So, although the Netherlands got a huge boost in OpenStreetMap when AND donated its dataset for the Netherlands to the community last year, we need to continue our efforts to keep the free world map up to date. And next Saturday is as good as any, so we are heading towards the 'Saendelft' suburbia project just north of Amsterdam.

Jochen Topfs maps comparison web application shows that we are lagging behind the Big G here:

If you'd like to join, find all relevant info on the Wiki (in Dutch). If you just want to see results, check OpenStreetMap in about a week's time.

Be sure to check it out and support the growing number of artists using FOSS to create stunning works!

Een citaat:"Ook is Google voor burgers een belangrijker zoekinstrument dan alle hulpsites die de overheid gemaakt heeft. De onderzoekers bevelen de overheid aan haar sites beter in te richten naar het zoekgedrag van burgers. In het onderwijs en daarbuiten dient men meer aandacht te besteden aan informatievaardigheden en het gebruik van zoeksystemen. Ouderen moeten meer hulp en cursussen krijgen bij de toegang tot computer en internet."

We kiezen inderdaad al meer onze eigen interface. Zorgen dat de data goed leesbaar is (open standaarden dus, maar ook semantic web technieken) voor computers (zoals Google), maakt het ook beter leesbaar voor de menselijke eindgebruiker. Vooral de oudere eindgebruiker zal ook erg blij zijn dat de tekst dan makkelijker vergroot of voorgelezen kan worden.

update: livre.nl schrijft ook weer over het onderwerp (met discussie aldaar tot gevolg) en merkt iets eigenaardigs op over de datum van het antwoord van CvB

What's the Open Web? We have invited David Gratton (Project Opus, Donat Group) - who will talk about 'How Open Source Technologies and Open Content Bring Value to Music' at the Open Web Vancouver 2008 conference - for some insight.

Applying Open Web and Content principles to products like music that were previously closed and proprietary is an incredible case study. Recorded music has always had a revenue model based on the direct purchasing of a product. Now that the product is completely digitized and replicable for near free, what are the business models and technologies that can bring value to these content creators so that they can continue to earn a living. The ramifications of what happens in the music industry will be complex and far reaching as other commercial content becomes regularly distributed on the internet and consumed digitally.

Q: What's the Open Web? What's Open Content?

David Gratton: For me the Open Web is a belief system in the concept that equal access to and distribution of ideas is good for me, my company, and the world in general. The concept can be expressed in the form of tools, connectivity, and content on the Web. As such Open Content would be creative works which are available equally for anyone to use. What constitutes "equal" and what is the nature of "distribution" is hotly debated, often classifying practitioners into zealots, pragmatists, and heretics depending on the camp (dare I say denomination) you belong.

Q: Why does the Open Web (Open Content) matter?

David Gratton: I happen to believe that equal access to and distribution of ideas is good for me, my company, and the world in general. From a pragmatic point of view, recreating what has already been created, and failing to "stand on the shoulders of giants" is an incredible waste of effort and resources.

Q: Tell us more about the Open Web/Open Content and your 'How Open Source Technologies and Open Content Bring Value to Music' talk at Open Web Vancouver.

David Gratton: Applying Open Web and Content principles to products like music that were previously closed and proprietary is an incredible case study. Recorded music has always had a revenue model based on the direct purchasing of a product. Now that the product is completely digitized and replicable for near free, what are the business models and technologies that can bring value to these content creators so that they can continue to earn a living. The ramifications of what happens in the music industry will be complex and far reaching as other commercial content becomes regularly distributed on the internet and consumed digitally.

Thanks David Gratton for your time. Join us for Vancouver's 1st Open Web Conference at Canada Place or/and tell us "What's the Open Web and Why It Matters" and win a free two-day Open Web Vancouver 2008 conference pass.

About David Gratton:

I am a husband, a father, and an entrepreneur. These are my three roles in life and they make me extremely happy.

For me, there is no higher calling than being an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs risk their own wealth to create "a better way". We create employment and opportunities punctuated with fun, exciting, sometimes painful, often stressful, but always satisfying experiences. What may surprise most people is that entrepreneurs are less likely to realize a return on their investment than winning the lottery. So why do it?

Because we have to - there really is no other option. Partly because our egos are too big (a wonderful wife and beautiful child help keep that in check), but mostly because we can't leave an idea alone. We have to act on it. Questions like "Why couldn't we do that this way?" or "Wouldn't it be great if we could do this?" result in a compulsive urge from entrepreneurs to act. Now that doesn't mean we don't care about making money. We all do. That is how our success is measured. We all want to make bucket loads of money for ourselves, our employees, and our investors. It just not what motivates us to come into work everyday.

My two present projects are:

Donat Group, a company dedicated to improving the human condition through shared learning and community support.

Project Opus, a company dedicated to enabling wonderful music experiences everywhere.

Questions? Comments? Send them along to the Vancouver Ajax & Web 2.0 (3.0) Developer Forum/Mailing List. Thanks!

Maar waar kan je informatie die niet voor de hele wereld bedoeld is beter niet opslaan?
oh ja

dus?
gesloten (dus per definitie beperkte) ELO-componenten combineren met (de flexibele kracht van) het open web.
Dan nog een blog/wiki/whatever voor gebruikers om dingen te kunnen afkraken/prijzen/aanpassen waarin verantwoordelijke ontwikkelaars/beheerders/management actief meedoen.
Op alle niveau's is de UT toch zeer te spreken over (studenten) activisme?
Ook op dit aspect daar ruimte voor bieden zal op z'n minst het onmisbare draagvlak creeren en wanneer goed ge(un)managed de creatieve UT mensen ook nog eens tot open ...* ontwikkeling brengen.

*: open innovatie, open standaard, open content of open source? Die lopen vaak toch in elkaar over. Open profilering van de UT? Wel heel ondernemend en technisch en multi-disciplinair.

De discussie over nieuwe profilering UT lijkt z'n beste tijd te hebben gehad. Echter lezen we in het laatste stuk van EWI misschien tussen de regels door dat we de eilandjes meer voor elkaar open moeten zetten? Ik zou zeggen dat open standaarden hierin kunnen helpen.

Een ding is zeker, de discussie over ELO en wat er allemaal nog meer voor grote wijzigingen op ICT gebied zit aan te komen is nog niet klaar.
Zo is mij ter ore gekomen dat er in het eerstvolgende UT-nieuws een door een hele reeks organisaties ondertekende open brief zal staan.

Hij maakt duidelijk dat "open access" vaak weinig meer betekent dan dat je er gratis naar mag kijken. Het daadwerkelijke verdere gebruiken (remix) van de data is vaak niet toegestaan (hij noemt hierin ook expliciet een probleem met de Nederlandse 'open access' tot proefschriften).
Veel van de data is vaak zelfs weggegooid, niet (exact) opgenomen in de publicatie, of anders zo goed als zeker in een formaat dat een computer alleen kan afbeelden, maar niet kan lezen.
Omdat je geen koe kan maken van hamburgers, verafschuwt hij PDF, de grote data vernietiger (bijna net zo erg als Powerpoint) en adviseert ie XML voor het opslaan van de data.
Hij laat ook zien dat zijn software (bots) bij wel toegankelijke formaten technische fouten kan opsporen en allerlei handige betekenisvolle koppelingen kan genereren.

1. Getting the OpenStreetMap data
2. Setting up a PostGIS database
3. Getting the OpenStreetMap tools
4. Importing the OpenStreetMap data into PostGIS
5. Setting up deegree

That’s it. Let’s explore the different steps a little further.
Note that I used Ubuntu 7.10 (in a VMWare box on my MacBook Pro) to do all of this. It could perhaps be done on Windows and Mac OSX, but I really don’t know about the import part. The osm2pgsql tool is not ported to Windows and I have no idea whether it can be made to compile in a hostile environment. OSX should be doable but I didn’t investigate.

