OpenTech 2008

I recently attended the OpenTech 2008 conference at ULU. The quality of the content and speakers was very high and I very much enjoyed the three sessions that I attended even though some of the topics weren't quite what I had originally expected. I was particularly keen to hear what Nick Black had to say about OpenStreetMap - a project that I last looked at when it was in it's infancy. Well it has certainly come along way and some of the maps are quite beautiful when compared to their commercial counterparts. I particularly like the fine grained details that some users have added such as walking paths, cycle routes, and of course pubs. When I got home I immediately uploaded some of my own GPS track data from my travels in New Zealand, and Tibet - both apparently in regions not already mapped by the project. I hope to create some street and path data from the tracks when I have increased my competency with the map creation tools to a suitable standard.