OpenOrienteeringMap from Start to Finish

Fancy putting on an orienteering event anywhere in the world but don't have a map? Then you've never heard of OpenOrienteeringMap. This amazing concept allows you to generate an orienteering map of just about anywhere based on OpenStreetMap, which describes itself as "a free editable map of the whole world". What this means is that thousands of people have been out and mapped everything they can find to create an on-line map. This has the huge benefit that it is open data, licensed under a Creative Commons licence (CC-BY-SA). Subject to certain conditions it is therefore essentially free to use as source data for other maps.

Ollie O'Brien, the man behind YepSport and the mapper for the London City Race amongst other things, has developed OpenOrienteeringMap that now allows you to generate an orienteering map based on OSM. This has been used by SLOW for their monthly street-O events around London. Last night I put on a Street-O in St Albans as part of the HH Summer Series to find out what was involved in staging a race like this.

First step as ever was to select an area. The north-east corner of St Albans is an area known as Jersey Farm. This has some complex housing estates joined by a network of paths which seemed just about right for a Street-O. To make life easy I decided on a 45 minute score event. So let's see what an OOM map of Jersey Farm looks like.

1) Go to http://oobrien.com/oom/. The default view shows Docklands. You can enter a postcode to go directly to somewhere in the UK, or use the zoom facilities to move to wherever you want to use for your map.

2) The default values of the various options are OK to start with. You have a choice between "Street-O Map" or "Pseud-O Map". The Street-O map is black and white and only shows features such as roads, paths, railways, rivers and large buildings. The Pseud-O map attempts to reproduce a standard orienteering map using the ISOM map specification. To me this looks much nicer, but for a street event it really isn't needed, and it's simpler to stick with the black and white version.

3) Once you have moved to the area you need then you can generate the map. Click on the "Create a map" button. This brings up the Map Builder window. You can then select the paper size, map scale and map type. There is also a check box labelled "Include controls". If you leave this box checked then you can add start, finish and controls to the map when you generate it. For my event I wanted to use OCAD for the course planning so I cleared the check box.

4) You then need to left click on the map to mark the centre of your map. This brings up a brown rectangle showing the exact size of your map. You can move this around as necessary by left clicking again, or by selecting a different scale, page size or orientation. For Jersey Farm I went for a 1:10,000 map. Once you have the correct area click OK, and then add a map title if needed, and click OK again.

5) You will now get the message "Creat PDF". Click the button labelled "Go!" and you will get your very own map in PDF format. This is named oom.pdf by default, so it is safest to rename it straight away and save it on your computer. You may well end up generating several versions of the map during the planning process so you need to make sure you are using the correct one.

Now to plan the course. To make life easy you don't want to have to put out controls so you need to find some other way of proving people have visited the correct sites. SLOW use questions about something in the middle of the circle ("what is the name of the pub" and even "what sort of elephant is this" for example) . For me this is too complicated, since it makes life difficult for the planner to create the questions in the first place, and it is annoying as a competitor having to stop to write down long answers or hunt around for obscure answers. I therefore went for something simpler. Jersey Farm is covered in green telephone connection boxes, most of which have a nice painted number such as AL062 20. Getting runners to write down the last two digits seemed the best idea. A quick run around the area and I had found about 50 possible control sites. I still had a few parts of the map with no controls, but a quick hunt around on Google StreetView helped find a few more. It also raised hopes a few times when I spotted a fuzzy green shape in the distance only to find it was a green recycling bin. It turned out that runners at the event had exactly the same problem. The photos aren't quite good enough to read the labels so I had to do another run round to check them. In the end I went for 55 controls. This was probably a little over the top, but it does give runners something to think about.

The event does of course rely on the quality of the OSM base map. In general it was pretty good, but whilst checking sites I did notice several things that needed changing or adding. The great thing about OSM is that you can always make the changes yourself. That isn't really what this is meant to be about, but for those who are interested I used JOSM to edit the map and add the odd extra road, several missing paths and some parks.

