OSM isn't that difficult. Start with drawing and naming streets (if they aren't already drawn). Later on you can add other features (like the surface and speed limit), draw areas and landuses and end by using relations.

Here is the beginners' guide: osm.wiki/Beginners%27_guide

Do remember that local information (pub names, local names, little paths that you can't see from images ...) are of the biggest value for OSM since they are very often missing from other maps.

Happy mapping.

On opera mini it is broken (can't move the map and the image is split),

On the default Android browser, dragging works and zooming-in with double clicking works (I don't have multitouch, so can't test it).

Can you say something about speed? E.g. is it fast enough to render the whole world from the compressed planet.osm file? Or for what areas is it meant?

Oh, and be sure, unless you find some politician that really likes the idea of OSM, you won't get anything from the government.

About the thing TripleBee mentioned, there is good Bing imagery there, just not as recent like the Google images. But enough to draw buildings if you have local knowledge.

I've also used out-of-copyright maps, but mainly for drawing village and city borders. They haven't changed a lot since the foundation of Belgium.

Just remember that you are here to have fun. If you like to make aerial images with a kite, people will be grateful for it, but if you just want to walk around and note what you see, than people will also appreciate it.

OSM is a DoOcracy: http://communitywiki.org/DoOcracy

In Potlatch you can't use relations of relations. Using relations that contain relations is something that should be avoided whenever possible. Can you say me why you want to do that?

It could be that I misunderstood you and that you meant "merging" relations instead of adding. I believe this has to be done manually in Potlatch.

Sorry to answer in English, but I'm sure that my German is worse than your Dutch.

First select a feature (way, node) that you want as part of the relation. Than you go in the side panel to "advanced mode". At the bottom of the side panel, you get the relations. There you can use the "add to" button to add the feature to a new or an existing relation. To add the feature to an exesting relation, just search that relation in the list you view. To create a new relation, click on the "new relation" button and fill in the correct tags in advanced mode.

If the new relation is created, you can add other features to it with the same method. You can set the role of the feature in the relation side panel.

Aha, nog een West-Vlaming. Wees gerust, we hebben geen nieuwere afbeeldingen nodig, de West-Vlaamse kaart is snel genoeg aan het evolueren, zelfs zonder up-to-date afbeeldingen. Als ik begon (meer dan 1 jaar geleden) dan hadden we nog geen luchtfoto's en stond mijn eigen straat nog niet op de kaart. Ondertussen heb ik bijna heel mijn dorp er op gezet, inclusief het grootste deel van de huizen met huisnummers. osm.org/?lat=50.93959&lon=3.06352&zoom=17&layers=M

Ik weet niet als er in Brugge ook een Wandelnetwerk is, maar de laatste tijd hou ik me bezig met wandelknoppunten in de Westhoek. De kust heeft zeker een Wandelnetwerk. Het wandelnetwerk er op zetten is best wel leuk (goede wandelpaadjes) en er is nergens anders zo'n online kaart beschikbaar. http://openwandelkaart.nl/?zoom=13&lat=50.78012&lon=2.76743&layers=000BFFFTFF

ENGLISH:

Ha, another user from near my region. We don't need newer images, our map is evolving quickly enough, even without up-to-date images. When I started (more than 1 year ago), we didn't have images and my own street wasn't on the map. Now I have mapped almost my complete village, including most houses with their housenumber. osm.org/?lat=50.93959&lon=3.06352&zoom=17&layers=M

I don't know if Brugge also has a walking-node network, but lately I've occupied myself with adding walking nodes in De Westhoek. I know that the Belgian shore has a network, but I don't know about Brugge. Adding walking nodes is quite fun since it leads you to good walking paths and there is no other online map that shows the walking nodes yet. http://openwandelkaart.nl/?zoom=13&lat=50.78012&lon=2.76743&layers=000BFFFTFF

Online it would be easy, just convert the positions to a CSV file and create a webpage with the openlayers javascript library to show these positions on any base layer (mapnik, google satellite, bing images ...). There is a lot of info about showing POI with openlayers, and you'd be ready in about 30 minutes.

If you want it offline, then it might be trickier. That means that the PC has to have installed it's own renderer. Most renderers are created to have a big throughput. While if only one user is viewing that map, you need a small latency instead. So that could give problems. I believe TileMill is optimised for a small latency, but the last time I checked it, it only worked on Unix systems. Maybe you could help with a Windows port. It should be easy to transform Tilemill into a tile-viewing app only. For TileMill, it's good if you have a pretty heavy PC. It's optimised for quad-core processors, and you can be sure that they are used pretty heavely.

But anyway, since you need the whole planet, that means that each PC has to have the entire OSM database on their HDD. If you do a quite normal setup, that you have to transform the compressed planet.osm file to a postgis database with osm2pgsql. The process to do this can cost from 12 hours (very high end server) to 8 days depending on the hardware. Those renderers also ask a lot of space from the hard disk.

So I think that a renderer which is strictly separated from the viewer (so that you can use a server-client structure) can't really be used in this context.

