I spent the last weekend at the Wikimania 2005 in Frankfurt, the first international Wikipedia conference.

One hot topic at Wikipedia is geographic information and creation of digital maps. After attending Arnulf Christi's presentation on Open Geo Data Projects, my Google Maps enthusiasm has cooled off a bit. Google decided to create their own API instead of following an existing standard. On the other hand, Google Maps just works too well to not use it for my hiking maps.

The second geo-related workshop I attended was done by Tobias Dahinden, and covered the graphical design of maps. From what I learned, map design is hard, and science has not made much progress in automatic map drawing in the last 30 years. And things get worse when it comes to displaying maps on a computer screen. The most devastating examples were side-by-side pictures of MapQuest and manually drawn maps. Another topic of this workshop was how to get the geographic coordinates for drawing maps. Unfortunately, only the USA makes data freely available when it has been created with tax money. Over here in Germany, geographic information is sold by the states, and may not be redistributed.