Vientiane downtown and Lonely Planet update

When I arrived in Vientiane in August 2009 the OpenStreetMap was quite empty, there were only some unconnected roads traced from Yahoo imagery and a few points of interest. It was my second or third weekend when I took my GPS, a pencil and a sketchbook and started mapping the downtown.

Find your way with openstreetmap.la

I'm really happy to announce the latest update on openstreetmap.la: Routing has been integrated to the main page.

As illustrated in a previous post I evaluated the capabilities of the Open Source Routing Machine amongst other routing engines. The speed and the web-oriented architecture of the Open Source Routing Machine convinced me to use it as a backend to implement routing on openstreetmap.la.

Rivers and lakes downloads available on openstreetmap.la

During my two-week trip through Laos I collected some tracks and points of interest, of course ;). Last week I started to add them to OpenStreetMap when I realized that there are still a lot of rivers missing. I traced (rather randomly) some parts of rivers from Landsat or where available Bing imagery.

Google Fusion Tables in QGIS

Since version 1.9 (currently still in trunk) OGR supports Google Fusion Tables. There are instructions online available that show how to upload Shapefiles to Google Fusion Tables using OGR e.g. a video from the Google I/O conference (starting at 26:30 with an introduction to GDAL/OGR).