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

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