RiscOSM: vector mapping for RISC OS

At the Wakefield Show this coming Saturday, Sine Nomine Software will be releasing a major new RISC OS application.

Ten years ago the OpenStreetMap project started in Britain, and has grown into a global mapping database, incorporating contributions from thousands of volunteer mappers and various free data sources. A little over a year ago, one of those volunteer mappers started working on a RISC OS application to render OpenStreetMap data as Draw files, and the result is RiscOSM, by Hilary Phillips.

There are plenty of on-line sources for maps these days, but with RiscOSM you can export a Draw file and edit it to add, remove or correct features. You can incorporate it into your documents, with the liberal OpenStreetMap licence freeing you from worries about copyright infringement. You can design your own style sheet, so that RiscOSM renders a map with different colours or including features that are of particular interest to you.

The RiscOSM viewer is interactive, allowing you to view the details of the map data behind the features, and providing links to relevant web sites, including Wikipedia, and even live bus departures.

Initially we will be providing mapping for the British Isles and the Netherlands. The software will be available on stand 21 at the Wakefield Show. A full demonstration will be given in the theatre session at 2.30pm.

We hope to see you there!

Brilliant! Well done, Sine Nomine.

Great stuff. :-) And don’t forget the OpenStreetMap 10th Anniversary Birthday party!

Sorry, please not forget the “Map Tools” from Thomas Milius aviable via PlingStore. Use OpenStreetMap, GoogleMap or what ever.
With Wkwyl you can find Poi’s, give the result to MapView … play around … Satellite or Cicle-map … additional you can use ComCentre the MobileStick-Tool and the CCT_Track App inside to find your location via the Phone CellID.
All with my Pandora ;-)
I use it since more than a year, ok “only” Bitmap-Export.

With Wkwyl you […]

That.
Right there.
Walking advert for wanting UTF-8 support.

(^_^)

It’s been a while since the Wakefield Show, but I forgot to say we now have a download page available with a demo of RiscOSM: http://sinenomine.co.uk/software/riscosm/

New features added since the show include:

• look up places in Thomas Milius’s WKnowWYL and open the map in RiscOSM
• transfer place co-ordinates from RiscOSM to open a map in MapView
• overlay GPX tracks onto a map
• drop geo-located JPEGs onto the map to place pins
• support for “geo:” URIs
• manual for the style sheet system so more technically-minded folk can design their own styles
• lots of bug fixes!

We’ve also released the data conversion tool, so you can convert other areas of the world. We’re currently supplying the British Isles and Netherlands pre-converted, and a few other countries will follow soon. Some countries are a bit too detailed for the conversion tool to cope with at present, so you would have to pick a region of France or Germany to convert, rather than the whole country.

At the London Show we will have a new version of RiscOSM available which includes postcode lookup for locations in Great Britain. We will have freshly-converted British Isles data available on CD.

If you bring along a memory stick or SD card (preferably not FileCore formatted), there will be a selection of data for other countries available which we can copy to your device free of charge.

Matthew, be careful how you advertise this. A certain company is very protective of post code data and will come down like a ton of bricks on un-licenced use. For example, AddressIt was licenced by Fabis as far as I know, but because of the change in ownership, we had a lot of hassle.

A certain company is very protective of post code data and will come down like a ton of bricks on un-licenced use.

Typical. Some random company wanting to sell data that should be public..
Maybe this can help?
http://data.gov.uk/data/search?q=postcode

A certain company is very protective of post code data and will come down like a ton of bricks on un-licenced use.