I wanted to use OCAD to generate the course. This won't accept PDF files as a background map so I first converted the PDF file to a JPG using GIMP. You can then use the standard OCAD course planning features. This allowed me to add the rules, a set of boxes for answers plus some extra logos. You can always use the built-in OOM function to add start, finish and controls if you don't have OCAD.

And so to the evening of the event. With no controls to put out it was simply a case of turning up at the start with a pen, clipboard and watch and setting people off. I put the start and finish at a green box so that people could see exactly what they were looking for before they started. Everybody got at least 19 controls, with the winner managing 42 in the 45 minutes available. You can see what routes some of the runners took on the HH RouteGadget site. The comments were all very positive, no doubt helped by the good weather and the interesting nature of the terrain. As ever there was much discussion about the map. The main issue was one I was already aware of from some of the SLOW events: open areas such as parks and fields do not show up. You can therefore end up staring at a large open space in front of you and wondering quite where you would come out if you ran across it, and whether you'll get stuck behind an uncrossable fence before you reach the road or path you want to be on. There's no easy answer to this, but it is generally fairly obvious once you get to the particular location. Using the full-colour Pseud-O map would help, and several people commented that they would prefer it.

Overall this event confirmed that it is perfectly possible to hold an event based on OOM. Jersey Farm itself turned out to be perfect, with surprisingly little traffic. Next time all I really need to do is move the start and finish and we could use pretty much the same set of controls. And then there's other bits of St Albans, and Mike said that Harpenden looks possible, and I've always wanted to do something in Hatfield, and then we could try Shenley or Welwyn or even bits of Watford. Looks like the Hertfordshire Street-O League may not be far away.

Orienteering meets art in Trafalgar Square

On Friday September 11th 2009 Adrian had his hour of fame on top of the 1.7m (wide) x 4.4m (long) x 8m (high) fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square as part of Antony Gormley's One&Other project. This provides a chance for 2400 people (one an hour for 100 days) to occupy the fourth plinth and do whatever they want. Brooner came up with the great publicity angle that this could be the world's smallest orienteering event. Around 20 other orienteers and even a few members of the public took the chance to run in the first orienteering event to be held in Trafalgar Square.

The whole thing was broadcast live on the internet, as indeed all 2400 hours of the project will be. Looking at the coverage afterwards it may have been a bit difficult to work out what was happening at the time, and even if you were there it wasn't immediately obvious. Adrian was so far above us that it was quite hard to communicate, especially over the noise of the fountains. The theory was that he would run a course on the plinth and then someone would run the equivalent course in the square. It soon became obvious that this was a bit difficult to synchronise so it turned into more of a straight relay.

The extra complication was that each course would outline a letter and everything would be recorded on a GPS watch that was passed from runner to runner, and if we got everything right then we would spell out a message. Alan Leakey was given the job of official starter and a set of maps with courses labelled O, N, E, &, T, H, R, P, L, I and G. His job was then to hand these out in the right order to spell the message. Orienteers from London Orientering Klubb, South London Orienteers, Southdowns Orienteers, Hertfordshire Orienteering Club, Chigwell Orienteering Club, Havering and South Essex Orienteering Club, Saxons Orienteering Club, South Midlands Orienteering Club and possibly a couple of clubs I didn't spot took part. The South Midlands runner was Roger Williams, who had already had his own hour on the plinth a few days earlier.

Discussions with Adrian before the event had concluded we had a chance of managing "ONE & OTHER PLINTH O" in the one hour available, but the unofficial target was to try to manage "ONE & OTHER PLINTH ORIENTEERING". As we came towards the end of the hour we had got to the T in orienteering, but Alan was desperate to finish off. The bright yellow cherry picker drove up to get Adrian down and replace him with the next plinther, but we relocated the start and finish a few metres and continued around it. I spotted that we could stop at "ORIENTEER" and that would still make sense, and even provide a better reference to the person who had started all this off in the first place. And so at just past 14.00 I set off on the final R, telling each control holder as I passed that we had finished. In total we had run 24 courses covering 8.56 kilometres in 52:47.

