About a year ago I wrote about my experiences of mapping in Bonaire. It’s time for an update.

Satellite imagery

One of the challenges I had was adding data without high quality and recent imagery. Luckily, earlier this year the ‘Satellietdataportaal’ (Satellite Data Portal) made high resolution data available for Caribbean Netherlands.¹

License

First things first though: are we allowed to use the aerial photos they publish for improving OpenStreetMap? There is a long thread on the Community forums. Whether it’s allowed or not depends on the agreement the Dutch government has with the satellite data provider.² Luckily, in the topic itself it is discussed that it is allowed to use Pléiades, SuperView and TripleSat.

Geoblock

The downside? You can only use this in The Netherlands. The data is geoblocked. I’ve added a lot of new streets and buildings in Bonaire over the past few weeks, but only other people currently in The Netherlands would be able to validate that I’m mapping actual buildings. The rest of the world would need to wait for a worldwide aerial imagery provider to update their data.

Selecting the satellite data

In the Satellite Data Portal Viewer, after selecting Bonaire from the top left menu, you then need to select a part of the area for which you want to see the satellite data, then it gives you a list of options. Currently for Bonaire there are only three options (as we’re only interested in recent and high resolution satellite data). * Pleiades-NEO January 9, 2023 * Pleiades-NEO April 18, 2023 * Pleiades-NEO June 17, 2023

The January one is generally too cloudy, but the April and June ones are useful. Use the April one if you’re looking at the Western part of Bonaire (Rincon and Washingtong Slagbaai National Park) and use the June one for Kralendijk and all of the east and south.

You can simply click on ‘Select for WMTS’ which fetches you a link.³

Setting the background

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We use the data from OpenStreetMap while hiking through Colombia, Panama and Peru. It is really solid and a big thanks you to all the contributors!

One thing always stands out though. Almost all of the local people have never heard of the name ‘OpenStreetMap’. However, whenever we get information about trails they ask if we use Maps.me or recommend using it. For those that don’t know, Maps.me is simply an app showing data from OpenSteetMap!

We’re not sure why Maps.me is such a popular recommendation, though the name may be easier to remember that OpenStreetMap. We think it may simply have been one of the first apps that was free and allowed you to easily download maps for offline use?

We use an app called Organic Maps ourselves and can recommend it to anyone that goes hiking in another country. It is a privacy-friendly app and we found out it even preloads data from Wikipedia (for instance on towns, soms highlights/attractions and mountain tops).

Background

For a long time, I’ve used the OpenStreetMap as my main driver for online maps. Whenever I’m hiking, the route or big parts of it are planned according to OpenStreetMap, walking from viewpoint to viewpoint.

A few years ago, I made some tiny contributions to the maps in Leiden where I live(d). As The Netherlands is mapped rather accurately and there are a lot of active people in this country, it only stayed at a few minor contributions.

That changed when I moved to Bonaire a couple of months ago. Bonaire is a small island in the Caribbean. In the past ten years, the population doubled and a lot has changed.

Contributing

Some of the contributions so far include:

• Adding hiking trails;
• Adding streets, street names & amenities;
• Adding development projects;
• Resolving open map notes. A lot of map notes have been added over the past few years mentioning that certain amenities are no longer there, or a request to add them. I’ve resolved now almost all of these notes (and of course an RSS subscription is notifying me of any new ones that may arise).

Adding trails is a lot of fun since it’s just enjoying a walk with your phone set to record a track, and thereafter importing the GPX file etc. Adding street names and amenities is a bigger challenge since you need to constantly be writing these things down in your phone.

Challenges

There are several things that make mapping sometimes a bit of a challenge. The available satellite images/aerial photos from Bonaire are either cloudy or outdated (or both). Even with a detailed GPX track and notes from my phone, it’s in some cases difficult to add stuff at the right place if the satellites images are too old or too vague.

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