As I recall the data in a rather large file set which covers MP, postcode, OS grid reference, GP, local hospital and a fair bit more was available to anyone with an Athens account. Such accounts can be set up at various educational establishments¹ and the use terms prohibit the data being sold (so giving it away is OK)

Some random company wanting to sell data

The Post Office Postcode application used to come on a subscription CD² with quarterly updates, mostly sold to companies wanting to check mail address and postcode before labelling an item for dispatch. These days such things are on line, like the phone book style application that uses the telephone CLI to tell your local chinese/indian/pizza take-away what address the phone call came from. So when you tell them to deliver to 36 … they know already. They know so much³

¹ ignoring the primary next door, since it’s normally shut when I’m home, I would just walk over to the Clinical Sciences building library since their literature on the desk area says its just a few minutes effort to register

² Yes, “random” company has been selling it for that long…

³ Work colleague has a gmail account. Booked holiday with flights and also booked train tickets to get to airport with both confirmation e-mails sent to gmail. His android phone is quite smart and the service sends him reminders that he might like to pop into this food place on his way from work to pub via home.(GPS tracking is an intrusion) It also sent him a reminder the other day that items x,y, and z from store w near his home that he might find useful on his holiday in in x-weeks. Basically they (robotically?) read his booking confirmation emails, analyzed the content and sent him targetted adverts. How secure is gmail?

Edit: accidentally missed a slash-small in the footnotes and discovered how to get even smaller…

Athens account

If anyone is interested then this is where the out to the net bit is.

We hit it via an N3 to JANET link.

I suspect Andrew was referring to the Post Office PAF file, which contains Post Codes, Addresses and more.

However, Ordnance Survey have a dataset called Code-Point Open, which contains PostCodes, their geographical location, and other data. I believe this is ‘Open’ data. No addresses are required to locate a PostCode on a map, I would have thought.

I suspect Andrew was referring to the Post Office PAF file, which contains Post Codes, Addresses and more.

PAF was the Post Office application I referred to without quoting the name. No idea whether it still exists as anything other than an on-line service.

No addresses are required to locate a PostCode on a map

True. I was referring to a resource¹ that does a full house number range + street = postcode + OS Ref + GP + MP + Hospital + etc. If I go digging I may find a old copy.
Postcode plus number(or name) is a specific premise.

¹ I had a part made (half finished would be grossly innacurate) lookup system that queried streetmap (IIRC) to pull OS map sections and plot premises over the top.

Martin is quite right: we are using the Code-Point Open dataset from the Ordnance Survey. Our use is fully compliant with the licence terms.

Version 1.16 of RiscOSM is now available from our web site

Since version 1.09 which was released at the London Show there have been lots of bug fixes, some speed improvements and many enhancements, particularly to the pins and tracks functions.

The German maps you find here.
France will comming soon.

Comming soon is now…
France you can find here .

I like the animation on you front page Raik:-)

It’s a WebWonder feature but only with javascript :-(

Can I use it to display 40 pins on a map (radius 0.5km) – updated, say, every 10 seconds.

I already have the GPS data updated at that rate.

There isn’t at present a method of updating pins in the way you want. Although it would be technically possible to write an application to fire a new GPX file at RiscOSM every 10 seconds, at present RiscOSM would just add more pins to the display each time, rather than clearing the previous set. You’d very quickly have a horribly large number of pins.

One of our users wanted to use RiscOSM for plotting the course of sailing dinghies after a race, but he didn’t have live data! What do you have in mind? Contact us via our web site if you don’t want to go into detail here.

We’ll be attending the South West Show on Saturday, demonstrating the newest release of RiscOSM, recently voted the “best commercial product of 2014”.

Hilary has spent the last five weeks working on improvements to the existing pins & tracks facility. The new version will allow overlaid pins / tracks / routes to be edited, saved in folders within RiscOSM or exported as GPX files for loading into a GPS device.

The new version won’t go up on our website until we get home after the show, in case any bugs surface during in-show demonstrating. So if you are not attending the show you will need to be patient for a couple of days!

At the show as well as offering RiscOSM on CD we will also have a version available on SD card,which is more convenient for use with the Raspberry Pi and other new computers. The larger capacity of the SD card enables us to include not only British Isles map data, but also data for the whole of France and the Netherlands.

It’s a while since I announced new versions of RiscOSM on this forum thread, but there have been a lot. The latest version, 1.44, was released a couple of weeks ago and is available from our web site

This year the main improvements so far have been:

• maps where north is not at the top of the page
• importing FIT files
• easy resizing of the map window
• easy to switch between degrees, degrees and minutes or degrees/minutes/seconds when opening a new map
• better timezone support for displaying recorded tracks