Field mapping!

Though we have high resolution satellite imageries and robust tools to digitise a map, we end up not tracing many features due to lack of visibility or some errors or covers. The only solution if an area has to be mapped completely and precisely is field mapping.

Last week a team of 6 involving Srividya, Krishna, Maanya, Amisha, Upendra and I decided to head out for field mapping at 12th main road in Indiranagar, Bengaluru. We aimed at collecting building details, building levels, Point of Interests (POIs), trees and street lights. We walked for more than 3km and tracked our ways using smartphone applications, mainly OSMTracker.

Street view images from Mapillary

We used Mapillary for capturing geo-tagged photos along the way and OSMTracker to collect data of the features while on the move. We added a text note at the location to feed the details of the feature such as building level, building number and names of commercial establishments. For mapping trees and street lights few of the team members used the presets available in the OSMTracker, which turned out to be handy.

Collective edits extracted from Overpass Turbo

In about two hours of time we were able to add around 151 trees, 44 street lamps and 103 buildings.

View of 12th Main on OSM after field mapping

We converted the traces recorded to .gpx format, mapped the collected data using JOSM and finally uploaded them to OpenStreetMap.

On the whole, field mapping was a wonderful experience which gave us an opportunity to explore our neighbourhood and turned out to be a great learning as well as a fun activity.