Getting the OpenStreetMap data
OpenStreetMap makes daily database dumps available in a simple XML format. The resulting file is called a ‘planet’ and is generated daily. The whole world is now 60GB in size, still 3.6GB with bzip2 compression. So you might want to consider getting one of the various extracts available from mirrors all over the world. For our needs, the Dutch extract is fine. This file is currently 90MB compressed, aboud 900MB uncompressed. Get the latest Dutch planet here.

We don’t need to uncompress the file, the import tool handles compressed files as well.

Setting up a PostGIS database

This goes beyond the scope of this article. There is an excellent install guide here. I had a PostgreSQL 8.2 / PostGIS 1.1.6 setup already available on a Windows box. There’s some specific steps to set up the database environment for the OpenStreetMap database. These are described well on the OpenStreetMap wiki. Some things I encountered on the way:

• PostgreSQL is set up by default to accept only connections from localhost. You need to edit two config files in order to get access (either using psql or PgAdminIII) from another machine:
  • postgresql.conf --> set listen_addresses
  • pg_hba.conf --> create an entry to allow connections from a subnet.
• As soon as you have that set up, all PostgreSQL client tools work form a remote machine as long as it’s in the designated subnet.

If you already have a fairly recent postgres / postgis setup on linux, you can just create a new geodatabase from the shell using

createdb -T template_postgis osm

where osm is the name of the database to be created.

Getting the OpenStreetMap tools
OpenStreetMap keeps a subversion repository with all client and server software. This contains source for editors like JOSM and Potlatch, but also the stuff we need: the export and import tools. Specifically we need osm2pgsql to import a planet file into PostGIS. This tool is in some package sources, like lenny (testing) for debian, but this is no use for us. This is an older version that can only connect to a database on localhost.

So we checkout the latest version from the repo:

mvexel@mbp-ubuntu:~/osm$ svn co http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/utils/export

We need to satisfy some dependencies as well. From the osm2pgsql README:

- libxml2    http://xmlsoft.org/
- geos       http://geos.refractions.net/
- proj       http://www.remotesensing.org/proj/
- bzip2      http://www.bzip.org/
- zlib       http://www.zlib.net/
- PostgreSQL http://www.postgresql.org/
- PostGIS    http://postgis.refractions.net/

So make sure you have those:

mvexel@mbp-ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libgeos-dev proj libbz2-dev bzip2 zlib1g-dev postgresql-8.2-postgis libpq-dev

Now change into the export/osm2pgsql directory and make the executable.
It will be in the same directory as osm2pgsql.

Importing OpenStreetMap data into PostGIS
Now this is the fun part. It is quite well described on the OpenStreetMap wiki.
Basically this is what it boils down to:

mvexel@mbp-ubuntu:~$ osm/export/osm2pgsql/osm2pgsql -H 192.168.26.83 -U osm -l -W osm/planet/planet-nl-latest.osm
osm2pgsql SVN version 0.52-20080307 $Rev: 6920 $Password:
Using projection SRS 4326 (Latlong)
Setting up table: planet_osm_point
Setting up table: planet_osm_line
Setting up table: planet_osm_polygon
Setting up table: planet_osm_roadsReading in file: osm/planet/planet-nl-latest.osmProcessing: Node(4433k) Way(1216k) Relation(1k)

Writing rel(0k)

Writing way(44k)Node stats: total(4433509), max(250236805)Way stats: total(1216105), max(23158086)

Relation stats: total(1348), max(6364)

The -H option sets the remote PostgreSQL database host. This is why we need the svn repo version, it was implemented recently. Before, it just assumed you had a database ‘gis’ on localhost port 5432.
The -U option sets the database user
The -l sets the coordinate system to EPSG:4326 or Lat/Long WGS84. Other options are ‘OSM’ Mercator or proper spherical Mercator.
The -W option forces a password prompt for the database user.
The argument at the end specifies the source planet file to import. There's no need to decompress a bz2-compressed planet, osm2pgsql will handle that on the fly.

If osm2pgsql croaks complaining about a missing 'default.style' file, make sure you launch osm2pgsql from its own directory and check if the file made it from the repo to your local source tree.

You need lots of RAM to do this. 512MB surely won’t be enough.

