My previous try to fix germanys bigges continous wood turned out to be more destruction than fixing. It was reverted by user rrissek.

It created some white tiles, and fixed others that were white before, giving a rather disappointing total.

I think I now understood the way it works - finally. The Harz outline has to go through every tile inside, and it is not enough if a segment goes throug the tile (I know, there are no real segments any more, but you know what I mean...). There has to be a node.

I think it was not very nice to modify the Harz itself (it has 473 nodes even without my fix). So my current try is based on new way inside the Harz, tagged as natural:wood. It has a node in every zoom 12 tile inside the harz, and should finally work. It may take some time to get rendered, because the T@H server is overburdoned right now.

Despite this, I uploaded about 20 gpx files that I missed until now, and traced the viallages around Wernigerode using Landsat images, tagging them landuse:residential.

Normally, I spent 30 to 90 minutes a day cycling, which results in another 30 to 90 minutes editing in JOSM. Yesterday, for the first time, I felt motivated to spend my whole day mapping. I cycled about 4 hours and spend another 4 hours in JOSM. Plus about 1 hour other mapping realted work, this is all I can do per day.

As some of you know (beacuse I tell this every time...) I use audio mapping which produces huge amounts of data that you can not see from the GPS track. I've done all the way from Wernigerode to Ilsenburg (white spot on the map till then), some streets there, and the way back via Drübeck and Darlingerode.

The OSM highscore list

When I now looked into the User statistics I read that this sums up to only 910 "edit points" (it does not say if it counts nodes or ways or tags...). Which gives me a "glorious" rank 43 for that single day. If I do this for the next 4 days, too, I might have a small chance to get into the top 60 mappers of the week, but wait a moment: There's a weekend in between!

Don't get me wrong, my main motivation for mapping is fun, then comes sport, then comes the need of a cycle map for this region, then the good feeling to share information, and then on rank 5 comes the "fame" to be in some list (which no one reads and which is gone tomorror). Other motivations to follow...

I understand that there are some users running automated cleanup bots or import scripts, but I guess there numver is finite. So how do they do this? To reach the score of, let's say "hogrod" I had to do audio mapping 37 hours per day :) And then this would get me on rank 14. Without the audio I would need about 60 hours to generate this amount of data.

Living streets / Lebende Straßen ;)

… צפייה ברשומה המלאה

The Harz is said to be the largest continous wood in germany... some say it was the even the largest one in europe, but who knows.

At least it is big enough to screw up Tiles@Home rendering. T@H uses osmarender to render zoom level 12 Tiles and all subparts. If such a tile is in the middle of the Harz, and does not touch the Harz border, then T@H will not know that there should be some wood around. This way, you get huge white squares inside the Harz. There were about 20 or 30 of these.

I fixed this the quick and dirty way a month before. Someony called Nils has found a better solution, and I adapted this to the whole Harz now. At this moment I found enormous errors in the shape, which I corrected for the northern and eastern boundary. South and west still to be done some other day...

In the slippy map it should look nice, but if you load this area into JOSM you might notice that it's still a dirty hack.

Fixing the software would mean fixing the API at a very low level... to dangerous to fix a single wood. There are no other areas in germany that are big enough to cause this problem.

Due to a bug in JOSM I had to restart 10 times!

By the way, T@H worked well for level 11 and below... while Mapnik is the other way round, and the Harz is missing in all lower zoom levels. But this is another issue. I have no Idea what causes this.

Yesterday I tried out the maximum capycity of my mobile phone. For GPS + audio mapping it is about 3.5 hours. I drove along the border between residential and forest areas, so I was finally able to put them into the map.

At first, I used landuse:residential and natural:wood as completely separated areas with some free space in between. If there was a road between them, I had three parallel ways, each one with its own nodes.

Afterwards, I merged the ways / nodes, so that residential and wood now "touch" each other at the road. This looks a lot nicer in the map, but the JOSM validator plugin now complains about overlapping ways. Am I doing things right?

As well, I now took care of the proper tagging of cycleways, footways and tracks, which are mostly distinguishable in our wood areas, were most ways are "Wanderwege" but commonly used by bikers. That means, as a guidway I used the questions "Does this feel like a cycleway? Would I recomend it to a biker? Would it be possible to drive a car right here?". I hope this meets the common sensus, too.

Same goes for rivers and streams. In the T@H map, rivers look too wide and streams too small, so what to take? I tried to make some compromise.

There is a big number of possible combinations between hardware and software to help you mapping. Most people may have useful equipment without even knowing! You will see, it's not expensive to be a "pro mapper". I got all my GPS/Tracking/audio/photo equipment for a total of $120 on ebay. On top of this, it features a MP3 Player, radio, phone, internet browser, pocket lamp, alarm clock... :)

I've just compiled a list, which may also be used as a OSM shopping guide. It's located right here in the wiki. It definitely needs some spelling corrections, I'm not a native english speaker. When some of the chapters expand over time, it might be needed to exclude them into own articles, like this very exhaustive GPS Reviews list.

To make this complete, I'd like to point you to the list of tracking software in the wiki.

There are tons of other useful information in the wiki, have a closer look if you didn't already!

Last friday I was out again on my bike. As I discussed earlyer, I have finally found a way to record audio and GPS at the same time with my mobile phone.

