@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

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