Not as good as satilite imagery, but openstreetmap[1], a wiki for maps, is not U...

jhancock · on June 13, 2011

The "charity" is http://jumpstartinternational.org/

Just after mapping Gaza, JumpStart went to map the country of Georgia. For anyone interested in as a programmer (lead or otherwise) in Georgia (Tblisi, cool city) on interesting followup projects, get in touch, I'm on the JumpSatrrt board and we're currently looking for IT talent...email in my profile. When I say "volunteer", we can pay expenses and a small salary...its just not Silicon Valley pay ;).

darklajid · on June 13, 2011

Thanks. I know and like that project. What I tried (and failed?) to say was that I wish for

a) decent _readable_ (here's the focus.. I cannot, yet, read hebrew) maps. Google Maps is actually not that bad for that so far.

b) a way to explore points of interests in advance: This needs satellite images that have a high resolution. OSM doesn't help here for all I can tell.

rmc · on June 13, 2011

a) decent _readable_ (here's the focus.. I cannot, yet, read hebrew) maps. Google Maps is actually not that bad for that so far.

Open Data to the rescue! The folks at Wikipedia (I think) have made a map based on all the different languages. Here's Isreal with English names: http://toolserver.org/~osm/locale/en.html?zoom=8&lat=31....

rmc · on June 13, 2011

On a related note, OpenStreetMap has allowed minority languages such as Basque (http://www.euskalmapa.com/), Scottish Gaelic (http://osmalba.org/), Irish (http://maps.openstreetmap.ie/?zoom=7&lat=53.55822&lo...) to make their own custom map in their language.

aw3c2 · on June 13, 2011

Since this is Hacker News: https://github.com/kothic/kothic-js#readme should make it fairly easy to render your own map with latin characters.