There are increasingly many users registered in a 50km circle around my house, most of which located in Vitoria and Vila Velha. I've noticed that most of these never have done any edits, and have no information at all on their profils. It is probably thousands and thousands of these. Does the administration any way of checkingnlast login of users? That way one could install a filter, or in some way remove, users that only have created their accounts, but not contributed in any way.

Just a suggestion to admins, for a new user to be able to publish, require him/her to at least one edit on the map, or something like that. That will seriously reduce the ammount of spam without impacting actual users.

Things are looking good for OSM in Brazil. I have seen that after a few imports, and increased availability of hi-res imagery (thanks to Bing), a new group of people are taking an interest into contributing. I see two types of these:
1) Those who trace Bing near where they live
2) Those who put in POI where streets already have been traced.

For this reason I think I can concentrate on my near area of Guarapari, as Vitoria is close to complete (in concerns of tracing) and the surrounding cities of Serra, Cariacica and Vila Velha seems to be traced of people in group 1.

I have most of the streets (all?) in Guarapari traced, though only a few key streets and some of the streets surrounding my residence have been named. I think the next step for me will be to print sheets of walking papers, and try to get these names down. Guarapari is somewhat large, so this will still take time (anybody visiting are free to assist). Further I will try to trace important buildings (and later buildings in general) and to include as many POI I can both from memory (i.e. POI I use regularly) and from observation (walking paper again?)

The next two weeks will hold me up pretty much at work, and I doubt I will have time or energy for much OSM work, neither tracing nor wiki, as I am doing a G20 crane course parallel with my work duties. The few hours I have left will be with priority of rest. I hope things return to normal after the trainings have been done.

I have found an app that should let me add POI on my iPad (though havn't been able to do anything useful with it yet. I am still looking for a good offline OSM map for the iPad (and a GPS that allows me to use it in full). Sadly I havn't been able to find any proper editors for iPad. Currently my iPad covers all my needs except for OSM.

My computer have broken down. I don't know how much I will be able to follow up the next weeks before I can get hold of an iPad, and than I don't know how much I can do on my various projects except when I have a little time off when I'm at work.

I am currently on travel, and are therefor not able to do any more than backing up the most important data on my computer

After a docking in Santander, Spain, and a transit via Valetta, Malta, I am now at work near Antalya, Turkey. Now, I havn't been able to get any surveying done, so I have no GPX tracks to trace, but Bing have given me a pre-christmas gift. With the release of Bing vertical fotos, many areas of my interest have now received hi-resolution vertical photos, a coverage Yahoo! didn't offer. Now, with Bing, Yahoo and CBERS (preparing vertical fotos is a long manual job, until now, only the flooded areas of Alagoas state have been made awailalble as WMs), much of Brazil have been covered.

In the first run I have completed most of the urban areas of Guarapari, than started to look a bit further away, getting more details into data I already know (my old GPX tracks have a low sample resolution), and further have been connecting many highways from the IBGE import to the main grid.

My work on INT 1 have been temporarily halted, though the icons are still residing in my computer. Today I started to upload icons on the chapter Q: Buoys, Beacons. Just a few more chapters, and that is completed.

My translations of Brazilian Portuguese Map Features continues. I guess I am about one quarter done now. That work as well will continue, and hopefully will help recruite more Brazilian mappers (and I hope Bing coverage also helps there). We are well underway of making the best roadmap of Brazil.

Does anybody know of a place to host a map? I am thinking about making a map stylesheet for an experimental INT 1 type rendering of OpenStreetMap.

I am well under way in translating tags to Portuguese. To improve the speed of the work I got all the templates used on Map Features, and following the red links allow me to translate the most important pages.

A few weeks of focused work (if I can allow myself the time) can produce enough pages for Pt-br (Brazilian Portuguese namespace) to be searchable.

On the same time, my work of documenting INT 1 symbols are getting closer to the end. I hope I can complete this before x-mas.

I know I have had little mapping done except for the Vitoria import during the last year. It have partly been because of the Vitoria import, and partly because of my work situation. I hope I can get the GPS installed in the car again, and that I can go somewhere with my family, so that we can have a holiday gathering tracks.

