The actual measuring of the trees goes pretty quick. With ~40,000 trees in the city and measuring a thousand trees per hours it is a bit of a job to re-measure them all but not impossible. It would not be difficult for a couple people to repeat when new imagery becomes available in the future. There will be new imagery probably as often as it would merit updating a map of tree sizes manually anyway. Because they are trees and you know their relative size, you can make a guess about their age and then simulate what size they are likely to be in the future. This means that a full re-measuring will likely be unnecessary anyway as you could have the computer algorithm age the trees and grow them accordingly and then just have the people check it against the imagery and adjust the ones that are not right. This would likely be much faster than the initial survey.

-AndrewBuck

@joakimfors Regarding the search string you posted, that search string will also select newly added nodes that are part of a way (such as a forest, or hedge). The validator groups untagged standalone nodes separately as ones that are part of a way normally don’t need tags. I’m sure the search can be extended to handle that properly, but I know the way the validator does it will always work.

-AndrewBuck

I posted the style on the wiki at:

http://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Styles/TreeCrownDiameter

You can enable the style directly from josm by going to preferences (F12) then to ‘Map settings’ which is the third tab down on the left side, then to the Map Paint Styles tab at the top. The style is named TreeCrownDiameter and should show up in the list on the left side. This config menu can be reached directly from the ‘Map paint styles pannel (Alt+Shift+M).

-AndrewBuck

Welcome to the project. I see you added the location of a hostel to the map. When we add locations of buildings and things like that we put the address over the actual building itself rather than on the roadway as you have done. I looked at trying to move the node for you, however I don’t know exactly where it should go.

Also, be advised that we cannot take anything from google maps, google streetview, or even the google satellite imagery. The only sources we can accept are things you survey yourself, things from your own personal knowledge, and things you trace from the microsoft bing imagery available in the editor (we have an agreement with them for this imagery, but not with google). The reason for these limitations is that we want to share our data freely with the world and to do so we need to create the data entirely from our own sources, we cannot copy from other copyrighted sources.

Regarding your interest in environmental issues, I have mapped quite a few things of environmental significance myself and there are others working on this as well. We have so far mapped wind turbines and other power plants, oil wells, animal feeding operations, community gardens, and many other things.

I and others are available on the #osm IRC channel if you have any further questions, or you can ask them here, or on http://help.openstreetmap.org/

Hope you enjoy working on the project. Let me know if you would like me to help you get started on mapping enviromental things or anything else. I can help you via voice chat on skype or google talk if you need detailed instructions to get started.

-AndrewBuck

The bot can sometimes remove roads that were from an OK import when the road was split yielding two segments. One segment keeps its old ID and history (and the bot will leave this alone), whilst the other gets a new ID and has version 1 attributed to whomever split it. If the splitter was a decliner then this “new” segment will be deleted by the bot since it was “created” by a decliner, however the nodes that make up the segment will be left in the DB so re-creating the way is pretty easy, just connect the dots.

In the US in some of the very heavily redacted parts I think people did do some small imports, but merging in the import is a lot of work, so unless it is pretty substantial you are better off just re-mapping using the normal OSM methods.

-Buck

Not sure what aspect of buildings you intend to work with, but if you plan on tracing more buildings from the imagery I would highly recommend using the building tools plugin for JOSM.

Not only does it make adding new buildings much faster and easier, the resulting buildings look very nice because you automatically get nice square corners on the buildings. You can also set the preferences for the building tools in the Edit menu of JOSM so that it automatically adds as many tags as you would like. I have mine add building=yes and source=Bing.

In any case, have fun working with the project. It can be really satisfying to see your contributions used on the map, and you can know that not only are they useful on the map but the open license allows others to do neat things with the data as well. :)

-AndrewBuck

Just so you know, the way this usually happens is that an agreer creates the original way so the way and the nodes are all clean. Then a non-agreer splits the way and one part gets a new ID. This “new” way is considered dirty by the bot and it gets deleted, but since the nodes that make it up are all clean they get left.

This was done intentionally to make it easier to re-map areas where this kind of thing happened.

-Buck

My understanding of the friend system on OSM (and I could be wrong about this) is that “friending” is a one way action; so unless the people you friended also friend you back, they will get the extra update notifications, etc.

