well somehow. Maybe not the most elegant execution and not apparent at first, but you have to admit, its quite cool. And for the first time you could also see bus route information (albeit only for the major corridors) superimposed with the train network, giving one a quick idea of how to move around using a bus/train combo and where to changeover.

I know i’d probably make tons of money selling a map like this to foreigners but putting up stuff online for free under a copyleft license is way more fun Head checkup is in order, definitely.

I have always thought of the sea being this one mighty being that humans have still not tamed. Disturb it slightly, and it swallows 200,000 people in a *ploosh*. So it was quite interesting for me to see my good friend Shillika’s attempt at communicating with the sea by tossing in a bunch of alphabets and seeing what the sea spelt out. Definitely quite a novel attempt which you can see in this short movie that was subsequently made.

What i find most interesting is how we seem to perceive the planet as some frail being that is being destroyed by us. The beachgoers in the video guess that the sea would spell out words like “help” “enough” and other sos-y stuff. But to be quite honest, isnt it us humans thats crying for help?

Fortunately (or unfortunately) my call letter from National Institute of Design came soon after and i would have to stall all my activities in Chennai and shift to Bangalore for the next 2 years. I had hoped to continue such efforts in Bangalore, but sadly it hasnt happened yet, thanks to coursework and my infamiliarity with the local language that makes it hard for me to approach government officials. I was in Bangalore, looking forward to the openstreetmap conference in amsterdam, where i would have to share these experiences of mine using OSM in India to an audience whose only knowledge of India would be ‘Slumdog Millionaire”. This would also be the first time i would be exposed to the international GIS and openstreetmap community. Find out how they use opensource maps and the kind of ideas and solutions that are in development abroad.

At SOTM, im behind the white Tshirt guy in front

Attending SOTM was an enriching experience in terms of the cultural exposure as well as technical knowledge. Especially inspiring is talking to so many individuals who speak passionately about their projects and dreams. I still remember a great conversation with the guys behind GeoMajas which was a bedroom project then, and now its being incubated by OSGeo.  Looking at the kind of interest that GIS companies and software developers were showing at the conference in openstreetmap data, its quite apparent there’s huge amounts of money involved in this business. But then why wasn’t any of this happening in India? Nobody here knows about the openstreetmap project, or care two hoots about why its needed. After all, you do have googlemaps for everything, and its free anyway.

To be quite honest, inspite of all my efforts trying to create awareness about the free geographic data and the openstreetmap project, the response has clearly not been satisfactory. I have been speaking about OSM at numerous unconferences, Chennai barcamp, Bangalore World Usability Day, Bangalore Mobilicity, gosh we even managed to set up a stall for OSM at OSI Tech Days in Chennai with the help of NRC-FOSS, but nothing sizeable has come out of it. People still ask me if i work for OSM, and to be fair WIkipedia in India is in the same boat too. Half the people ive asked still dont know that they are allowed edit wikipedia, let alone edit a map of their neighborhood on openstreetmap.

One of the problems is that the development of OSM is still west-centric, after all thats where all the active mappers are and thats where the money is too. India is more of a sleeping giant, we still dont get that we are sitting on a giant pot of gold, we have enough people to crowdsource data, only that nobody knows why it should be done or how it can help them. I left Amsterdam thinking about a new direction of promoting OSM, by putting openstreetmap data into action and let others do the talking.

There was lot of cleaning up to do in the current India data itself, before letting others jump into it. For one, the Mumbai map data was extremely messed up after the AND import, i went around trying to attempt a cleanup of the major road network and the railway network and its almost done. This should hopefully start as a good reference point for someone to add data to Mumbai. As an example of showcase, i attempted to create a tourist map of southern Mumbai with an emphasis on the railway lines, a work still in progress.

I figured out that this was a better way to generate public interest in the osm project, letting interested people discover for themselves what osm is about, an approach i hope would bring more genuine users become active in the project and let  developers see the potential of this project for themselves.

