No, absolutely not. Google is completely off limits (this means their maps, their satellite imagery, and the street view).

The only imagery we can use is the Bing or Yahoo imagery (not the bing street view though, just the overhead view). For some contries there is also imagery that has been released but it varies from place to place. You can check the wiki page for whatever countries you are interested in to see if there is a local source available.

-Buck

I have been using mapwarper to orthorectify imagery of Libya from the space shuttle/station over the last few days. If you can find any good images of the areas you are interested in, I can try to get them rectified so they can be traced. The best way to search seems to be using the "Clickable Map" under the search tab at the top. I browsed through a bit and nothing immediately jumped out at me, but I don't know enough about the area to know where to look either.

http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/

-Buck

Welcome to the project.

-Buck

Just rectified and have begun tracing the city of Marsa-Brega from the single frame taken below.

http://warper.geothings.net/maps/4635
osm.org/browse/way/124111798

-Buck

The last two images (of 4 total) of Sirt.

http://warper.geothings.net/maps/4631
http://warper.geothings.net/maps/4632

osm.org/browse/way/123988526
osm.org/browse/way/123988527

-Buck

Another oilfield rectified and mostly traced. This one is the "Warehouse 59e Oilfield", a somewhat interesting name. There is another airport called "Warehouse 59a" which may very well be an oil field as well given the similar name.

http://warper.geothings.net/maps/4629
osm.org/browse/way/123813961

-Buck

Just added an image for a oil field south of Ajdabiya. I have traced pretty much everything in the image but am making a note of it here in case I want to compile all these images together later.

http://warper.geothings.net/maps/warp/4628
osm.org/browse/way/123806417

-Buck

I have the first two (of four in total) of the highest resolution photos of Sirt which have been taken by the ISS. I will try to get the other two uploaded although it is trickier for those as there are fewer roads mapped in that area to use for alignment. Here are the two mapped thus far:

http://warper.geothings.net/maps/4624
http://warper.geothings.net/maps/4625

osm.org/browse/way/123743113
osm.org/browse/way/123753313

-Buck

Here is a much better image of the Misrata harbor area during the day than the one posted in the first message. There is another photo further east of the harbor which I will upload next. In addition to being better quality, these images are newer than the previous ones; they were taken in January of this year.

http://warper.geothings.net/maps/4622
osm.org/browse/way/123725856

-Buck

I have the night image for Misrata rectified now. It was a bit tricky to find control points outside of the city for this one but I think the alignment is pretty decent given the low resolution of the image (the night image covers a much wider area than the two day ones). The links below are for the map and the bounding box, respectively.

http://warper.geothings.net/maps/4616
osm.org/browse/way/123717085

-Buck

One thing that has been a great help to me is the fact that for my area (Fargo, ND) the most zoomed in Bing imagery is actually a different satellite pass then the imagery if you zoom out just far enough to load the next set of tiles. The "less" zoomed in one is only about 6 months old so it is good for locating things that are new and, more relevant to this discussion, it was taken at a time when there were few leaves on the trees. I have found many houses tucked away like this by switching back and forth between the two image sets. Probably not something that is available everywhere but worth checking for when you start a new area.

-Buck

For a pedestrian bridge we will likely continue to be ahead for quite a while as the others have very little focus on pedestrian/bicycle infrastructure. Keep up the good work, it is little differences like this that will eventually open people's eyes to the project when they see how well it works.

-Buck

I wonder if it would be possible to get permission to trace these "Public Eye" images for OSM. Given what I can see about their project on their web-pages it looks like they would probably be open to the idea, however I couldn't find any license terms for the pictures.

They may not even have the right to allow further tracing, etc, of the images either as they may have gotten them on special permission from the other agencies listed in the pictures bottom frame. If we could get permission to trace from their images though it would be pretty neat as they look like they cover a lot of "interesting" locations that would be kind of cool to have in OSM.

-Buck

Looks like spremberger beat me to the roads. :) Thats cool though, its fun to see areas like this where we have the best map, even if all it is is a few main roads it's better than the competition.

-Buck

Hard to tell what it is just from the picture. There is definitely a fence surrounding it and checkpoints to get in/out as well as a helipad inside it. It is probably a military something or other, but may just be luxury estates (like a gated community in the US. Being located on a lake like this rather suggests the luxury homes idea as well.

Unfortunately, neither Bing nor Yahoo seem to have hi-res imagery of the area, however the bing imagery is good enough to trace the roads to/from that area (but unfortunately the buildings/streets inside it). For you, or anyone else reading this, please keep in mind that we cannot trace from or use google in mapping this area, but it is an interesting place to look at just for fun.

I might try to trace in some of the major roads and the lake (if its not already there). It seems like an important enough area that it should be mapped so at least getting the major roads through there will help people find it again in the future (maybe when we have better imagery to work from). The Bing imagery is not only somewhat low-res, it may also be quite old so I don't know how great those tracings would be, although I would suspect that it's unlikely any roads were moved/removed, it is more likely that newer roads were just added around the intersection there with the existing highways either left as they were or just resurfaced/improved.

-Buck

I'm also not from the area, just offering more suggestions. If you turn out to be the only person in the area (or the only active one), you may want to try to find others around the world who would like to help do the armchair mapping, leaving you more time to focus on ground surveys, etc.

Walking papers, as listed above, lets you re-scan the work so you or _anyone_ else can enter the information. You could potentially set up a team of people to help enter the information that you collect. This would not only be a more efficient use of time/resources, but would allow you to interact with more of a pseudo-community for your area, even if there are not other mappers physically in your area.

Anyway, just a thought. I enjoy armchair mapping myself and do quite a lot of it even though I am the only really active person in the area and should probably be focusing more on groundwork as well.

-Buck

Ahh, it looks like the fill/casing are done as separate rules so that they can be rendered as separate layers when the image is built up. Guess it's going to take quite a bit of poking around the file to really get a sense of how things are layed out and how they interact with eachother.

-Buck

Actually I am starting to make more sense of it. I am using a proper XML editor now, rather than just a normal text editor, and I see that the rules are duplicated because there is both a minor-roads-casing and a minor-roads-fill style sections. This is why I was seeing so many duplicate rules, as each road type seems to have an entry in the corresponding casing/fill style for that object type.

Although this explains the duplicated filters and zoom-level parameters, I don't understand the reason for having separate style sections with so much duplication. It seems to me you would want one clause with a single filter string to match the road type once, and then under that rule you list more than one entry to do both the casing and the fill in one place. Having them in two separate sections like this makes it much harder to understand what is actually going on and means that any change to how the roads look needs to be done in two distantly separated places in this huge file.

-Buck

I have used the GPS tracks in the past and they are quite useful for the area they cover however they are almost all in the southwest portion of the country. Also, because it was a recreational driver many of the tracks are just driving around in circles out in the sand dunes and not necessarily on roads. They have been useful though and if you find out about any others let me know.

If you want to make a mailing list post you are welcome too, I don't follow mailing lists much so I haven't done much with them. I see you have been doing a lot between Al Khums and Zlitan which was really empty, looks much better now.

I plan to keep alternating between doing buildings east of Zlitan and continuing the "rural" road network in the far southeast corner. This way I am working in a different area so we avoid edit conflicts and/or duplication of objects.