Chimani, a leading developer of mobile apps for U.S. national parks, recently switched its mapping data over to customized tiles based on OpenStreetMap and the TopOSM project. Learn more about the steps involved and Chimani's efforts to encourage park visitors to contribute to mapping national parks within OSM.
4. Acadia
Cape Cod National Rocky Mountai
Seashore
Cuyahoga Yellowston
Valley e
Yosemite
Grand
Canyon
Great Smoky Zion
Mountains Cadillac Mountain, Acadia National
Park
5. A “virtual passport” for all
398 U.S. National Park
Service units
Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park
15. Next Steps:
Impact of license
change
Improve
cartography
Higher Zoom
Levels
Drive users to edit in
OSM
Seawall Beach, Acadia National Park
16. Opportunities
: Pick a park and
contribute!
Working with NPS
(yippee!) the
Rapidly increase
number of park apps
Mariposa Grove, Yosemite National Park
The result of my personal frustration for not having useful data available for my iPhone\nThe frustration with poor mapping data and it’s dependency on cell data/connection\n10 in the App Store and 10 and Google PLay \n
Always wanted to fly between the two Portland’s. \nBTW, Portland, Oregon was named after Portland, Maine in 1845\n
Focused on the top ten most visited national parks\nIf you search for one of these parks, the apps will show up first.\n
Covers all NPS units, and some BLM and US Forest Service units\nAllows users to “stamp” the parks they have visited and build a bucketlist\n\n
We’re had over 400,000 downloads\nVery modest compared to other folks.....\nAnd especially since there were over 281 million visitors to national parks 2010\n
Mobile first. Don’t have a website. Didn’t have a printed publication\n
Meant to “augment” the park experience\nApp was design and engineered to help users PLAN, NAVIGATE, and SOCIALIZE\nAssumed they were outdoors and with no cell phone coverage\n\n
Everyone used Google Maps (no cell/data access in the park)\nOr, take the image files from NPS and reference them.\nVery little detailed trail data\n
assembled data sources from a variety of place, but mainly NPS data store and local municipalities\n\nmap server-like functionality within the app\n\n
Clean design...meet the immediate goal....\nHowever we went all the way to Zoom Level 16 - the workflow didn’t allow for data to be displayed differently at various Zoom levels\n\n
\n
Discovered the TopOSM project by Lars Ahlzen...provided a viable solution\nBegan mapping and cleaning up much of the National Park data.\nNeeded a fast, hosted solution which could handle the tiling requirements (Reliable Networks)\nSyncing tiles between private cloud and public cloud (with at Amazon Cloudfront and Glacier)\nCURRENT: monthly imports of the planet file. GOAL: bi-monthly updates\n
Before: very nice parks\nAFTER: more details, land coverage, hill-shading and the ability to update on the fly\n\n
license: commercial company \nmore “outdoor specific” designs - best of the previous, NPS style,\nZoom: the details in the busiest areas\nTriggers for users to go back to OSM\n
There is lots of work to be done. Pick a park you love, and map it!\nNPS: really excited to see the work that Mamata and the NPS team are doing - ]switch over to the NPS base map for virtual passport app\nWorkflow can increase the number of apps, excellent opportunity to capture more OSM editers...contributers\n