OpenStreetMap
I’ve been a member of OSM for just under 2 years and I suppose I ought to start using this diary.
Project Map Pinedale
For the past few months, the majority of my activity has been targeted at the town of Pinedale, Wyoming, United States. This was (and still is) a very under-mapped town by most standards. So far, I have been able to map the majority of the businesses & buildings on main street (Pine Street). The remainder of the town on the map is almost exclusively roads at this point with some scattered buildings.
Goals
My personal goal for the next few months will be to map every major building (basically everything with the exception of some outbuildings, sheds, etc). Besides merely creating building outlines, I would like to tag each building with its proper address and any other information I can gather on it. Additionally, I will improve road mappings as I notice deficiencies. Ideally, I will be able to accomplish all this by the end of August.
Other
I will try to continue adding to my diary with status updates & possibly projected end-dates for this project.
On the odd chance someone else sees this entry & would like to contribute to this project, I would love to hear from you!
Discussion
Comment from Piskvor on 5 February 2016 at 14:53
Well, this is an ambitious project for sure. Perhaps another in the area would be “river tracing” - looking south of Pinedale, the Green River seems to disappear in places. I have traced the main water course for a bit, will continue later.
Comment from MRPockets on 5 February 2016 at 17:48
Thanks for doing that. I have traced some of the river a while ago, but decided to focus on Pinedale itself for now.
I know this is a lot of work I’ve decided to do, but Pinedale isn’t a very large town so if I get a few streets-worth of mapping done each week, I should be able to accomplish my goals.
The United States overall is a rather undermapped area on OSM; I personally think that a lot of the reason is the cultural differences between Europe and the US regarding personal data (i.e. Americans are much more willing to let Google track them in exchange for nice services) but hopefully the OSM community here can grow as the map improves.
Comment from Piskvor on 10 February 2016 at 11:30
Added some more; now it’s at least a bit continuous, albeit not quite smooth. BTW: do you know if this is a pond on a stream that flows into Pine Creek, or is it an oxbow of the creek? osm.org/way/397068005
IMNSHO, the mapping density varies greatly from one country to another, even within Europe (e.g. Germany seems mapped well, Spain to a lesser extent). Since you have mentioned Google - I think it’s the integration between various services that’s the main attraction: have an appointment? Here’s your map, and here’s the traffic (one thing that’s hard to do with OSM).
Comment from MRPockets on 14 February 2016 at 03:21
I am not certain about that waterway. I will have to survey it; hopefully I can get to that in the next day or so.
Service integration certainly plays into the popularity of certain services/projects. But as OSM is primarily a map database (as opposed to a mapping service like Google Maps), it seems to me that the integration would not be difficult for another project or company to accomplish if they so desired; it just hasn’t happened yet (though OSM’s usage in Apple Maps is an interesting partial exception).
Comment from MRPockets on 2 March 2016 at 20:19
I have attempted to survey that waterway, but it is on private land, partially hidden behind tall shrubs, and covered in ice/snow. I’m fairly certain that it is not an oxbow (it’s appears to be several feet higher in elevation than the creek) but I couldn’t really tell what it is. Looking again at the Bing imagery, I’d say it’s a pond and the stream it’s on goes under brush a lot.