The process took a little less than an hour on my machine, ymmv. The -v option gives more verbose output, you might want to set that switch to see what’s going on.

I wanted to load the data in a GIS to check visually that the import had succeeded. Quantum GIS complained about the lack of a primary key. Strangely, osm2pgsql doesn't add one by default and it does not create a OID column either, so we need to do some postprocessing of the osm2pgsql created tables. There are four:

planet_osm_point
planet_osm_line
planet_osm_polygon
planet_osm_roads

For each of them, we're going to add a serial column and define that as the primary key:

\c osm;

osm=# ALTER TABLE planet_osm_point ADD COLUMN pid serial;

osm=# ALTER TABLE planet_osm_point ADD CONSTRAINT pid_pkey PRIMARY KEY (pid);
osm=# ALTER TABLE planet_osm_line ADD COLUMN pid serial;
osm=# ALTER TABLE planet_osm_line ADD CONSTRAINT pid_pkey PRIMARY KEY (pid); 
osm=# ALTER TABLE planet_osm_polygon ADD COLUMN pid serial;
osm=# ALTER TABLE planet_osm_polygon ADD CONSTRAINT pid_pkey PRIMARY KEY (pid);
osm=# ALTER TABLE planet_osm_roads ADD COLUMN pid serial;
osm=# ALTER TABLE planet_osm_roads ADD CONSTRAINT pid_pkey PRIMARY KEY (pid); 

So now the data is ready for consumption. Let’s see some results!

This is the Netherlands in OSM data in uDig

It consists of
41848 polygons
1163734 lines
187565 roads
69425 points.

This is what is looks like when zoomed in to Amsterdam:

Setting up deegree WFS
My colleague Steven did this, may be he’ll blog about it some day. Bug him about it. It took him less than half an hour, so it can’t be difficult.

Ik deed een eigen QuickerThanQuickscan van deze quickscan, met een paar opmerkingen ten gevolg:
========================================================
- Bij een andere instelling die is bezocht blijkt het corporate systeem prima te werken, voor het management, maar onderzoek naar tevredenheid van de studenten is niet gedaan.
- Sakai werd opzij gezet omdat er te weinig support vanuit de community zou zijn, vreemd om vervolgens alle pijlen te richten op het gesloten SharePoint systeem.
- Eigenlijk is het SharePoint systeem ook meer een lege huls waar je een onderwijssysteem op kan bouwen (met heel nauwgezet programmeren, want open webstandaarden zouden eens te makkelijk kunnen zijn ?!), dan dat het een onderwijssysteem is.
- Bij de UT is een beoogd nieuw systeem onderzocht, maar dan vermomd als het huidige/oude systeem. De functionaliteit waar jaren geleden al om is gevraagd zit er nog steeds niet in.
- Waar vroeger integratie het woord was, alles in 1 systeem, betekent dat tegenwoordig eigenlijk echt open stellen voor koppelingen via het web (veel meer dan alleen een hyperlink, maar meer een API, of sterker nog gewoon toegang tot de rauwe data), de interface kiezen we als gebruiker al meer zelf.
- Terwijl met tests bij een andere instelling is gebleken dat het niet goed samenwerkt met Outlook, wordt toch geadviseerd voor een complete Microsoft omgeving te gaan. Wat niet wordt begrepen is dat studenten daar geen boodschap aan hebben, zelfs op de teletop sites (waarvan wordt geadviseerd ze met Internet Explorer te bekijken, omdat dat aantoonbaar beter werkt) gebruikt ongeveer 30% van de bezoekers toch Firefox (terwijl de meeste universiteitscomputers alleen Internet Explorer hebben!!).
- De organisatie van het leven verandert, en het onderwijs gaat (met OF langs de traditionele instellingen), mee: Bekijk dit fantastische filmpje maar eens

Maar waarom voor een toekomstgerichte oplossing gaan die prima kan doorgroeien ook binnen de wettelijk groeiende constraints aangaande openheid, terwijl Microsoft ons weer een fantastische belofte doet? Vraag maar eens aan Neelie Kroes wat die beloftes waard zijn ...
========================================================

Inmiddels zijn de Eindrapporten Quickscan Sharepoint beschikbaar, dus is er de mogelijkheid voor een meer gedegen analyse.
Heb jij tijd voor gedegen analyse of een reactie ?

