Ottawa Biking Problems is in the Ottawa Open Data competition! We hope you’ll consider voting for us.
Why?
Cyclists understand what facilities are available to cyclists better than anyone else, and the city is so large that it is difficult to collect that distributed information. This site pulls that together.
What does it do?
We’ve been around since May 2010 and collected more than a hundred reports from dozens of cyclists , but if you’re new to OBP, here’s an overview of what it can do. We’ve made pretty large changes in the last week, it might be worth have a look if you haven’t visited us recently.
Viewing data
Look on the main map, and you’ll see locations that have been identified by local cyclists. The usual Google Maps zoom, pan and Streetview features work. It also includes the Google Maps bicycle layer. You can overlay the ward boundaries, or search by problem type.
Every report has information associated with it. If you click on a report marker on the map, it’ll display the information available.
All entries will have a title and a description. Other possible information includes external links, uploaded photos, or a Google Streetview representation.
Users can also see more details for some of the reports. There are many examples.
Contributing
Users can also create new reports. Thats as easy as filling out a web form. Users can search for an address or click on a map to specify the information. They enter descriptive information, report categories (construction, improvement, problem, etc) and other details. They can upload photos, and find the right shot on Google Streetview. Entries are then edited and added to the map.
Cyclists can edit existing entries, which lets them click an edit button and change the fields for the report.
There’s also a forum for comments, which has a few hundred entries from this year. It is particularly active in the cycling season.
So vote!
We hope you like enough what you see to vote for us in the Open Data competition. It closes January 28th!
