This is a map of places where fresh food is obtained, grown, or distributed in Philadelphia, USA. The map demonstrates how data can be pulled from OpenStreetMap and displayed in a user-friendly application geared toward the public. OpenStreetMap is a free digital map of the world created by volunteers. It is used by map makers throughout the world in apps like this one.
This map was developed in 2014 by Sterling Quinn, then a PhD candidate in the Penn State University Department of Geography. Mr. Quinn studies OpenStreetMap contribution and usage patterns and their application toward social justice issues. The project was advised by Dr. Lakshman Yapa, a professor of geography researching urban food security and poverty issues, and Dr. Alan MacEachren, a professor of geography focusing on geographic information science. Numerous Penn State students and community volunteers also gave their time and skills to enter data into this map. Maggie Norton created the tutorial video.
This page was originally hosted by Penn State GeoVISTA, a research center in geographic information science. It now resides on a server administered by the Central Washington University Department of Geography
You can update the contents of the map by adding and editing items in OpenStreetMap. In order for the changes to be recognized here, you must use the standard and proposed tags for food resources when tagging the items in OpenStreetMap. Your changes will show up the next time the website administrators update the map. (The map was previously on an automatic overnight update cycle, but that is temporarily unavailable; in the meantime the map is refreshed manually by the administrators.) See the tutorial video for a detailed walkthrough of the process of editing the map.
Food data in this map comes from volunteer contributors to OpenStreetMap and originates from various public online sources and community information lists. Additionally, all the basemap data used in this application is from OpenStreetMap with the following exceptions:
Some of the neighborhood names and boundaries were derived from Zillow neighborhoods.
The Philadelphia city limit boundary was obtained from the City of Philadelphia via The Pennsylvania Geospatial Data Clearinghouse.
All of the above-mentioned datasets are freely available. OpenStreetMap data is available under the Open Database License.
All parts of this map were created using free and open source software. The web page uses the OpenLayers mapping API, the jQuery JavaScript library, and the Bootstrap web presentation framework. The background map was created with TileMill. The icons are from QGIS. Data updates and processing are performed using the OpenStreetMap Overpass query API and the GDAL spatial data processing library.
As a courtesy to developers who want to make similar thematic web maps from OpenStreetMap, the scripts used in this application for data retrieval and processing are available for download here under the open MIT license.