Geograph - photograph every grid square

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

Original Idea

• Gary Rogers came up with original concept, launching Geograph as part of a online Geocaching magazine.

Photographs

• Copyright on all photographs is retained by the original contributors, 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

• Paul Dixon, created the software as an open-source, GPL licensed project, and is responsible for much of the original coding / design, as well as building the first dedicated server farm. Paul can be contracted through his company Elphin Limited.
• Barry Hunter, developer and maintainer of www.nearby.org.uk lends his wide experience of working with mapping technologies and is responsible many of the site search and mapping features, as well as contributing many other enhancements. Now takes care of the day to day running of the site servers.
• Hansjörg Lipp has fixed many a bug in the core code, during the creation of Geograph Germany.
• Ian Rutson contributed to the Memory Map export features.
• David Morris has helped with the profile features and a bulk standalone upload application - JUppy.
• Rudi Winter created the GeoTrips section.

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 National Library of Scotland.
• 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. Later available in OS OpenData (no longer maintained)
  • 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.
• Great Britain 1:250 000 Scale Colour Raster Mapping Contains OS data © Crown Copyright and database right 2022
• Maps for Ireland and also during the search using the Google Maps API.
• Selected map extracts are from the OpenStreetMap project, via the Cycle Map rendering.
• UK Unit Postcodes, from OS OpenData : Contains Royal Mail data © Royal mail copyright and database right 2010.
• Landcover Classification: LCM2015 © and database right NERC (CEH) 2017. All rights reserved. Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2007.
• Note also we use a wide range of baselayers in our coverage mapping. The appriate credit appears when select a different base layer.

Reverse Geocoding Gazetter

We have compiled an agorithm to show a 'near to' place, to help provide context when viewing a photo. Compiled with with a range of Gazetteer Products

• OS 250K Gazetteer Contains OS data © Crown Copyright and database right 2022
• OSNI Open Data - Placename Gazetteer CC BY 4.0
• Centres of Population - OSi National Placenames Gazetteer LPS Open Government Data Licence
• UK Island Names Copyright Maps RSPB, CC BY 4.0
• Islands - National 1m Map Of Ireland CC BY 4.0
• Data was also processed using data from OS Boundary-Line Contains OS data © Crown Copyright [and database right] (2021)

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.
• Tiger Computing keep our servers running, performing the routine maintainance, and incident support.
• During the early days of the project, we relied on a dedicated server generously donated by Positive Internet.
• Between 2007 and 2020 used Co-Location services from Fubra/Livetodot

Supporting Functionality

The following support Geograph in various functions:

• Online image manipulation by picmonkey.com
• Interactive 3D image viewer by cooliris.com
• EAFlashUpload flash file uploader

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

Technology

This project relies on the following open-source technologies:

We also run geograph images though various algorithms, including Carrot2 Clustering Engine, and Cloud Vision API.

In addition www.geograph.org.uk uses:
   Linux (Ubuntu), http://httpd.apache.org/Apache, memcached, redis, munin, nfs, haproxy, varnish, and m/monit.
to deliver a high performance website - but are not required to run the Geograph codebase.

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
• 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: