One of my latest personal projects is Briscycle, which aims to eventually be the most comprehensive resource for cycling in and around Brisbane.
I figure a humble beginning never hurt anybody, so while the content is currently somewhat limited the goal is sky high. If you’re in or around the area, check it out for some great day trip ideas.
Crowdsourced Data
One primary limitation that has stymied development in the past has been lack of available data on cycle networks in the area. Brisbane City Council have their own WMS and PDF based map systems, and the Gold Coast has their own PDF fliers outlining bike maps as well, but none of this data is sufficiently open or accurate enough to remix into something useful.
This is where crowdsourced data comes to play.
For the last year or so I’ve been contributing to OpenStreetMap in my free time, and in just one year the coverage of street and amenity data has expanded incredibly thanks to edits by committed locals and hobbyists. With the recent release of the incredible NearMap PhotoMaps and the continued expansion of the OpenStreetMap database, we’re finally in a place where the freely available crowdsourced data rivals commercial and government data sources in terms of accessibility and completeness.
For this reason I’ve used OpenStreetMap to render a customised map of brisbane cycleways specifically so that visitors can get a fast overview of how to get around. I’ve further mixed in data from other sources such as contour lines from NASA and landmarks from free encyclopedia Wikipedia to further enhance the user experience.
Existing Technologies
I’ve utilised Silverstripe and OpenLayers to combine the simplicity of WYSIWYG content management, a powerful object oriented framework for development, and a highly customisable web map library.
Pages are tagged using a geotagging extension which lets articles utomatically display a relevant Briscycle map inline. In the future this will be accessible via an API and automatically shown on the main Briscycle Map.
Openlayers has been custom built with the minimal required libraries, then been further combined and compressed together with map logic. The site has a rather elegant method of dynamically loading map requirements as required which further reduces page loading time, and has further been heavily optimised for speed. Briscycle is hosted in Sydney for near perfect response times within Australia.
Small Screen & Accessibility
The OpenLayers map library is currently inaccessible to most non-mainstream users. This is a problem I hope to fix in subsequent releases of Briscycle through implementation of a static (non-javascript) map implementation as well as possible WAI-ARIA and other necessary extensions to the OpenLayers library itself.
The site does however render in small screens as little as 240 pixels wide, thanks to a highly optimised configuration of Javascript & stylesheets. The site will also display the OpenLayers slippy map on a number of mobile Webkit based browsers including the iPhone and modern Nokia handsets, as well as utilising the W3 geolocation recommendation to request and automatically fly to the visitor’s location. A Google Gears fallback has also been provided for browsers which support it.
Continued Growth
Briscycle growth is projected to continue in both wholesale content such as trip recommendations as well as in data depth. While the existing OpenStreetMap cycleway data has been expanding at a rapid rate thanks to the availability of the NearMap PhotoMaps service, I am also planning continued on-the-ground reconnaissance missions in the name of expanding both OpenStreetMap and subsequently Briscycle databases.
Due to the wide range of data sources, building a community is going to be a challenge because in essence the site aggregates a majority of its content from elsewhere. Integration with other sites and services is being investigated, and a roadmap is being developed in this area.
Briscycle is still very much in the early stages of development. The site is stable and the first phase of development is complete, and the next few months will see continued development on both data depth and search engine placement before development continues on enhanced features.