OpenStreetMap
Today I moved onto some higher priority projects. I saw other people’s styles of mapping and learnt some techniques for improving my own.
The first, and by quite a way the most important, technique was not to map trees or woodland. I thought it would be helpful to map woodland so that aerial emergency services would know where they can and can’t land. However it takes an extremely long time to map all the trees that weave their way through the landscapes of our earth. I suppose at the end of the day they would be able to see with their own eyes if they could land at the scenes of any incidents once they got there. Trees might have been cut down, as well, in the time between the satellite imagery being uploaded and the incidents.
The second, which is more a corollary of the first, is to use less nodes when mapping. It can save some time, but saves an especially long amount of time with regards to woodland; which I won’t be mapping as much from now on, as mentioned previously. Hence there is a good chance that I’ll keep mapping nodes with the same frequency as I used to. Of course there are many objects I have yet to map, rivers would be a notable example, so I’ll revisit this rule of thumb when the time arises.
Discussion
Comment from skquinn on 15 October 2019 at 15:04
I map mostly the urbanized area of greater Houston, Texas, US. Here the pockets of wooded areas are relatively few and relatively easy to map, and my primary reason for doing so is that it exists in the OSM history for places that are later developed. Even in the rural areas it is relatively straightforward to map isolated pockets of woods among mostly open land, though in some areas getting the boundary accurate is a bit more work than usual. Nevertheless I can see how not mapping woods in some areas would make the task a lot easier as other parts of the US and beyond as there are a lot of heavily wooded areas out there.