Saturday, 13 November 2010

BarCamp London 8: wheelmap.org

Holger Dieterich@holgerd

More details on lanyrd

  • http://wheelmap.org — find wheelchair accessible places to eat & drink
  • Made by http://sozialhelden.de — Social Heroes
    • one of the founders is in a wheelchair
    • problem is not how to get somewhere, but how to find somewhere suitable
    • is there a step? is the toilet accessible?
  • databases in Germany have 30,000 places, but they’re not so easy to use (mostly commercial)
  • had a wheelchair tag in OpenStreetMap before they started, but only about 5,000 places were tagged
  • now have about 18,000 places in germany
    • 300-400 places edited a day!
  • website finds your location by IP and offers you places to edit/add
  • also an iPhone app
    • using OpenLayers to display
  • CloudMade is good, but is read-only and not updated regularly (once a month!)
    • want to have immediate update
    • don’t yet have immediate, but 3 minutes is close
    • OpenStreetMap itself is sometimes down (for three days at one point), so had to implement caching and their own intermediate API
  • also approaching companies to share their data…
    • they’re really scared… so talking with Berlin government to convince them
  • having slight issues with OSM community as wheelmap data is added anonymously by a pseudonymous user
    • but it’s better that data gets added
    • and there’s no real chance of spam since the data is added automatically

1 comment:

RT said...

Nice summaries. Thanks for this. May be you could put these up on lanyrd as well?