After the event it was simply a matter of downloading the GPS track and extracting the message. The good news was that we had a full trace from the whole race. The bad news was that my vague idea of doing something in Routegadget to extract the letters didn't really work. After some experimentation the final method turned out to involve quite a complicated process as follows:

1) Read GPS trace from Garmin Forerunner 205 using SportTracks and create a GPX file for each letter.

2) Import each GPX file into QuickRoute and use this to create a JPG image showing the letter. QuickRoute had the nice extra that allows the colour at any point to indicate how fast you are running. Thus green sections show bits where people were moving fast, whilst red is slow.

3) Use IrfanView to do a batch conversion of the JPG files. This provided an easy way to crop and resize all 24 letters without doing it painfully one at a time.

4) Create a 9 by 3 Word table and import the JPG letters into this for final printing.

And so as a contribution to the art created in association with this project we come to the final result, as shown below.

The start and finish are at the bottom left of each letter, and this means courses have to be planned so they don't go through this point. That explains why the E is backwards, the T is on its side and the L is upside down.

A few related links:

• Trafalgar Square map and courses.
• Maprunner photos.
• Photos by Ali Hooper who ran the first letter O.
  
• Maprunner video.
• Adrian's blog.
• Photos by Roger Williams.
  

Tower, 52m, northern foot

Any suggestions where this might be? I guess it's not really that difficult to work out that it is Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square. Tomorrow the general public will be getting the chance to orienteer around the square when Adrian Bailey spends an hour on the fourth plinth as part of the One & Other project. Helen and I have been helping to set things up so I am mapper and planner and Helen is organiser for what promises to be an interesting experience. We're still not quite sure exactly what will happen, but we have maps, control flags and SI kit so it should look like a proper race. Brooner has found an interesting publicity angle, claiming it to be the World's smallest orientering event.

You can get a sneak-preview of the map in Routegadget.

If you can't be there, don't miss the live web broadcast from 13.00 to 14.00 BST.

And that should provide a perfect warm-up for the 2009 London City Race on Saturday.

City of London Orienteering Race

What an event. If you haven't seen it I recommend starting by looking at the map and courses in Routegadget and then seeing gg's video. Then there are the results plus lots of pictures, discussion and comments from officials on the official event web site.

The map, produced by Ollie O'Brien, is a pure work of art. There laid out in front of you is the whole City of London, from the remains of the Roman walls (in the olive green just north of control 135) to St Paul's Cathedral (control 151) to modern skyscrapers such as the Gherkin (control 137).

This was a chance to orienteer around the streets of London, which on its own would have made a great day out. The street network is not particularly complex, but it is good enough to make the navigation interesting, and around every corner you find a view of some well-known building to distract you. The start and finish were in Broadgate Arena next to Livepool Street Station (as shown in the photo of prizegiving on the left). The majority of the 400 competitors arrived by public transport and could sit in the warm sunshine while they waited to start or to discuss route choices after they had finished.

But the added element on top of all that was the final few controls spread around the Barbican Centre. The is spread over multiple levels, and proved a real challenge to map. Never before have so many people been so confused by so few controls.

It's also worth looking at Ollie's web site where he explains some of the technology behind the race.

Don't Miss This

I spent last Saturday checking control sites for the City of London Orienteering Race on October 11th. All the photos in the mosaic on the left were taken from somewhere on one of the courses. Despite having lived and worked in London for over 25 years I still visited places I had never been to. At one point I was in a deserted maze of narrow alleyways behind the Bank of England when a lone runner came round the corner at high speed. It was Brooner, the Event Organiser, out test-running the long course. I said these alleyways were just like Venice. He thought it was like Istanbul. In future you can say that other places are just like the City of London. Ten minutes later I met him again in a deserted churchyard. The map is a true work of art on its own.

