Gipuzkoa Provincial Council releases all its geo data
Nov 27th
Today, it’s a great day. The Gipuzkoa Provincial Council has released all its data in the B5M geo website under a free license.
The “Legal information” page has some changes including what we believe is a license compatible with CC-BY:ç
The content geographic information corresponding to the Gipuzkoa Provincial Council may be reproduced, removed and reused freely on a nonexclusive basis, in whole or in part, by any person in any format and for any subsequent legitimate use under the following terms:
This is the only condition of reusing content that limits its use:
1. Authorship must be indicated in any case.
It’s great news, no doubt. Our Provincial Council’s geo team is an example because of the quality of their projects and services; there isn’t around any public administration’s geo team like Gipuzkoa’s. We hope that this release decision will be copied by other public administrations.
Not only OpenStreetMap has a wonderful chance to create a great map of our province, now, companies like Tagzania Services will be able to develop really useful and interesting apps for our customers using B5M’s data. Thanks a lot B5M, eskerrik asko!
Gipuzkoa is one of the basque provinces. It’s capital is Donostia-San Sebastian.
EuskalMapa
Nov 19th
This is not the first time we talk about Tagzania’s commitment with OpenStreetMap. The project is well-known internationally and the community is really strong in most European countries. But our local reality is not so wonderful, OSM is only supported by few dozens of users and there’s a lot to do on the map (even though we’ve got some great places).
EuskalMapa is our latest project to support OSM in the Basque Country. It has a double goal: spreading the word about OSM and giving to our native language, the Basque, its own presence on the map (using the name:eu tag). OpenStreetMap gives to our language the chance of having its own map, like OSM Alba has done with the Scottish Gaelic.
We’re working on this Basque map, meanwhile EuskalMapa is posting about OSM news, tutorials about how to edit the map or giving information about the mapping parties we’re organizing.
Mapping Ordizia with Jakintza school kids
Sep 30th
Last monday we celebrated an OSM mapping party with the girls and boys in the Jakintza Ikastola. With the help of their teachers Maite and Jokin, they added and corrected much data to their town’s ( Ordizia ) map in OpenStreetMap. They did a great job and showed us what “Digital Native” term means.
- Pictures of the event on Flickr
- Summary of the work done, with an animation (before and after)
- Ordizia map in OpenStreetMap
Let’s map the world, step by step
Sep 16th
You already might know we’re really involved creating the free wiki world map. As individuals, we’re mapping several areas of the Basque Country (users Gari Araolaza, mikeltxo, kere, dreguera, aitzol).
Tagzania Services has also supported OpenStreetMap by sponsoring the State of the Map conference; we’re also talking with our public administrations to liberate their (their?) geo-data. But we can’t be waiting forever, that’s why we’ve started organizing mapping parties. Don’t hate the media, become the media.
These mapping parties goal is making OSM more popular in our area, and, of course, getting some new devote mappers to the project.
This is our mapping party agenda (you can find them also in the OSM wiki current events)
We’ve also organized a special mapping party in Ordizia with some high school students by the end of September.
We hope this is just the begining. That’s why we encourage people in our area to contact us for organizing more mapping parties.
What’s after the State of the Map 2009?
Jul 14th
State of the Map 2009 is over. Congratulations to the OSMF for organizing such an event with good speakers. It has been a pleasure for us sponsoring this year’s SOTM09.
There were many interesting talks, I’ve chosen my favourite ones for the Video nominations.
- Making Money with OSM – Frederik Ramm (Geofabrik): OpenStreetMap needs companies around it earning money, that will get the project more powerful for competing with other maps.
- How People Search for Locations – Ed Freyfogle (Nestoria): it was an interesting approach from the users’ points of view. OSM must think more in the map users (not just mappers).
- Open Paper Maps – Mike Migurski (Stamen). Walking Papers is a nice project for helping mappers to improve OSM data.
- Free and Open Palestine – Mikel Maron. Mikel and his collegues have done a brilliant work mapping Palestine. Hope he goes on doing it in other countries.
“State of …” talks were also interesting, specially Egypt, Cuba and Japan.
- Egypt: It’s amazing seeing how their map has changed in just one year with just a few volunteers.
- Cuba: How can they map without GPS devices or good satellite images?
- Japan: He was a funny guy. He walked about 24 km for mapping a shrine!
We’re really positive about our first SOTM, our talk in the Geomob session (thanks to Christopher Osborne!) and the sponsoring (it was nice seeing the Tagzania logo near Cloudmade’s or Ito’s). We got some interesting feedback about Mapapel and we’ll keep on working on it improving the website and adding some new city maps. We’re also thinking about how can we improve OpenStreetMaps presence in Tagzania.com
See you next year!
State of the Map 2009 and more
Jul 10th
These are the slides we’re showing in the State of the Map 2009:
There are other things we haven’t shown you, like the Tagzania app for Android we’ll publish soon. Have a look at the demo below:
Mapapel, print your city map
Jul 7th
These days we’re starting a new project, Mapapel. Our goal is offering printable quality city maps to our users. Currently, we’re testing the idea so we’ve published a prototype of the Mapa San Sebastian (map of Donostia-San Sebastián).
We’re using OpenStreetMap as data source. You might remember we already use OpenStreetMap data in Tagzania.com thanks to Mapstraction. Tagzania Services is working together with La Personnalite in Mapapel; they’ve designed the printable map so it looks even cooler.
We’ll start soon giving a more appropriate design to the website and adding some new printable maps and locations.
New office
Dec 18th
Some months ago we showed you our office´s photos. But that was not Tagzania Services´ office, it was its creator´s, CodeSyntax´s. After doing a hole in the wall, our young startup has now a new home next to that office.
This is our new usability lab:
Hope you like our brand new work place. You can see more photos in our Flickr account.
Venture capital investment in Tagzania Services
Oct 28th
A Basque venture capital firm (Sociedad Gestión de Capital Riesgo del País Vasco – SGECR) has invested 465,000 euros in Tagzania Services for 28.57% of the company. The investment has been done for six years through the Elkano XXI fund, specialized in technological projects.
Maps named with the suffix -vision
Mar 12th
Maps named with the suffix -vision (if that’s any kind of definition) are a subset of map mashups that became fashionable in 2007, after David Troy launched Twittervision. We’ve created several of those lately. Two of them, UkPropertyVision and Casaszoom for a customer, Nestoria, a vertical search engine for the real estate world.
Describing UkPropertyVision Techcrunch says it’s like “property porn”. Well, there’s some kind of hypnotic effect in those mapvisions: Ajaxian effects moving and changing the info bubbles constantly on the maps, no action required on the part of the user (although in these two examples, the properties to be shown can be narrowed to certain areas and features).
In Spain, besides the Casaszoom example featured in this screenshot below, we also created Betisvision , a social tool for a football (soccer) club that celebrated recently its 100th aniversary.
