You may remember a couple of months ago I mentioned Freemap, my online
paths database and mapping facility. Freemap allows you to generate a
map of all the paths and features (hills, pubs, villages etc) in a
given area.
Well, in the meantime I've added several new features to the site
including:
- Distance measuring
- Search by place name or by grid reference
- More details on Freemap's background
- Instructions for use
and, importantly, if Freemap is ever to succeed in its goal of mapping
the whole of the country:
- Instructions for contributing your own GPS-surveyed data.
Also, Freemap now contains a significant amount of real path data. In
the past couple of months I've surveyed all the paths in the Fernhurst
area of West Sussex, which you can now see on the site.
There are still things to do, including:
- Add descriptions and photos of the landscape features shown in
Freemap;
- Improve the "look and feel" of the maps, and of the whole website on
Internet Explorer (at the moment it looks significantly better on
Mozilla and Opera than IE);
- Add user options to enable site personalisation (colour scheme,
whether to show all rights of way or just those open to
cyclists/horseriders, etc)...
- Add databases of suggested/contributed walks in a given area and
(eventually) bed and breakfasts;
- Widen the number of formats that Freemap accepts for upload. The GPX
format is the key one I'll be looking at, being XML-based.
- and of course, much more data!
One piece of feedback I would appreciate from people with any
knowledge of legal matters is the agreement for people uploading data
(in order to avoid the upload of OS data) - this is on the
"Contribute" page.
See Freemap at http://www.freemap.org.uk/
Nick