At work I am saving up points in a safety program to buy myself a new GPS. I can have a Garmin Nüvi for 200 points, and believe I can be in that point range by June of next year. With two units I will be able to gather more tracks, and hopefully the old Garmin Yellow can be used for recording paths and trails.

I have for some time subscribed to the feeds from Blogs.openstreetmap.org and have lately grown tired of all the foreign language entries that pops up. The blogg feeds of the OSM community can be subscribed in each individual language, so why not also this "master feed"?
I know that most of the additional bloggs are in English, but allowing us to subscribe lets say to all the Spanish blogs only, than more additional geospatial blogs in non-english could be added, and users from each group of languages could subscribe to a list containing ONLY the bloggs in the languages they understand.

I for one would in that case usbscribe to English, Norwegian (maybe both Bokmål and Nynorsk), and Portuguese (both PT and PT-br).

Also, why not add a "nominate feeds" option? There are probably dozens of bloggs out there unknown to the administrators, that both writes about OpenStreetMap and GeoSpatial in general. I could than see if I could separate a feed of specific key words from my blogg.

The data imports of Vitoria is finally completed, and I have started to clean up my data archive to make room for the next project.

There have been a long list of events in this import (you can read about them here: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8 and part 9)

At the moment I am doing the last finishes on the import, that is I am using the validator plugin in JOSM to get rid of as many "errors" as possible in the imported area, and I am eying the end of that as well. The validator throws up a lot that I will not use too much energy on now, and some things that have to be verified on the ground, so I'll deal with only what I can figure out from my arm chair.

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I think I was a bit premature when stating that the last bulk layer was imported. Just as I started to clean the data I realized that two important layers (ACCESSO = highway=service + service=alley and ESCADARIA_RAMPA = highway=steps) was overlooked. I am now about to finnish that.

I was also supposed to go home to spend time with my familly last wednesday, but first I was kept onboard my vessel as a translator (my releiver doesn't speak portuguese and onsigning captain was delayed), so when I got of the ship on Saturday I was called from the company. A colegue of me was sent to hospital (we hope it is not serious) and as her ship was due to leave dry dock somebody had to enter in her place, this time that somebody was me. Hopefully I will be home next week, so I can see my familly some before going off to sea again.

The ship yard have been entered in from Yahoo! images previously. The dock is now flooding (filling up with water) to release the ship. The next couple of days I will be busy onboard Normand Borg. If you have been following my diary you would notice that this is the third ship in a raw without seeing my familly.

Today I uploaded the last bulk data for the Planimetria import. There are still a few layers I can upload, but I don't count them as part of the import data in this round. (Outstanding data is walls, fences and gates).

I was disappointed to learn that many of the very interesting layers where incomplete or extremely faulty. This goes for all the TXT_* layers, so no easy way to import names. I will see if I can compensate that when I start control of the data against split segments with all layers. There are also some FIXME tags that needs to be sorted out.

I will start on this process tonight. Hopefully I can read street names and place names out from the complete files, and with some luck also POI names and types.

Some adjustments might come on several points, as things might come clearer with the broader picture. And maybe some of my questions can be answered?

Some of the layers had somewhat unclear meanings, this might even help clarify which meaning is the correct (Example: FAROL means literally man_made=lighthouse, while other meanings can be highway=traffic_signal, flood lights, or the head lights of a car (unlikely in map data)). Unfortunately the FAROL layer was unusable, but that is just a good example of what I have been through.

Complete layer list, with assosiated tags (both imported and suggested) together with import status can be found here

OK, since part 6 I have changed ship, which sort of solved the IT caos for my part (I managed to get approval for a full IT upgrade on the vessel I left), and came to a much better IT solution. Here I can access OSM with my own laptop, and even do some uploads. I focused on completing the building layer of the Planimetria import, and are now in the progress of uploading that. I will probably need one more day for that.

Well, the IT solution is better here, but the firewall are still too tight. There are a few features we would like to have liberated, such as e-mail and IM, but for the moment we can access our web-mail and use Meebo. I am not happy with the solution, but it is better than nothing.

I have started to ponder about next step in the import. There are plenty of layers to import, but another large layer such as the building layer must wait. I have the TXT_EDIFICACAO (building name), TXT_RUA (road name) and TXT_RODOVIA (highway name/ref) layers in mind when I talk about other large layers. Yes I know that it would have been good to import that together with the roads and the buildings. But mess in the splitting of the layers made that a cumbersome task, it is easier to get the data back from the server than to match the tiles of split layer data.

I am making notes of experience from every move here, and want a total rewrite of the splitting tools for the next import. I would also like to see a tool that can force "closed ways" on all objects in a file, something that would have made the building import a lot easier. i.e. if all ways with more than 3 nodes was wrapped to closed ways, than it would only be a matter of combining the areas (command shift J in JOSM@Mac). I have also installed a plugin that helps me create multipolygon relations with a mouse-click.

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I am back at work, and arrived to IT caos. The computer in my office is not working at all, so I have to sneak in at other computers to do my work and daily read of webmics and other routine stuff. I have already sent request to the IT department to resolve the situation.

I am continue to work offline on the Vitoria import. There will be several files with layer data to sync with the server when I get the opertunity. I hope there are a computer or two with Java installed so I can do a few syncs.

Text layers will not be touched until I can work online again, meaning probably when I am back home in a months time or two. This is because the fact that I need to download underlying data to attach to the text, such as the streets for the street names, etc. I also need to find out how I can clean up the code to correct accented names, as my source have crumbled all the accents.

When I get back home I hope that I can get TwoNickles compiled to work properly on my computer, so that I don't have to ask for too much assistance. I also hope to get a splitter program that allows me to split nodes, ways and closed ways for each layer, as well as a script to automatically remove all blank spaces within layer names. That will help me a lot in future imports. I also would like to find out how I can use JOSM better to remove unwanted tags from the import data.

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My wife finally got a working computer today, and that is good news for the import of Planimetria de Vitoria. That means I get a lot more time to work on extracting layers.

I am currently working on the building layer, which contains more than 77000 objects (i.e. buildings). I am dividing the import in batches depending on available time. The first batch became too big, so the next couple of batches are fixes to batch one. I will try to have as much as possible done by 10th of February, where I probably go offline again for some time.

There are some layers I can work on while offline, at the same time I will contact the GIS department of a few other municipals to start import process from more municipals. (Most interested in Guarapari and Divino de São Lorenço).

I am working with extracting more information from the PLanimetria de Vitoria import. There are too many layers to keep you updated for each layer, but I am making progress. At the moment, most ways, parking spaces, beaches, and coastline should be updated, though some more work might be needed on a few layers.

If it continues in this speed I might be completed with the import (not the cleaning of the data though) by the easter. I am not making much effort on the cleaning of Vitoria, as I would need to go places and check stuff, and Vitoria is a little outside my daily roaming area.

When this import is completed, I will look into getting the same sort of dataset for Guarapari, here I will be able to do the cleaning as well.

Today I finally got to upload first part of Planimetria de Vitoria import, the layers imported are VIA_* (all roads) CICLAVIA (cycleways) and various footway layers (CAMINHO* *TRILHA CALCADA).
There are still a lot of layers around, with street names (still not imported), buildings, bus stops, gas stations, parking spaces, walls, parks, squares, green areas, beaches. When the complete import is done, than Vitória will be complete. The next will than be to maintain the data (and I will find another town to import).
At the moment, another user have taken over to clean the roads, the import have resulted in a few duplicated roads (basically all existent road data in Vitória), so there is some need to go over the data.
When I get more time, I will try to work on the next layers.

I am working on the import of the Planimetria of Vitoria, a high resolution data set with multiple layers. Thanks to h4ck3rm1k3 I have now a perl filter/chunker, and I have made a chuck-fixer in case a node is missing from one chunk.

Mike's filter is designed so that it can take a list of layer names, and chunk up all ways and poligons containing those layers, that way I can make separate chunks for cycleways, or unclude both unpaved and paved ways in the same layer.
I have also substracted a layer list.

