Welcome to OSM, glad you converted over from mapmaker. :) As I am sure you already know from your editing here, we are much more open to having things like your pathways example and fun stuff like that. The other big issue you forgot to mention in your list of mapmaker problems is that all the data you give to them just goes into a “black box” that google controls and can release or not at their own whims, but with OSM you or anyone else can play with the data and do cool stuff with it.

Hope you keep using OSM and have fun with it. Let us know if there are any questions you have. I assume you probably are pretty familiar with the project with as long as you have been mapping, but there is always more to learn. :)

-AndrewBuck

You need to check the option in the map app you are using to make the GPS traces. Some apps will try to snap the GPS fix to the nearest road. You need to make sure you are not doing this as if you do, the snapped tracks will inadvertantly copy the apple maps road data into our GPS database which could introduce copyright issues. If the app you are using uses OSM as the map data then the snapping is less of a problem copyrightwise, but still makesthe gps data less useful for trying to improve the map by aligning imagery, etc. IT could just be errors though too, hard to say, although it does look fairly precise just to be an error that just happens to follow the road.

-AndrewBuck

Yeah, there were some problems with the database this morning so that is probably why your downloads failed.

For collecting survey information you should check out the ‘field papers’ website. You print out a map of an area on on paper, then you can walk around and take notes on those pages, then you take a picture of your notes and upload them to the website. Finally the website will make your notes available as an imagery layer right in the editor, so you can copy them into the database. http://fieldpapers.org/

Another really good way to collect a lot of information really quickly is a technique called audio mapping.

Keep up the good work, and welcome to the project. You can map pretty much anything that interests you so just because the map has a lot on it already, don’t let that discourage you; there is always more detail to add. :) Remember to have fun, and feel free to ask if you have any questions.

-AndrewBuck

Although there may be no technical reason for ordering them, it does make them a bit easier to work with. I wouldn’t put a lot of effort into ordering them manually though, there is the ‘sort’ button in the relation order to do it automatically, but I don’t know if I would edit the relations just to change the order. Definitely worth doing when you do make some other change to the route, however.

-AndrewBuck

Be aware that ‘unclassified’ does not mean, no one has classified the road yet, this is what highway=road is for. Unlcassified is actually an actual classification, being the lowest level of road in a country. A lot of people get confused about this since the naming scheme is somewhat ambiguous. Check the wiki page for highway=unclassified for more details on this.

-AndrewBuck

By the way, you should check out JOSM and the ‘building tools’ plugin for tracing buildings. It is much less work to trace them, and produces a better result since the corners are nice 90 degree angles. Definitely worth taking the time to learn if you plan to do much building mapping. There are some good videos on the wiki about how to use it effectively.

-AndrewBuck

Yes, looks very good. I have been doing similar landuse coverage west of Fargo as a test experiment in how the result looks and was happy with the results. Good to see someone on the other side of the line doing similar work.

Keep up the good work. Bit by bit the landuse in the midwest is being done, I think it will be really interesting when the coverage gets more complete.

-AndrewBuck

Don’t worry about missing the dams. The tool is still a work in progress and we are still refining exactly what to map and what zoom level to use, etc.

The dams themselves are only of secondary importance anyway. We are mapping them because water (of any kind) is important in a desert area, but our primary goal right now is to help aid organizations, and they are concerned where the towns are. The townspeople they help will know where the water is, so the main problem is to find the people. :)

Anyway, thanks for the help marking images, and thank you to anyone who shared the links via twitter/facebook. The ‘referrer url’ records on the webserver show a couple dozen people found the site through these links, so please keep sharing them. We will probably be putting up some more imagery in the future so check back and tell you friends.

-AndrewBuck

I am actually currently working on something like this right now. It is called OSM Logic, and it is an OWL ontology which is designed to give semantic meaning to the various concepts in the OSM realm, as well as to create a machine readable database of tags and how they relate to one another.

For example, the tag section of the ontology lists individual tags and then uses relations to show when one tag implies another tag, or that one tag is equivalent to another tag, and when there are equivalent tags which one is preferred and which are deprecated, etc. I had considered the possibility of adding things like names in various languages, and short descriptions of the tags to this as well (the OWL language actually provides some support for this itself).

The ontology is still being developed and is still in what I would call a “pre alpha” type of phase, so I have not posted it online yet (but I am getting close to releasing it now to alpha stage). When I do release it I will write a diary entry describing it in detail and how I envision it being used.

The ontology itself is much bigger than just what you described here, but the tagging subsection is almost an exact match for what you described, although you do list a few things I had not specifically planned but maybe they could be added as well.

-AndrewBuck

There is a brewery in New Ulm, Minnesota that has a “beer garden” surrounding the brewery, so I would guess this is the kind of thing that the mapper was meaning to indicate. The brewery facility itself though is probably a landuse=industrial.

-Buck

Nice work. I live in North Dakota and we have a big problem with the tiger residential->track issue here as well. I have done a bit of cleanup in the immediate area but there is still a lot more to be done. Little bit by little bit though it is all getting reworked. Hopefully in the next couple years we will have complete road classification done.

-AndrewBuck

Welcome to the project. Looks like you figured out how the editing works. Hope you enjoy working on adding more things and have fun with it. We need people’s local knowledge from all over the world to improve the map.

Remember, we cannot use any information taken from other maps because we want to be able to share our data with anyone who wants it.

Let us know if you have any questions about adding anything else.

-AndrewBuck

Oh, by the way, just to clear up some info from above, adding /dirty to the tile URL does force a re-render of the tile. But the coastlines shapefiles are built using a separate process as mentioned, and it is these files which are out of date, so re-rendering the tile will update all the roads, etc, in the tile, but the coastline will still look the same until the shapefiles are rebuilt by the admins.

-AndrewBuck

@Jopparn

The coastline rebuilding does not happen automatically every two weeks, but rather it happens manually whenever the admins get around to running it. Recently there have been a lot of changes to the project happening and so coastline rendering has fallen by the wayside.

Just keep making your changes and they will eventually get shown on the map. I do a lot of coastline work myself and it gets frustrating sometimes as it takes a while to show up but you learn to live with it. (There was about a 4 month gap before the last coastline rebuild) As long as it looks right in the editor then you have done what needs to be done and the update process will happen eventually.

-AndrewBuck

Yes it is interesting to see some of the thoroughly mapped places in OSM. I am not in Atlanta, but I am sure there are a few people there in your area. If you set your position on your user preferences page to be in the city it will show you a map of other users in your area (assuming they have set their location, too).

Here is a local news segment about some people doing OSM in Atlanta from a few years ago. They might still be around…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yidk6zI7gY

Anyway, hope you have fun contributing your knowledge to the map. Start by adding your favorite resturants, coffee shops, etc and then just work your way out from there.

-AndrewBuck

Awesome, and once again welcome to the project. There are a lot of different ways people have already used the data so if you need help with some particular thing feel free to ask. The osm IRC channel is a good place to ask. There is a wiki page with the IRC channel details on it. There is also help.openstreetmap.org (which is linked in the left sidebar). You login there with your OSM account so no need to create a separate login.

Also, if you are interested in walking around with a printed map to gather building address data and business names, etc, often there are people who will trace in the buildings in the area around where you live to save you the time of doing it yourself. Having a printout with all the buildings makes gathering info really easy with something like http://walking-papers.org/

-AndrewBuck

@Jrrusse

Regarding point 1, we have such a database of address to lat/lon and vice-versa. The database system is called Nominatim, and it uses OSM data, TIGER data, and several other datasources to try to resolve addresses. Unfortunately the process of resolving an address is tricky, even with complete data, and even harder with semi-complete data like we have.

You can help out a lot by collecting the addresses in your area and adding them to our database. For an example of what a more complete portion of the map have a look at cities like London, or Berlin. Address lookups in more completely mapped areas work very well, but the US hasn’t had as many people mapping as Europe. That is beginning to change but we still need more people mapping.

-AndrewBuck

There have been several projects that have merged OSM data with SRTM. The opencyclemap is one I think, open terrain map is another.

If you are interested in trying out rendering without too much fuss about the setting it up I just finished putting together a virtual machine image that I describe in this post. You can also see a lot of info about the process at www.switch2osm.org The virtual machine image is basically the machine from the “Building a tileserver from packages” on that site.

It is very easy to use the VM to download an extract of the OSM data and get the standard OSM map style that is on the main site, but rendered locally on your own machine. Once you have that you can play around with changing the style, etc. Of course setting up your own rendering server is not too difficult either if you choose to go that route.

Hope you find the project useful, and I hope you continue adding your own knowledge to the map. Remember, we cannot use any copywritten data in our maps so do not copy from any other maps when entering data, just use your own knowledge, or things you go survey yourself.

-AndrewBuck

If you are interested in buying the image, the HOT team would probably make a task to map it, especially if there are people there in the city that can add on the ground information.

I looked at the city on openstreetmap and it looks like a lot of the major connecting roads to other towns are already mapped. Often these can be seen in even the low resolution imagery if they are major roads.

Wikipedia says the population is ~50,000 which is about 1/3 the size of Gulu, so it shouldn’t be too big of a job to trace it. If you are interested in pursuing this further you should subscribe to and then send an e-mail to the HOT mailing list laying out your proposal. With people working on Gulu and Lira right now there may not be many left over to trace Arua, but we should be finished with those towns shortly.

http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/hot

-AndrewBuck

The imagery is provided to us as part of the Humanitarian Openstreetmap Team (HOT) response for that city. The Red Cross acquired the image and runs a server that we have access to for tracing. I am not sure whether they bought the images or if they got them for free from Digitalglobe, but in any case it is a sort of “one off” event and unfortunately will not get imagery for other places unless a similar project happens there. We sign a special agreement with them agreeing to use it for humanitarian work in developing this map, so they probably got it via some special agreement with Digitalglobe, but that is just my guess.

Not sure exactly what city you area looking for imagery for but the [orbview 3[(osm.wiki/Orbview3) imagery covers a lot of the world and is good enough for basic mapping.

-AndrewBuck