Slashgeo

Artem Pavlenko writes "I'm pleased to announce that there is a new release of mapnik (0.2.5a), together with a new website. Mapnik is a Free Toolkit for developing mapping applications. Above all mapnik is about making beautiful maps. A key goal is to provide high-quality anti-aliasing rendering of geo data - think Google Maps at their best. It is easily extensible and suitable for both desktop and web development."

Here's a wrap-up of last month's geonews regarding OpenStreetMap. First is a long discussion on the licence attributed to data contributed to the OpenStreetMap project, an exert: "Many of the problems arise because Creative Commons (the “CC” of our licence), as the name suggests, is largely concerned with “creative works” - music, literature, art, and so on. OpenStreetMap, on the other hand, produces data: a factual, uncontroversial recording of the world around us. [...] In the [Science Commons initiative] protocol, Creative Commons restates the problem that copyright simply does not apply universally to factual information." Then there's an update on Nestoria, the first commercial application now using exclusively OSM data. We also have Google's Ed Parsons discussing the differences between data in Google Maps and OpenStreetMap. Other OSM entries include a short discussion on the community surrounding OSM vs "old timers", a mention of OSM during the KDE 4 keynote, a visual comparison of Google data vs OSM + OpenAerialMap data over China, a short account of using JOSM, the advanced OpenStreetMap editor, and finally, the announcement of this year's State of the Map 2008 conference will be held in Ireland. See also the numerous related stories below (more if you search the Slashgeo archives). On a personal note, I used to say about OSM that data is particularly useful in Europe, but not in North America yet... after a quick peak today at the status of OSM completion in NA, I admit I'm impressed, data has been added very rapidly and this is obviously great news for public domain data.

Stefano Costa writes "A List Apart has an interesting article by Paul Smith of EveryBlock about open source software for creating webmapping applications. From the article snapshot: "Rolling your own maps need not be an intimidating affair, provided you understand the problem and the tools to fix it."" I included below several related previous stories. Thanks Stefano for your submission.