Tonight I finished a JOSM modification which enables me to load audio into the map. While I'm hearing my own voice, I see a spot moving across the map, which is always exactly at the position in which I recorded the audio.

There's also a feature to play/pause and seek with a slider bar (which is not easy cheese in Java). It still has lot of bugs, I think I will submit the patches in a week or two after some more testing.

This way, I can include much information into the map which would be lost without audio. I got familiar with mentioning every post box, bus stop, street name, hotel and many other POIs.

But what's even cooler, when I now get across a crossing, I can easyly say "here's a crossing, road xyz to the left at 9 o'clock, a cycleway to the right at 2 o'clock, and the oneway street Abc ahead of me". While the GPS shows just a straigt line across the crossing, I can put road stubs in the right position and a not-too-wrong angle into the map. I don't even have to speed down!

If you look at this place in Wernigerode, it looks like a lot of maze driving and visiting some places three times. In fact, this data comes from a mostly linear drive trough.

Sadly I remember that there's a real live waiting for me... Can't wait to record new audio tracks!

Since a few weeks I am actively mapping, and since then I seach for the optimal mapping effectivity. But it's not always easy...

In the beginning, I used mobile trail explorer, which has nice features, but completely stops recording when minimized.

My next try was GPS Track. It has nearly no features, but does record when minimized. As I told in my earlyer post there was some disappointment when I realized that it did not record timestamps, so I could not use it to geotag photos.

I now got a modified version of that software from User Sebastiaan which includes time. It does what it says, it records time along with the position. Thanks again for that!

But anyway, mapping by bike and photographing in these dark winter times does not fit together. To make a sharp photo, I have to stop completely, take a photo, and start again. Anyway, photos may get blurry and unusable. It just seems to be the wrong aproach.

So I tried to switch from photo- to audio-tagging. My phone (SE V600i) does not allow me to start a Java App while doing voice recording - but funnly it lets FIRST start the Java App, minimize it, and then start the voice record. I may record up to three hours nonstop, which should be enough for most days :)

Another problem just popped in: The data from GPS Track is very inaccurate when it is minimized (this is true for the original version as well as for the modified).

So I gave another try to Trek Buddy which I deleted from my phone because I didn't get it to work back than. Now I managed somehow, and it seems as if this might be the perfect choice: It has most of the features known from Mobile Trail Explorer, records perfectly even when minimized, and can save GPX as well as the raw NMEA data.

Finally, I can start riding throug the cities and talking to myself all the time!

(Just a test here: If html-hyperlinks work, what about italic, bold and

headings

?)

Mapping went well until now, though there were minor bugs in "Mobile Trail Explorer" (the Software I used to record GPS trails until now). So I decided to change to "GPS Track". After a short test I thougt this would work better. To improve my mapping performance, I took my digital camera with me, also for the first time.

Home again, I found out, that the new software doesn't record timestamps, and without these, my photos have no GPS coordinate attached - they are useless without. And what's more serious, after some minutes the program decided to change the interval of recording, so that the accuracy of my trail was lowered extremely.

Anyway, I was able to map some streets and cycleways arround Wernigerode and Darlingerode (see Map).

On the end of my trail, I was thinking "If I had a voice recorder with me, what could I do with it?" For the last 10 Minutes, I just spoke to myself as if my voice was recorded and imagined what it would be like... While riding my bike I was able to "record" about 10 times more details than I would be able to remember or photograph. From this moment on, I knew I had to get a voice recorder ... or get my mobile phone to record voice and GPS at the same time.

I started to tell friends about OSM. Most of them were wondering "Why would someone need this? We have google Maps!". After a few words about Copyright most of them agreed that OSM is rather important for us all.

One of them (Uwe) instantly started to put in the name and position of his home (Kuxwinkel near Schlagenthin).

An my ohter friend (Alex) even took my GPS device, coupled it with his mobile phone, and went off to map his home village Berßel (not present until that day) which I linked below (maybe visible in the Tiles@home layer only). Impressive work if you consider it was his first day mapping!

He also implemented my idea of a virtual Tiles@home-client, so we could spread OSM even more, because setting up a render client won't be pain anymore. We are currently awaiting an accout. As soon as we got it, we will optimize the virtual client, and you all can start rendering.

There seems to be a cartographer in most of us. I'm looking forward to the future developement of OSM.

I had some spare time, so I remembered I still had some GPX Trails from my last holliday on the island Mallorca. They fit very well with the data that's allready there, because by chance we drove exactly along those streets which were missing until now, so I could continue the dead ends that existed in the map.

Yesterday I arrived in my former home town Castrop-Rauxel, which in OSM is a white spot until now. I went there by bus, and I am happy to announce, that I could add big parts of the bus line NE 11 (Night Express Line) to the map.

I also noticed that there already were some roads, tagged as highway=residental. The value lacked the 'i' in residential, an thus they were not rendered at all in the map. This was one of the most common errors I made when I was beginning to map, and it seams as I'm not the only one.

I'm only here for a week and have other things to do, but I hope that Castrop will soon evolve as other cities in this area do.

I've heard of OpenStreetMap just one or two weeks ago. This is what I was looking for some years ago, but didn't find it back then.

Mainly I'm interested in writing Software which operates on GIS-Data, I haven't the time to do this right now.

But I had some GPX-Tracks which I recorded with my Sony Erricson V600i some months ago, and used them to map parts of my home town Wernigerode. It's kind of addictive.