[clug] tomtom one

[Cameron Patrick]

Kim Holburn wrote:

> In general I was surprised because the tomtom seems an incredibly  
> closed environment - difficult to do anything other than what they  
> want you to do.

So I'm surprised that in this discussion, no one has mentioned the
proprietariness of the underlying map data yet!  I'd encourage you all
to have a peek at the openstreetmap project.  There's some coverage
around Canberra already:

  http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=-35.27180442946868&lon=149.12577835024877&zoom=12&layers=B0F

and a couple of Canberrans are active posters on the talk-au at openstreetmap 
mailing list.  If you're familiar with a particular area (e.g. near
where you live) it's quite easy to go and trace a couple of streets from
aerial data and add names using openstreetmap's online editor - note
that you can't legally derive street names from another street directory
though!  If you want to do it more seriously you can cycle or drive a
route using a GPS to record your position, take notes and then tag the
roads that you were on from the GPS track.  It can be surprisingly fun
to fill in a blank area on a map!

The wiki describes how to get started: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/

While Australian data in OSM is relatively new (and incomplete), OSM'ers
in the UK have achieved complete maps of central London and a number of
other smaller cities, as well as good progress on the greater London
area and the rest of Britain.

Cameron