UPDATE: Er is inmiddels contact gelegd met Holland Open om op of 18 maart, of 24 april, of nog later op of nabij de UT iets te organiseren

UPDATE2: Holland Open zal deel uitmaken van een open source en standaarden dag, 24 april, Enschede

januari 2008
41.9% Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 (IE7)
18.7% Mozilla Firefox (-based)

En dat terwijl de UT-computers voornamelijk IE(7)-only zijn...

Misschien maar eens wat fouten oplossen (om te beginnen) en gewoon aan de open webstandaarden voldoen?

Dan nog even Firefox en/of Opera installeren en de kloof die ontstaat en het opleidingsestablishment afbrokkelt kan worden geremd door meer actieve participatie.

'Vrije software in het onderwijs is een must!'

Linux PCs forge education revolution in Philippines (Linux still cheaper than heavily-subsidized Microsoft products)
red:. het zoveelste land met een flinke component vrije software in het onderwijs

OpenThesaurus von Daniel Naber.

Insbesondere die Möglichkeit, den Thesaurus als Suchmaschine in das Firefox-Such-Plugin einzubinden ist unschlagbar.

God's Providence

5.1 As the great Creator, God upholds, directs, disposes and governs all creatures, events and things from the greatest to the least. He does this by his wise and holy providence, according to his infallible foreknowledge, and the free and unchangeable plans of his will, to the praise and glory of his wisdom, power, justice, goodness and mercy.

5.2 Although in relation to God's foreknowledge and decree all things come to pass unchangeably and infallibly, by the same providence He causes them to occur according through the nature of secondary causes, either necessarily, freely or contingently.

5.3 In his ordinary providence, God uses means [or methods], but he is free to work without, above or against them as he pleases.

5.4 God's almighty power, unsearchable wisdom, and infinite goodness manifest themselves in his providence even to the extent that they apply to the first fall and all other sins of angels and men. God has not only permitted, but has ordered and governed these sins both individually and collectively for his own holy purposes. Yet he does this so that the sinfulness of these acts proceeds only from the creatures and not from himself. He remains holy and righteous, and neither is nor can be the originator or approver of sin.

5.5 God, being wise, righteous and gracious, often for a period of time allows his children to be subject to many temptations and the corruption of their hearts. This is in order to discipline them for sins they have committed and to show them the hidden power of corruption and self-deception in their hearts, so that they may be humbled, and to bring them to closer and greater dependence on God for their support, making them more vigilent against future instances of sin. God also allows this for other just and holy purposes [known to him alone].

5.6 God blinds and hardens the wicked and ungodly, punishing them as a righteous judge for sins they have committted. He not only withholds the grace that might have enlightened their understanding and worked in their hearts, but sometimes withdraws the gifts they had previously, exposing them to the consequences of the sin their corruption leads them into. [In so doing, God] gives them over to their sinful passions, the temptations of the world and the power of Satan. The result of this is that they harden themselves even under the very same means that God uses to soften others.

5.7 Just as God's providence extends to all creatures, it takes care of his church and disposes all things toward its good in a special manner.

Copyright (c) 2008 Some rights reserved.

Creation

4.1 In the beginning, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was pleased to create the world and all things in it, whether visible or invisible, from nothing, in order to manifest the glory of his eternal power, in the space of six days, and all very good.

4.2 After God made all other creatures, he created human beings, male and female, with rational and immortal souls and endowed with knowledge, righteousness and true holiness, in his own image. They had the law of God written in their hearts and the power to fulfill it, yet, they had the ability to transgress, having freedom of will, which they could change. In addition to this law written in their hearts God gave them a command not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. As long as they obeyed the command, they were happy, in relationship with God, and had dominion over all other creatures.

Copyright (c) 2007 Some Rights Reserved