Don't miss it. This will be something special.

Click here for an enlarged version of the picture.

Golden Graham (and JD and Jamie)

What can you say. GG cruises round to come back fourth. JD decides that isn't good enough and comes back in the lead. Jamie is caught by Thierry and then Novikov. Clive Allen convinces us all that France and Russia are fighting for the Gold with GB settling for Bronze. Jamie suddenly catches Novikov back up despite a longer gaffle. Thierry swallows a bee, gets stung and ends up walking. Jamie's TracTrac route shows him missing control 25 by miles, but somehow he ends up in the lead at the next control and is clearly running much more strongly than Novikov. And that's the race over. JD and GG struggle to keep up with Jamie down the run-in, Dave Peel gets in on the act on the finish line and GBR have a third WOC Gold medal. Just how WOC should always be.

There has been much Nopesport comment about the shorts. You will see from the attached photo that GG was already sporting them at WOC 2008 in the Ukraine when they lined up for this "we'll be World Champions this time next year" photo.

Having now had a chance to watch the Czech TV coverage it strikes me that it was excellently done, especially given that it went out in real time. (The internet streaming from the Czech TV website simply wasn't up to it during the race itself). TracTrac almost proved its worth, but the loss of contact and occasional strange position reports mean that it can't quite be relied on to fill in the gaps between even quite a large number of TV cameras. Clive did a valiant typing job, which I then had to balance with numerous (and in fact too many) on-line radio controls, plus trying to keep up with the Test Match at Headingley and the Open Golf at Royal Birkdale as well. If I was a betting person I might be asking for a steward's enquiry to work out quite what went on in that mad last ten minutes, and I'm sure we'll be hearing a bit more detail from those involved.

But for now we can just celebrate the new records: first British Relay Gold, Jamie becomes a double World Champion, GG becomes the 10th Brit with a WOC medal (and saves himself a BOF membership fee for life I'd expect). And just for me, my ongoing prediction of the emergence of China took a step forward with 7th place in the Women's race, and we had a fourth WOC race where Sweden, Norway and Finland failed to win a medal, and the third of these four where GBR won the Gold. Quite astonishing.

Another Full Set

How many runners have claimed a WOC medal in all four disciplines, counting Short and Middle as equivalent for these purposes? Remember Sprint only started in 2001 so many people never had a chance.

A quick think about it brings up the obvious candidate: Simone Niggli. After that I was struggling, but some analysis showed that Minna Kauppi has also got one of each. And then at yesterday's Middle race a third person joined the elite group when Vroni Koenig-Salmi claimed silver and completed a full set of Sprint, Middle, Long and Relay medals. The photo shows her on the way to Gold in the Sprint in 2001 in Finland.It also shows what may be the least attractive control site in WOC history: Tampere Greyhound Stadium toilet block, NW corner.

So who else could join this group in the near future. Looking just at runners at the 2008 WOC with three types of medal already we find people missing teh following types of medal:

• Sprint: Heli Jukkola, Marianne Andersen
• Middle: Andrey Khramov, Emil Wingstedt , Matthias Merz
  
• Relay: Yuri Omelchenko
• Long: Jamie Stevenson, Pasi Ikonen, Thierry Gueorgiou

The Sprint and Middle are over, so those five have missed out. I can't see the Ukraine sneaking a relay medal so it surely won't be Yuri. Pasi and Thierry aren't running the Long so it won't be them. But it just could be Jamie. One extra thing to cheer him on for on Saturday.

(Just for completeness, Valentin Novikov would have needed a Long and Sprint medal.)

And one final statistical excitement from yesterday. The men's race was only the third race in WOC history that Norway, Finland and Sweden all failed to win a medal. Unfortunately for me this was the first time it had happened when Great Britain didn't claim the associated gold medal.