Beautiful work!

5,370 volunteers have committed nearly 16 million map changes

Amazing!

Thanks Rub21, this really saved a lot of time when cleaning up the Japan data.

1. In Seto Inland Sea
2. Bhopal Airport Terminal osm.org/#map=16/23.2909/77.3368
3. School ground osm.org/#map=18/39.76643/-86.21198
4. Near Fiji, Japan

Nice work Aarthy, a plugin like this will be extremely useful to avoid mistakes due to human error in customizing the various setting in JOSM especially during HOT activations.

Where can I download the plugin/code? Would love to try it out.

Good suggestion imagico. In future we’ll keep the OSM scale bar.

Issue file in iD to suggest alternate imagery based on map location to help new mappers set the correct background layer: https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/issues/2826

Distortions in Bing imagery: osm.org/user/PlaneMad/diary/36262

Distortion in Bing imagery: osm.org/user/PlaneMad/diary/36262

Great work!Looks like there was someone else from Jorhat mapping too, you can try to check the history of objects and getting in touch.

Also interesting is to make a map with Assamese labels and pass it on to the local authorities. As a region which is constantly flood prone, these are very valuable resources for those on the ground.

@SK53 Good call, this will be some valuable documentation to have for reference.

A point to note here is that growing a community in a place with broken data is quite a challenge. The AND imports in Mumbai was such a gigantic mess that the city of 18 million had 0 mappers till I manually cleaned it up singlehandedly over months. Its very discouraging for a new mapper to start off cleaning issues rather than building of the good work of others.

@RicoElectrico Unlike the western world of open source where mailman lists and irc are the norm, in Asian countries, people prefer social networks like fb and whatsapp to connect and communicate. Its a matter of convenience for each community to decide the language and mediums to talk to each other.

Just tried out the export tool and was very simple to use, great work!

Neat! Next need to figure out how to get such codes on the http://openstreetmap.in/ style.

Welcome!

Also helpful, this map that I made :)

This is so beautiful! How many hours did it take to map the building in OSM? How did you get the correct dimensions?

It was during my undergraduate years in 2008 that I heard about OSM and went knocking on the doors of my city officials to see if they had any existing maps that could be used. Made some friends in the GIS dept there and gave me access to their many CAD based map prints. They were of terrible quality and not to scale, but had the street topology and names that I could use in OSM. Much of Chennai was mapped by me this way, but other cities essentially were mapped just by local volunteers and many big cities remain empty to this day.

You might find my talk at SOTMUS this year of interest, where I shared my experiences doing this in India. You can watch the lightning talk here.

@fidelcastrogi to clarify, there is no open GIS data available that we can use for OSM. The national mapping agency Survey of India maintains tight control over the availability of maps and even accessing them involves a lot of paperwork.

A nice relief shaded map used as an overlay can instantly help differentiate valleys from streams. The cyclemap layer is pretty ok for this for this purpose, but a specialized layer could really help.

We have the same problem in India where geospatial data is never released by the Gov. Nothing like a good neighborhood mapping party to for some high detail maps.

This is the area near office where we do regular field mapping. Much better than what any company or Government can collect!

osm.org/#map=17/12.98072/77.63663

Haha, classic! Flooded large parts of India myself back in the day :)