So lets take a look at the applications that combine those. The first one that pops into my mind is Navit. It's an open-source multi-platform navigation program that works completely offline. It does the rendering from highly compressed binary map files. You can adapt the rendering via an XML configuration file and you can use separate POI files. The only problem is that it's optimised to view smaller areas. You cannot zoom out to see the whole world at once.

A second one that I think of is OsmAnd. It's an open-source Android app, but it's very modular, so I believe it should be quite easy to get the rendering module out of it and transform it to plain Java. This app is a map viewing/routing application, so it can also render maps when you zoom out a lot. It's less easy to configure than Navit, but it also has POI files and map files. It would ask some coding though. OsmAnd also uses it's own type of compressed map files.

As third program, I should take a look at the Travelling Salesman application. It's a Java app that uses the Osmosis java library to do offline rendering and routing. But it's a while since I last heard of it, so I believe that it's not being developed anymore. But since traveling salesman is only a thin shell above the Osmosis library, you could use it as reference implementation and make your own rendering app.

A last program that I can think of is MapSource from Garmin. This is not open-source (but free to use under certain conditions). You can load POI files into it and OSM maps to view.

If you have any remarks, do PM me, I'll probably won't read this post again (I don't get notifications).

Mashhur, how do you want to use the map? If you want to write your own application (for smartphone, computer or web), you can download the pure data in an XML format. The whole planet can be found here: osm.wiki/Planet.osm
And for smaller regions, you can use cloudmade: http://downloads.cloudmade.com/

If you want to use it for Garmin, than alexz gave a good link, and most apps (web and smartphone) took the XML data and transformed into a usable format for them.

As axample, a renderer doesn't have to know which ways are connected, so that information isn't available in the format that mapnik needs. But a router does need that info.

The pure XML format is very rarely used.

Welcome to OSM.

A source tag is not needed, but it can be handy for other people to know where the information came from. The most important are the features you put on the map.

Happy mapping

If you go for an Android phone, I should certainly check the open source OSMAND app like Haynes already said. It offers offline map viewing, searching for POI and addresses and offline route calculation (in the nightlies or in the donation version). The offline route calculation now only works for rather short distances (under 50 km) but they're working hard to improve it.

OSMAND also offers online features like adding POI to OSM, using online tiles as your map (so also sattelite images), using online route services (those can calculate longer and better routes), search via nominatim ...

Sorry to answer in English, but I'm sure that my German is worse than your Dutch

It seems that your data is not yet in Nominatim.

I checked the nominatim FAQ: osm.wiki/Nominatim/FAQ
and looked at the address http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/details?osmtype=W&osmid=122851426 . I believe that the phrase I get back means that the data isn't loaded. When I look at http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/details?osmtype=W&osmid=112575667 , I get a totally different view.

Check out this difference:

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=50.979831,3.119366&spn=0.004593,0.013078&z=17
osm.org/?lat=50.9795&lon=3.12017&zoom=17&layers=M

And yes, OSM is correct.

Can you do these for me?

osm.org/?lat=50.8465&lon=3.00715&zoom=17&layers=M

I have family living over there, but I can't map there house because my GPS is to unstable under the trees and I can't see the house because of the trees.

@mwbg: I think TomH means that you can't just take pictures, convert them to a .osm file and upload the thing. You do need to do some postprocessing. There are alsways some pictures wrong.

And if you do post processing anyway, I see no advantage in converting the pictures to nodes. When you use an editor like JOSM, you see the pictures placed on the map anyway, you just need to create a node where the feature is and tag it. That's just the same amount of work as checking if the node is at the right position and tagging.

My condolences for the bomb. I never though such a thing would happen in Norway. But I believe that one fool is enough to cause it.

Welke telefoon is het? Je kan best eens op de wiki kijken.
osm.wiki/Software/Mobile

Maar het krijgen van de data op de telefoon is geen hoofddoel van dit project. Ons hoofddoel is het verzamelen van geografische informatie (meestal door ter plaatse te gaan kijken hoe alles er uit ziet). Het is de bedoeling dat de data bruikbaar is, maar hoe dat gebeurd is een taak voor andere projecten, geen taak voor OpenStreetMap an sich.

Op de wiki vind je dus namen en links naar andere projecten (soms van bedrijven zoals mapquest, soms van hobby-isten) maar OpenStreetMap heeft geen macht om aan die projecten iets te wijzigen.

I agree with teddiebear, a monthly newsletter about what's happening in OSM could draw some more active people to OSM. Both people that have forgotten OSM and people that never understood OSM.

You can also force an image to be rendered. Right click on the part of the map that you want to get re-rendered, select "view image" (bekijk afbeelding), than in the url looks like blablabla.png, you can append /status to it, so the url is blablabla.png/status, to see if it will be rendered soon. If it wont, you can add /dirty (blablabla.png/dirty) to mark the tile for rendering. If you look again at the status, you should see that it will be rendered soon. Depending on the hardware, this can be one minute (for the main OSM servers) or one day or more (for slower servers like the cyclemap).