The next meeting of the Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club (WROCC) will take place on Wednesday 1st, April, and the club will be playing virtual host to Chris Hall, who will be talking about RiscOSM in the context of documenting and illustrating railway history.
Chris will explain how essential Sine Nomine’s OpenStreetMap-based mapping application has become to him in the task, serving as a digital cartography tool that allows him to dispense with the ‘trial and error’ of older approaches to mapping. He will show how he uses it in his historical research, including how he traces vanished lines based on historical data and ordnance survey maps, recreating long lost routes. Areas that will be covered by Chris’ talk include:
- How he recreates old routes by tracing out old railway lines into RiscOSM using OS maps.
- The steps he takes to produce high-quality map images for illustrating his books on signal boxes and sections of railway.
- His home-brew GPS-based satellite navigation system and how it interfaces with RiscOSM to produce ‘rolling’ maps.
- The conversion of legacy file formats into GPX data (used by modern satellite navigation systems).
- How he generates customised map tiles to show Irish rail networks, and the challenges involved in the process.
The meeting will take place on Wednesday, 1st April, with a kick off time of 7:45pm. Like all WROCC meetings, it will be held online using the Zoom video conferencing system, allowing you to join from the comfort of your own home.
The only requirements for attendance are a system on which Zoom can be run, and the meeting credentials. These remain the same as previous meetings, so if you’ve attended any recent monthly WROCC meetings you should have them, but if not they can be obtained by contacting the group.
Although the meeting is open to any RISC OS user, regardless of WROCC membership status, it’s well worth supporting the group by joining; the cost is just £10 each year, and you get the group’s self-titled monthly newsletter sent to your inbox as a PDF file, along with access to their online discussion forum.
You can also find recordings of previous meetings on YouTube, linked from the Meetings page on their website.