-Buck

@dcp

The location where we publish the minutely diff files used by outside sources to keep up to date against the OSM DB was changed before the redaction bot actually started running. This means that if they take no action, they will stop getting updates, but their map will not be broken without them knowing about it. For those that choose to they can easily switch to the new location and if they do so they have to live with the consequences until the map is fixed.

-Buck

For as much as you complain about this project, you sure do stick around.

-Buck

Don’t know if you have already added these links to the potential datasources page or not but if not, it would be good to add them so they are all in one place.

osm.wiki/Potential_Datasources

-Buck

Welcome to the Open Street Map project. In case you didn’t already know, our maps are made by volunteers from all over the world making changes to the map database. If you click the ‘edit’ tab at the top of the map view it will open a simple online, flash based, editor which you can use to add information based on your own local knowledge of the area. There is also a more advanced editor called JOSM which is a more traditional GIS type editor with a more difficult learning curve, but much more power. There are also plugins available for ArcGIS and some of the other professional GIS suites, but the recommended way of editing is using either JOSM or potlatch (the online editor) since they are custom made to suit our data model.

We currently have very few map editors ‘on the ground’ in Africa so any contributions you make to these areas would be greatly appreciated and really help out the project. Let us know if we can be of an assistance to you, either in adding to the dataset, or helping you make use of the data for your GIS work. There are many people who do tracing of satellite imagery in Africa to try to build up a simple base map and we may be able to assist you in this way as well. That way you can focus on getting on the ground info like street names, hospital locations, etc, without having to create the base map yourself.

Just a quick reminder though, please keep in mind that we cannot accept copyrighted data from other sources into our databases unless we get a get proper permission to do so. This is to keep the dataset open and available for use by everyone.

-Buck

Nice work. With regard to your comments regarding the rendering, you can check out http://openpistemap.org/

Not sure if it covers the whole world or not but the focus is exactly what you are interested in.

-Buck

Keep in mind when you are lokoing at altitude from GPS that the error in altitude is usually 5 to 10 times greater than the error in ground position. I regularly see altitude errors of +/- 25 meters even when I have a good fix from many satellites.

-Buck

Cool. They don’t have to be uploaded right away (I often let them sit on my computer for many weeks until I get around to uploading them). Just wanted to make sure you were aware you could upload them and how they could be used by others.

-Buck

Nice work. The area looks quite detailed. One thing to be aware of, GPS traces will be less accurate if they are under tree cover. If you haven’t already done so, you should upload your GPS traces to the main OSM server. That way they can accumulate with future traces by you or other people and can further refine the exact position of trails and whatnot.

Excellent work though. The area looks like a fun place to go exploring.

-Buck

The zip:left and right are for the left and right side of the road, if you are driving along it in the direction of the way (i.e. the way the road would go if a oneway=yes tag was added).

-Buck

Welcome to the project. I see you haven’t made any changes to the map data yet, if you need help getting started with that let us know.

The easiest way to start is to zoom in to an are of the map you would like to add something to (schools, restaurants, churches, pubs, etc, can all be added), and then click on the ‘Edit’ button at the top of the page.

This will launch the Potlatch editor. Then you can drag and drop the icons for the various things in your area onto the map, as well as add their names and other information as well. Our map is made almost entirely from the local knowledge of people all over the world. If your area is blank then it means you are the first person from that area to join the project.

Please keep in mind that we cannot copy map data from any other maps (like google, mapquest, bing, etc). This is because our goal is to freely share our map with anyone who wants it. If we copy map data from other copyrighted maps then we cannot share the data (and would be in violation of the law).

-Buck

Josm has the validator tool built in which can fix duplicate nodes. If you load the existing osm data that got uploaded and then your data on top of it it should detect and be able to fix the duplicates.

I am not sure how it determines whether to keep the existing nodes that are already in the DB or if it just picks one at random to delete.

Also in case you haven’t already done so, you should send an e-mail to the imports mailing list. This is supposed to be done before you do any importing at all so I would do this before you do anything else. They can also probably give you better advice on how to recover from this.

-Buck

Welcome back to the project. :)

-Buck