23rd November 2015
I did attend Slush a week ago, I had a great time, really liked some of the talks(The best one were by Christopher Fabian UNICEF) meet a lot of people that is both doing interesting things and though what I do is great.
The reason I got to Slush is as frequent readers of this blog know were the Nordic Open Data Challenge that the Biocaching project participated in(previous posts about Biocaching, 1, 2, 3).
Biocaching ended up being one of the three winning projects together width Humans4Oceans and SpaceInvaders. I’m a fan of all project at the same time as I believe that all projects has major issues that has to be overcome.
Photo of Alice, Peter and me.
25th October 2015
Twice before has I has been writing about Biocaching, first when we won Hack4no then again when we relaunched the idea under the new name with a new website.
Since then we got to the Citizen Science Challenge hosted by UNEP/Eye on Earth Alliance. Bjørn and Alice went to Abu Dhabi and got a lot of great feedback.
We got featured on UNEPs website.
Biocaching was last week presented at a press conference in Port Louis, Mauritius, by the country’s Minister of Environment(Press letter).
We were featured on the webinar “Citizen Science & Citizens’ Observatories”, hosted by Bente Lilja Bye(link).
Jacqueline McGlade Chief Scientist UNEP also had some thoughts about our project.
That’s somethings that happened recently, up next is Slush in Helsinki. We would love to meet and talk open data and crowdsourcing!
6th September 2015
In January I proposed cleaning up a lot of imported CLC06 data manually to preserve the OSM ecosystem. Mappers had a hard time working with the large multipolygons and tools such as Tilemill/Mapbox Studio/iD all had rendering issues. Because of those issues the multipolygons become even more broken by mappers trying to handle them.
The two main multipolygons had areas about 80x120KM.
Removed
Today I removed the last major imported multipolygon(the east one). The first one I removed all way back in January, then I spend about a month mapping all the forest back from scratch. I moved on to the next multipolygon and ran into ±5.0 × 10−324 to ±1.7 × 10308 errors and moved on to do other things.
I learned some more powerful Overpass queries and earlier this Sunday morning I pulled the trigger on the second multipolygon, done in less then five minutes. I brutally smashed some “smaller” low quality CLC06 multipolygons into nothing.
Imported CLC06 multipolygons, currently:
Ahead
OpenStreetMap lost tons of data as a result of my work, still I believe that the lose of bad data allow OSM to faster gain high quality data. I mentioned earlier I mapped most of the forest from the first multipolygon back in smaller pieces and with higher quality. Mapping it all back will take time but the forest data will end up being usable.
All the CLC06 relations and ways:
As shown in the image above all easy edible such as small not broken multipolygons and areas is still in there, progressive updates of those objects will eventually make the underlying low quality import obsolete.
17th August 2015
I earlier wrote about BioPin.It, the project which won Hack4NO. Since then it has been renamed to Biocaching.
Today there is so much data missing in the public accessible space about diversity, observations of species and general species properties. I believe creating such meta data and making it accessible to the public could benefit us all. Allowing this data to be used in education as well as research.
Biocaching is our approach towards creating such data. Go ahead and read about it at biocaching.no.
