Google Maps does not let you edit any country in the world for some reason. I just had a look, and Brazil where I am mapping is closed for contributors for some reason I don't know. There are also no evidence of data added in the state of Espirito Santo (didn't check the rest of Brazil), so I would guess that Google Maps is useless in Brazil. But still, it is really hard for the Brazilian community to recruit new mappers. The community have grown quite some the last few months, but there are still a lot to do, and place for more mappers. Easy usable tools could probably benefit more for recruiting as more people will see the benefit.

If I could program I would make a map/routing program for Blackberry Curve (the phone I am about to buy)

I am myself looking for a new GPS, but for other reasons. Basically I need one that can be permanently installed in my car with map functionality and an easy way to update maps and extract tracks. My Garmin eTrex yellow is handy, but falls short on many points, such as battery life, track resolution, no maps, etc.

Checking out warper, have converted a few PDFs to tiff and rectified them. I will look into recifying more and use them as WMS background in JOSM to correct some roads and to add a few other. Missing only a few houndred meters in Centro, I will also get some more from a few other suburbs where I probably will not get to survey in the near future

akuckartz, I hope those who formated the system entered a valid register key, though that is not common in Brazil.

pauliusz, I know how to get the information about what is installed, and how to find out experiences with it in Linux. That is how I got the wlan card working, using NDISWRAPPER

agallaher, I will take a look at WUBI, had plans about testing with Linux on a Stick, found a page about installing Ubuntu on a pendrive, that give me the ability to test the solution without formating the windows. i.e. no need to reformat it and install everything in case I cannot get it working in Linux.

Unfortunately GPS Utility is only available for Windows, which makes it completely useless (or f***in expensive) to use. I need something that works in Mac or Linux as that is the two platforms I have available.

At least lable which are 24h and which have opening hours.

The Brazilian tracks arn't one the map as far as I know. There is one in Caghonas near Sao Paulo (currently used), one in Brasilia (not F1 any more) and one Japaraguai in Rio de Janeiro (named Airton Senna, used to be F1?). They should be visible on air photos, and Yahoo coverage for those areas should be good.

My goal is to survive the traffic in Brazil without any harm to my family, friends, or any other surrounding me. I try to avoid known dangerous roads when I drive, and since my wife still are inexperienced, I never let her go on long trips alone, and take over the wheel on the most dangerous roads.

My vote noted, a dialog with google is a good start, I believe google have the posibility to set up a sperate WMS API for us where they can filter out sources with copyrights we cannot use (all US official sources as i.e. NASA is already public domain). Without a dialog with Google we get nowhere.

According to my brother who works for Google, reffering to their maps for streetnames, placenames and such comes under derrived works, and is supported in the google copyright.

I agree that changing roads because they do not fit with the yahoo images is bad, especially if the yahoo images are old and the shape of the road indicates a rebuild of the road.

GPX tracks are very good and usefull, though there should be a way to filter the age of each trackpoint. At the moment all uploaded trackpoints can be downloaded, and this can make areas very crawded. Especially if there have been road reconstructions or if the area suffers from urban canyon effects.

IMO Users should also be able to blackspot areas when uploading GPX tracks, so that overcrawding of inaccurate trackpoint around users home areas can be avoided. (I would love to have 250m blackspot on my house)

Congratulations Diogo, lets hope it is easier to reqruite new mappers in SP when all they need to do is correct names and annotations.

Hello Thomas, are you also living in São Paulo, or just passing time there? I am myself an estrangeiro living in Brazil and love to see the community grow. Unfortienately I live far from SP, but we need to cover alot of ground in this waste country.

I do not plan to just download such data and start working, my plan is to inform them of my purposes and ask them to send me the most uptodate detailed data they have, so that I can work on the latest. Often it seems like the data on the web pages might be the "previous latest". I will feel much more confident about both the uptodate issue and the copyright issue when I have it straight from them.

I will of corse inform them about the entire OSM project, who knows, maybe some there decide to contribute more actively?

You can also help out with looking at Marine Mapping and the marine-tagging proposal. I have had an idea of harvesting ecco sounder data to build a sort of SRTM data source for depths, but havn't got the idea further than random thoughts.

-A

Maybe a solution is to take the list of lighthouses from Wikipedia, go there and get the possition on your GPS, and than add them? Atleast than you are not using Wikipedia data as other than a catalog, and you are not using copyrighted hydrographic data.

Maybe layer=-1 or layer=-2 is the right way?

Carefully on the OSM Sanity Test on the wiki, you get a free point for being married to an OSMer :D

Welcome onboard from S22W040

If you can get any hydrographic organization to liberate their list of light or similar to OSM, than you probably can get a CVS or other format datafile that can be converted to something usefull for the normal bulk upload scripts, though I would guess that the most difficult part is to get the data liberated.

What I would love to see is a datalogger with GPS, GLONAS, IALA corrections and SBAS enabled, a few years ahead I would also like Galileo enabled, and I am watching with interest if the Indian Space Program can deliver a 4th system. 3 different satllite based possition systems with two augmmentation systems, all set to enhance each other will probably give the highest accuracy in the market when it comes to handheld units, and with a trackpoint every second than you are all set for putting your world on the map.

If you cannot compete on price, lets compete on accuracy!

A town or an area can be declared when two mappers independently can verify the data and waver for it. If you have a wikipage using the status template you can mark it as 3 (light green) when you are satisfied with it, and when somebody else verify the status as completed move it to 4 (dark green)