To help me in the tagging, I made a separate preset file for my JOSM, where I have an dedicated button for adding the source=Planimetria de Vitoria tag, that all the imported data will contain.

Ruff estimate says I might have done all roads, footways, cycleways and paths within wednesday morning, which sort of is my deadline, I will also see if I can made a hotel layer, chuch layer and school layer before that, but the way layer have priority.

I found one possible problem though, it seems there is a slight offset between my data and that which is already in based on GPS tracks. I will check if this is a fixed offset, in that case I will align the entire changeset accordingly before upload, if not, than I will need to investigate a bit in how to solve this.

Some time ago, vdepizzol got hold of a AutoCAD .dwg file with PD data of high quality for the entire municipo/city of Vitória, the state capital of Espírito Santo state of Brazil and asked me for help. None of us have access to CAD software, and we where a little stuck.

After pondering on this for too long time I got the idea to contact h4ck3rm1k3, who didn't have access to AutoCAD either, but via his contact net managed to convert it to .dxf, and from there passed it through a program he is making, managed to convert the poligons of the CAD files into poligons on an OSM-xml file. The output archive was HUGE, bzip compressed to 27MB, so uncompressed is probably around 2-300MB, chunked it up into 3 smaller chunks, and I dived in to start working with it.

After drawing close to all the roads in the first chunk, I got stuck, the next chunks didn't load in JOSM, so I opened the xml files in Xcode, and started to clear out the errors. At the same time I asked vdepizzol for assistance in rechunking the larger file. I would like to have it in uncompressed osm-xml chunks of less than 5MB each (yeah, will be a hell of a lot of files), so that I can load areas around where I am working to get a flawless background image to trace upon.

I figured out that making automated import scripts of this would be difficult as the data shows poligons of what is outside the roads. (A future house import from this data should be easy, but the roads are tough).

Anyway, when the roads are in the database we need to do an on the ground verification of the data, to find out what is accessable by cars, what is to be defined as footways and cycleways, any oneways, access restrictions, etc. I think we should be able to import the street names from the data.

I have tried to put into system the tags that need more work on the wiki. In the work of marking stub tags I noticed that some tags that was missing in English had pages in other languages, and even a couple that was redirecting directly to other language pages. I have been able to compile a list of tags that either are missing in English (or extremely short) where other language pages exists.

There are actually 4 languages that have these pages, Finnish, German, Russian, and Italian. I did not check wether these pages are stubs aswell or if they have descriptions.

Since I am limited to the following three languages: English, Norwegian and Portuguese, any translations between these languages I can help with, and during this process I also translated (or rather gave a fuller description) to the special Brazillian key:cep that was only partly described in Portuguese.

The list:
Tag:amenity=hunting_stand - German keywords describing? the tag in English page
Tag:historic=battlefield - Russian
Tag:historic=manor - German
Tag:leisure=water_park - German
Tag:power=minor_line - German and Finnish
Tag:power=pole - German and Finnish
Tag:shop=confectionary - Russian
Tag:wood=coniferous/deciduous/mixed - Russian
Tag:boundary=water_protection_area - German
Tag:historic=monastary - German
Tag:natural=stone - German
Tag:power=cable_distribution_cabinet - German
Tag:leisure=dog_park - Italian

If everybody helps getting these pages to English, and try to keep at least an English language page of every keys and tags to use, than it is much easier to translate the documentation to other languages. Remember that there probably are people understanding (and able to translate to and from) English in every language, while not every community can find people understanding other languages.

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While being at work, far from where I can obtain a single GPS track, the Brazilian community have adopted the project TIGER 250, and adjusted it for Brazilian conditions. The project was named Brasil 250 Cidades which means Brazil 250 Cities. One of the important elements with the project is a distance table with the route length between key Brazilian cities, with color codes identifying their status (based on calculated length, not reality).
So what have this to do with me? Simple, as I cannot go out and drive down unmapped roads, I can try to figure out whats breaking routes, and if there are high resolution Yahoo images where such routes are broken, than I can try to fix it. The result? One (or more) green routes on the distance table.
Long term goals? Making the best routable map of Brazil.
In the long run, OSM is turning into the best routable map of the world!