Two things got me back into mapping. One I am thinking of retiring and this will give me a lot more time to do it. And two we recently acquired a puppy dog (A Coton de Tulear) that needs taking for walks so I have been exploring local pathways to use for said walks. In any event I have also been a fairly regular user of an iphone/ipad app called Galileo for quite some time now and I love maps.

I realised that it must be well over a year since I looked at doing any mapping. JOSM is not on my current computer (replaced 18 months ago). I do however have loads of photos, routes and speech commentaries that I have meant to use in doing map updates. Always happens when I am on holiday and I never got time to apply them on my return. Places like Ireland, San Francisco, Athens, Sidney, Queensland and Singapore are obviously all the poorer for not having my map updates applied onto OSM!

So first step was to downloaded JOSM which I did yesterday 25/07/15. Some quick reading on how to use - somehow seems easier this time round and then off on a long walk to gather some data. This is an enjoyable and healthy way to do mapping. I like walking and exploring with a purpose and actually find it very relaxing. However the battery on my iphone ran out half way through so I will need to revisit some of the walk. Not too unhappy about that either! I specifically wanted to correct one of the local footpaths which is incorrectly shown on OSM and unfortunately my battery had run out before I got to the relevant bit.

As a result of the above walk however I did work out how to upload traces in .GPX format to OSM. Been meaning to do that for ages and I have a lot of traces to upload. Additionally when using the photos I took on this walk for a location fix I discovered that it did not match with what JOSM was saying. On reading up it seems that I need a plug in to correct this . It appears to work out the correct offset for you when you position objects on your map to line up with the imagery. I haven’t tried it yet.

I then started doing some updates - simple things like house numbering - automatic allocation can’t handle infills such as the three houses behind ours which all have the same number but designated A B and C to give them unique addresses. Occurred to me that just getting my local town (pop. 6200) up to scratch is a considerable amount of work. I also did some research on data sources for this exercise such as .gml files from the Land registry (another plug in I believe) and a uk post code map. I failed completely after some hours researching in getting what is said to be freely available post code amps as a layer to use on my maps.

So as a result of all this my list of things to follow up got bigger and bigger - am I looking at taking on an unpaid full time job. :) List is :

• Get offset on Bing maps sorted out.
• Get plug in to handle .gml files available from land registry (INSPIRE index polygon data.)
• Work out how to get more layers such as electoral boundaries , district council boundaries etc.
• Work out how use tags better (a lot of reading) - such as how to represent a house barge (I live on a river)
• Look at a tags for entering statistical information freely available from the Office of national statistics such census date.
• Start looking at writing code to help with some of the above - I have an IT background but promotion has meant not doing any coding for quite some time and I miss it!
• Find out about adding photos to the map
• Find someone (preferably local) who I can chat / work with on this.

No doubt this list will keep getting bigger!