I quite enjoy tracing suburban footpaths.

One of the things that turned me off OSM back in the beginning (a few years ago; I can't quite remember when) was its seeming focus on making maps for CARS. I don't like cars! I cycle, or walk, and don't have a driver's license; I want to contribute to maps for walkers and cyclists, not for those silly GPS things that everyone's suctioning to their windscreens these days. (Rhubarb rhubarb.)

Thankfully, I have since realised that OSM is about MAPS, not cars, and that I can contribute whatever parts of the map that I feel are useful. So, I find myself focusing on paths for pedestrians, and because I live in the 'burbs, most of those paths are a) foopaths next to residential streets, and b) paths of desire (oh, such a delightful term!) in those rare bits of non-suburb'd land.

The question is: should one trace these paths individually? I say yes, because the information cannot be captured with tags on a road. But some people say no. Hmm....

I think I'll just keep on as I am. :-)

Long live OSM!

I'm setting up a tracking and navigation system for the trucks at work. They've each got a tablet PC (running Windows unfortunately, because of needing MS Access), with a built-in GPS and 3G modem.

So far, the track logging is working, as is the uploading of that data to a central server. The tracks are created continuously, as fast as they can be read off the COM port, and split up into hourly log files.

These tracks are converted to GPX files on the server, and from there will be uploaded to OSM.

Is this an okay approach? We'll end up with buckets of data about regional WA, including fire tracks, power poles, etc. But should I do anything else to prepare it?

The idea is that, once the data's back in from the trucks, I'll trace the tracks and add whatever other data I can (there's photos coming in too).