Geograph

Credits

The idea for this site was born when I searched the web for pictures of some coastal features in Cornwall and found the Geograph British Isles project. I was intrigued by the project's philosophy immediately, and I was wondering more and more why there is no such project for my region.

However, I would have never been able to get such a project going on my own. I was lucky that the maintainers of www.geograph.org.uk provided me generously with the source code and helped when I had problems and stupid questions. Thanks a lot, especially to Barry Hunter.

Thanks for ideas and help with the German project go to Stephen Hocker and Christian Lipp. Ulrich Meier has done a lot of work improving the maps (e.g. lakes in Bavaria, coast lines). I wouldn't have been able to import all the information about counties and districts without his great help. He and Sebastian Ballard do most of the moderation which enables me to spend a bit more time on web development.

Borders

Most of the borders are taken from OpenStreetMap. Many thanks also to geoclub user "flopp" for his help.

Towns

The coordinates of the towns have been partially taken from OpenGeoDB.

Maps

Many thanks to "Nop" for allowing us to include the Wanderreitkarte and to Andy Allan for allowing us to include the OpenCycleMap.

Map data

The static mapnic tiles for the draggable map are made from OpenStreetMap data provided by GEOFABRIK as a dataset reduced to German features.

Digital elevation model

The "Relief" tiles for the draggable map are made from CIAT data. "Nop" (Wanderreitkarte) provided helpful suggestions regarding tile rendering.

Credits page of www.geograph.org.uk

Here's all the people and technologies that make this site possible...

Original Idea

• came up with original concept.

Photographs

• Copyright on all photographs is retained by the original contributor, but all are published under a Creative Commons licence - each individual photograph on the site details the original photographer and their precise licence terms.
• View the Photograph Contributor Listing.

Software

• manages the software development as an open-source, GPL licensed project, and is responsible for much of the coding / design, as well as specifying and building the dedicated server farm. Paul can be contracted through his company Elphin Limited.
• , developer and maintainer of www.nearby.org.uk lends his wide experience of working with mapping technologies and was responsible for the site search, as well as contributing many other enhancements.
• Ian Rutson contributed to the Memory Map export features.
• David Morris has helped with the profile features and a bulk standalone upload application - JUppy.

Moderators

• A growing number of volunteer moderators drawn from the contributor list, donate their time and effort to help sort and maintain the image archive. View the Geograph Team for the list of current and past moderators.

Mapping & Location Data

• Historical Maps from the mid 20^th century kindly made available by VisionOfBritain.org.uk.
• GB & Ireland outline reproduced from 1990 World Vector Shoreline dataset by MIMA, not subject to copyright protection under 17 U.S.C. 403.
• Placename/Toponymic information is based on the Geographic Names Data Base, containing official standard names approved by the United States Board on Geographic Names and maintained by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. More information is available at the Products and Services link at www.nga.mil.
• Low Resolution postcode data from Sourceforge Geocode.Service project.
• Administrative County centre points compiled by .
• OSNI generously donated a complete set of 1:50000 paper maps for Northern Ireland, aiding photo moderation in the absence of suitable online maps.
• Historic County centre points compiled by .
• National Trail routes compiled with the help of magic.gov.uk and contributor Tony Atkin! (subject to Copyright, used under licence)
• National Cycle routes provided by sustrans.org.uk. (subject to Copyright, used with permission)
• Great Britain Gazetteer based upon Ordnance Survey® 1:50 000 Scale Gazetteer, © Crown copyright Ordnance Survey. All Rights Reserved. Educational licence 100045616.
  • and enhanced with the Gazetteer of British Place Names, © Association of British Counties, used with permission.
• Great Britain 1:50 000 Scale Colour Raster Mapping (Same as paper based Landranger™ product). © Crown copyright Ordnance Survey. All Rights Reserved. Educational licence 100045616. Provided as part of Sponsorship deal.
• Maps for Ireland and also during the search using the Google Maps API.

Hosting

• Ordnance Survey® Great Britain have agreed to sponsor the project, allowing us to secure reliable hosting, as well as to develop the project into an educational context.
• Fubra provide superb co-location hosting and support, giving a home to our collection of servers.
• During the early days of the project, we relied on a dedicated server generously donated by Positive Internet.

Supporting Sites

The following support Geograph in various functions:

• Natural Language Query Parsing by MetaCarta Web Services
• Online image manipulation by picnik.com

NOTE: use of these features does not imply endorsement by the host organizations

Technology

This project relies on the following open-source technologies:

Code Libaries

We have reused code from following open-source projects:

• Sorttable - javascript table reordering
• FeedCreator - Generate a wide range of RSS feeds in PHP - extended for GEO
• Rico - Javascript for Rich Internet Applications
• Prototype - Javascript Framework
• OpenLayers - DHTML and Javascript Draggable Map Interface
      Also reuses parts of Rico and Prototype separately
• GeoTools - Javascript Coordinate Conversion

We also strive to adhere to the following standards: