Welcome to the project. I had a look at your edits and they look good. Hope you enjoy editing the map. A few things you may want to consider adding that helps the project out a lot are bars/resturants, gas stations, movie theaters, schools, parks, recycling centers, and any other things you know about if you live in the area. Marking these places and adding their names makes the map much more useful, and can only be done by people living in that area who know what’s there.

Please remember to add only information from your own knowledge, things you record on the ground, or traced from the background imagery in the editor. We cannot accept any data from other maps since the goal of the project is to make the data free to anyone. Adding copywritten data breaks this.

Anyway keep up the good work and hope you continue contributing. The more people we have mapping the better the map gets for everybody. :)

-Buck

Another good way to contribute without a GPS is to print out a map from walking papers and just take that with you when you go on your survey. Then as you take pictures you can note whatever you want by just writing it on the walking papers you printed out (including things like road surfaces mentioned above, or where you are talking pictures from, etc). Then when you get home you scan the walking papers you wrote on (or just lay them on a table and take a picture of one page at a time) and when you upload them back to the walking papers site it will make them available as a background layer in JOSM. This lets you quickly write down notes in the field and then overlay the actual OSM data you are working on in JOSM right over top your field notes.

Anyway, hope this helps and hope you enjoy working with OpenStreetMap.

-Buck

Cool. It’s interesting to note also that not only is this data added much more quickly to the OSM database than it will to others, it is even a foot bridge so many datasets wouldn’t include it even if it had existed since time immemorial. Nice work on that. Hope you at least uploaded your GPS traces even if the bridge is already there. It never hurts to have a extra data collected.

-Buck

I have done quite a bit of tracing similar to the work you are doing, it is good to see other people working along the same lines. :)

This fine detail is what really distinguishes OSM from other available maps. Keep up the good work.

-Buck

Actually, I have had a look at the area where you are working and I don’t know if I can split up the buildings like you are doing. Since almost all of them seem to have more than one address it would be hard for me to trace them and know where to split them for different addresses. The work you are doing looks good and I don’t know if I would be able to contribute as much as I initially thought.

One thing you might be able to do that would save some time is to draw just a single building=yes for each whole physical building, and then put the individual addresses as separate nodes inside the building. The nodes can also be part of the outline of the building, but have individual addresses on different nodes. These can additionally be marked with building=entrance so you know where the door is.

The way you are doing it currently though is also acceptable. As with many things in OpenStreetMap we have more than one accepted way of doing them and whichever one works best for the area you are working in is the one that gets used.

-Buck

Welcome to OpenStreetMap.

I would be happy to trace some buildings in your area to save you time in the mapping process if it means you would be able to ground survey to get addresses and street names and such.

If you are the only local mapper there your time would be much better spent collecting data on the ground with something like walking papers or by using audio mapping to collect the information on the ground that is not available in the satellite imagery.

I might trace a few today anyway, but if you would be interested in working together on this I could trace quite a few for you to gather address, POI, and street name data on the ground. Let me know if you would like to collaborate like this. The on the ground information is really the most useful to the project, since anyone, anywhere can trace imagery but only local people can gather information on the ground.

-Buck

If you give me a ring on skype (username andrewbuck40) I can help you with setting up the multipolygon relations. I converted the section of the Green river you traced a while back to a multipolygon relation when I extended it through the town. A relation for a lake would be identical to the way the river was done, the only difference is a lake should have natural=water instead of waterway=riverbank.

All the outer shores of the lake should get a role of ‘outer’ and any ways that make up islands should have the role ‘inner’.

-Buck

Welcome to the project. Let us know if you have any questions about how to add things, what kinds of things can be added, etc.

I see from your profile you are interested in offroad applications for the map. There are some OSM based projects like the HikeBikeMap and also the TopoMap (can’t recall the links but I think google will find them) which may be of interest to you. You can also load OSM map data onto a GPS handheld so information you add can be used in future hikes and other offroad excursions (instructions for doing this are on the OSM wiki).

-Buck

I will start on the buildings here in a little bit then. We cannot use POI information from other sources like garmin since they claim copyright on all of that information. Anything you add to OpenStreetMap must either be based off your own knowledge, or from you surveying the thing on the ground yourself, or traced from the Bing imagery that is available in the editors (we can only use Bing, google won’t allow us to use theirs).

If you want to load OpenStreetMap data onto your garmin gps (which is what I assume you mean by the 24k topo maps) there is info on the wiki on how to export the data and format it for the GPS.

Let me know if you have any further questions. I can be reached either here or on skype (username andrewbuck40) and also hang out in the OSM IRC chat channel (info on the wiki).

-Buck

Looks like you are making excellent progress on that area. If you would like me to I can trace in the buildings for your town (shouldn’t take me more than a few hours for a town that size) and then you can add address and POI information to them. Doing this makes the map much more useful to people and makes for a much cooler looking map.

The address information can be collected very quickly via audio mapping, or somewhat slower with printed maps from walking papers.

-Buck

The way you add everything is the same, you click around the border of the object and either make a long line for roads and rivers, or you make a closed loop around the perimeter of lakes, forests, etc.

In the online editor the bar on the left side where you enter the information about objects has two buttons on the bottom, 'simple' and 'advanced'. If you click to the advanced tab you will see that all the information is just entered as key value pairs, so for example a city street has a key of 'highway' and a value of 'residential'; when we are talking about this we write it as highway=residential.

Knowing this the best way to find the tags you want is either looking on the wiki osm.wiki/ or by searching on taginfo to see what other people are using http://taginfo.openstreetmap.de/ or finally, by just looking at existing objects in the map editor itself.

For adding lakes you will want to add natural=water, rivers and streams are waterway=river and waterway=stream respectively. Also, whenever you trace something from satellite imagery it is a good idea to add a source tag (most likely source=Bing) so that we know where the info comes from. Then if we find out there was a problem with the imagery (maybe it was aligned wrong) it is easy to hunt down what needs to be changed, in addition to providing credit to the imagery provider.

-Buck

Welcome to the project. The easiest way to get started is just to dive right in; starting by adding a few things around your neighbourhood. On the map page zoom in most of the way to an area you know well and then click the 'Edit' tab at the top of the page.

The easiest thing for new users to do is add POI data (points of interest) to the map. In the online editor you can add point of interest like schools, gas stations, restaurants, etc by just dragging the icons below the map editor onto the proper location on the map. Once you have added a POI you can click on it to select it and then add the name, opening hours, and other relevant information in the appropriate fields in the sidebar.

People adding their own local knowledge of their neighbourhood is how the our map is made up so we need people all over the world working on their own little part. Remember that any information you need must be either created from your own local knowledge and/or information you collect by walking around with a GPS or printed map, or it must come from a public domain source. We cannot copy any data from google maps or any other copywritten source since the purpose of this project is to collect information we can share with the world, and google as well as other map companies won't let us share data copied from their maps.

Let us know if you have any other questions either on your diary here, or on the official OSM help centre linked in the left hand bar of these pages. Adding your own local knowledge to the map is fun, rewarding, and very helpful. Hope you are able to contribute to the project.

-Buck

Si quieres, puedo conectar para usted. Yo uso el editor JOSM que es mucho más adecuado para la corrección de este tipo particular de problema que el editor Potlatch en línea que está utilizando. Yo había considerado simplemente la corrección de ayer mismo, pero no porque no quería causar un conflicto de edición si se sigue trabajando allí, pero si usted no va a ser la edición de hoy que no será un problema.

-Buck

(Auto comentarios traducidos por traductor Google, lo siento si la traducción es malo)

Excelente trabajo en la ciudad hasta el momento. Una cosa que noté fue que sin embargo tiene muchos caminos que se cruzan entre si, pero no se conectan. Es necesario agregar un nodo en cada intersección, donde el cruce de caminos para que se conecten a unos de otros. Sin este software de enrutamiento de conexión no se dan instrucciones adecuadas, ya que no sabe que las vías de hecho no se conectan.

Aparte de eso, mantener el buen trabajo. :)

-Buck

The JOSM filters work for data you have already downloaded but don't allow you to choose what you download in the first place. It would be nice if the XAPI servers had functionality that would let you download a subset of the data, I don't think they currently support this.

For example if you ask for the road layer you would get highway=*, cycleway=* and several other things. Asking for the water layer would get you waterway=*, natural=water, landuse=reservior, etc.

This would let people who are working with only one kind of data (perhaps you are cleaning up the lakes/waterways over a large area) and you only need a subsection of the full dataset.

Using the layer download you put less strain on the servers, and equally importantly, your editor doesn't slow way down because you have thousands of nodes for buildings and roads which even if you filter out, still slow down the editor needlessly (assuming you are working on the waterways as given in the above example).

Also, XAPI servers limit your download in two ways, by the size of the area you query and the number of objects in the resultset. By allowing you to download only some subset of the data you may be able to download a larger area since you will not be as likely to hit the object count limit as you are not asking for the portions of the data you don't intend to use.

-Buck

Also a handy trick in hunting down source info for photos is to use http://www.tineye.com/ to try to find the original image. You give it an image file, or the URL to an image and it will find other instances of that image on the web (I think even if they have been rescaled, re-compressed, etc it will still find them).

But yes, properly documenting stuff is definitely the best course of action, tineye is just for when it is not done right originally and you want to "set the record straight".

-Buck

Welcome to the project. Let us know if you need any help with the editing process if you see things you can add. OpenStreetMap is built entirely by individuals contributing their own knowledge to the map, the more people we have contributing, the better the map will be.

-Buck

There are a lot more things rendered on the map than are shown in the key. The main goal of the project is to _build_ the map, rather than just _display_ a map so the map on the main page doesn't really get as much attention as it should.

If you are wondering what a particular feature is you can zoom in on it and then look at it in the editor to see the tags on the object. There are also other sites which display data from openstreetmap and do a better job of making a map since that is their main goal.

Our map is created entirely by volunteers, and you are welcome to join in in adding things to the map. If you are interested there are many places to learn how to contribute. We need local mappers all over the world since the best people to map something are the people that actually live there.

-Buck

Adding source=survey is also a common thing to do with ground verified stuff. That should also help keep people from changing it if the ground is different than in the photo.

Ultimately the best source of information depends on a lot more on whether it is just imagery vs GPS. Ground truth is the only source of much information and good GPS traces give you positions well, but detailed road and building shapes are gotten better from properly aligned imagery (if available).

-Buck

Welcome to the project. We are always glad to have more mappers working with us. Please make sure that anything you add though is not from a copyrighted source. I am not sure what the policy of English Heritage is regarding their information but we have to be careful to only use out of copyright sources, sources we have permission for, or (best of all) information gathered directly by our own mappers.

One of the best ways you can help the project is by ground-surveying your own neighbourhood to add points of interest, like businesses and schools, and also to add addresses of buildings that are traced from satellite imagery (we have permission to trace from the Bing imagery that you will find in the editor). If you don't have a GPS the http://walking-papers.org/ website will let you print out maps you can write notes on and then the map can be scanned and uploaded to the website to trace over in the editor.

I hope you enjoy working on the project, and don't be afraid to make changes, but the copyright issue is one we have to be very careful of if we want the map to remain freely useable by everybody.

-Buck