Lately however, i have been exploring opensource GIS tools like QGis and GRASS, and have been totally blown over by the power of it.

All it took was a couple of Xapi requests from the openstreetmap server to get the railways and forest cover areas to make this. Even the Indian railways dont have a GIS system for their network but OSM has it, thanks to tracing from landsat imagery, the entire Tamil Nadu railway network was added in two days. Expect more maps in the days to come.

I’ve had a ball of a time during my 4 years in Chennai, where i promptly put my electronics engineering course at SVCE in the backburner while following my real interest in trying to set up an information system to aid people using Chennai’s buses and trains. The numerous days that i spent running around the Chennai Corporation’s EDP cell, Bus Route Road department and the rundown offices of the MTC and SETC trying to make sense of the public transportation system and hunting for information that did not exist.

But thank god that even though we have a government system with huge voids and roadblocks, there’s a community that exists and can make the difference if we want to. Those numerous days that i spent running around and my greased up collar from the Chennai sweat did not go to waste. Maybe i’ve not reached where i wanted to go yet, but what i have gone through has only made me aim higher.

for all those who havent been following my twitter updates, ive had quite a few things happening around me lately. whenever i think i should write about it, something new pops up and me todo list only gets bigger. its about time i started pruning that list and finished off all my pending tasks. a whole bunch of emails and comments that need replying will be attacked first. incase i havent followed up your mail within the next 2 days, i’d appreciate a reminder since ive lost track of it all and more

You cant always use a bus to make your trip, and knowing weather you can or not is what helps you decide. In the current scenario, not only is there no information about where the bus stops are located, but no one even knows what buses will stop there or what route the bus will take. Even today, the most reliable  guide is the conductor of your bus and nobody else.  Even after three years of religiously using the buses, i have to confirm if the bus goes to my destination with people on the bus before boarding.

Having explored every possible avenue to get detailed information about the mtc bus routes, including personally meeting with the higher officials of the corporation itself, i can say without an atom of doubt that the MTC neither have the technical capability nor the interest to produce timetables or route maps for the public. In which case a job like this is best done by the people who need it most. us.

The bus route mapping project originated with my attempts at creating a metro-style public transport schematic map for chennai (see what it looks like), an attempt that i gave up because of information black holes that i encountered at every step. I realised that there were a lot of people who wanted something like this, because they knew the routes they travelled regularly, but in new areas they were always lost. And since i’m made up of wiki blood, it struck me that the best way to get the info that all of us are looking for is to put our heads together and throwing in whatever knowledge we have into a common pot and giving it a good stir.

If you think buses are smelly crowded crumbling  death machines (you actually aren’t too much off the mark), here’s why you should still consider helping out with the project:

• each person who switches from a private vehicle to a bus, will reduce travel time on the road. both for you in your ac car as well as me, inside the death machine
• had a party and dont want to risk your head by driving back drunk? mtc to the rescue,but you wouldn’t know where to catch a bus would you? that’s why we all need this project
• the mtc bus is called a death machine because it hits and runs over people outside the bus and not inside, which means you are probably safer using the bus and leaving your unscratched car at home

Some concluding notes: While i might have helped lay the foundation for this and taken some initiative, this isn’t by any means my project, its a pure community effort and the rewards will be reaped back by the community. And such kind of collaborative projects are still new in India, for one, hardly anyone here even edits wikipedia or sees the need to.I do hope something like this will give everyone a good opportunity to share their knowledge and be part of the system than just be the selfish onlooker who just complains about how things don’t work. If you have an opinion let it be heard,the reigns are in your hands now.

Chennai Bus Route mapping Project wiki page

PS: Excuse the pep talk, just something that i had to get off. i will be a little busy the coming week because of exams and some tv shows, in the meantime, try playing around with mapping and take some initiative to discuss the tasks ahead and streamline the whole project.