I have a BGT-31 and that's happened to me a few times. First time it happened I was in Kenya and due to take a long bus journey to the other side of the country. I really wanted to get that trace, so I took the back off and disconnected the battery. It does void your warrenty but it's not hard to do.

I happened once when I was biking around Ireland, causing this annoying gap in the trace here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rorymccann/3606876259/in/set-72157619350389855/

I'm not sure of the cause or the fix. It's happened a few times recently. Maybe a firmware update?

I've been using the same SD card for ages and it was on the list of 'OK cards'

re: using a custom dictionay. If you want to get that specific you could just make an OSM binary file format and use that. It should give the most bang for buck

wow that's cool.

There is a lot of aerial imagery available that people can use to trace roads. However the one thing that doesn't give us is street names. Someone, like yourself, with local knowledge would be able to help tremendously in this area. :)

Great to see you!

I imported this data just now.

Hi donaciano,

OpenStreetMap is based on creating a free map of the world. There are lots of maps of the world, but they are copyright and we can't use them, because then our map would not be free. So we need to do it all from scratch. It's similar with aerial imagery. There are only a few sources of aerial imagery that we can use. There is worldwide low resolution data covering the whole world that we can use. That's probably the cloudy layer you see.

Yahoo have brilliantly let us use the aerial imagery from their maps. That includes some high quality parts of some areas. That's probably what you're seeing in some areas. Unfortunatly this doesn't cover all areas. many parts of the developing world are not covered.

It wouldn't matter what editor (Potlatch, JOSM, etc) you are using, you wouldn't get any better imagery.

I always add the bus route relations where I can. Sure, the data might not be used now, but it might be used later. Especially for routing.

It's great to see you interested. OSM has some great potention.

OpenStreetMaps is not just limited to simple roads, the goal is to produce a free map of the world. As AndrewMcCarthy mentioned we can map hotels, B&B and the such. But we're not limited to that.

The Map Features page ( osm.wiki/index.php/Map_features ) shows some of the features we normally map. e.g. Tourism features: osm.wiki/index.php/Map_features#Tourism , Parks and other leisure items: osm.wiki/index.php/Map_features#Leisure . We have a flexible tagging system that allows us to tag anything we want. For example someone recently started tagging Holy Wells: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-ie/2008-September/000202.html .

Hi all,

Was this lighthouse uploaded to the main OSM database? I don't think it was. (see mailing list discussion here: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-ie/2008-December/000253.html)

Unless there's any objection, I'll upload it myself.

Rory

I like that idea of landuse being for humans and natural being the natural way things are. That's a nice clear separation between the two. :)

Hi vlodia, good to see you here!

It's great that you want to contribute maps. A good starting point is the Beginners Guide on the wiki: osm.wiki/index.php/Beginners%27_Guide

Short guide is to zoom into a part of the map on the main page and then click on the 'edit' button on the top of the screen. You should be able to draw new roads and add features from there.

Be careful about the copyright licence of any maps you want to add. Rule of thumb, anything you make yourself is OK, but copying from google maps or a paper map is most likely not OK.

Hiya Marianne Perdomo,

Good to see you on board. I'm sure you can contribute something, everyone can bring something new to the table. Just have a look around the areas you're familiar with, and if you see anything not quite right, change it!

Good luck and happy mapping!

Rory

Hi Afni.

The 'name' tag is used for the main name on the ground of a feature. The old name can be stored using the 'old_name' tag. More details here osm.wiki/index.php/Key:name

By tagging a road with both of these tags, then when someone draws a map, they have the choice if they want to display the name, or if they want to do a "Name (previously old_name)" type thing.

TwisTer has just messaged me to say that "I didn't translate the street names, I just "Transliterated" them into english because the arabic characters didn't show in my Garmen software".

That's interesting. Have a look at osm.wiki/index.php/Japan_tagging#Names which is about tagging names in Japan. They have a similar problem. They use "name:ja" for the japanese name written in japanese characters, and "name:ja_rm" for the japanese name transliterated into the latin alphabet. Perhaps you could do something similar? "name:ar_rm" ? that makes it different from "name:en"?

Be careful with this. The "name" tag should be for what the name on the ground is, the common name. It does *not* mean the name of it in english. If there's a street, and all the street signs for it are in arabic, then the "name" of it is the arabic name.

Having said that there's nothing wrong with using "name:en" for the english name and then having "name:ar" for the name in arabic.

There are some areas where, in my opinion, openstreetmap is better than google maps. Compare these 2 areas: http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=53.282664,-6.222467&spn=0.023246,0.077162&z=14 and osm.org/?lat=53.28563&lon=-6.22967&zoom=15&layers=B00FTF

Welcome back!

I'd guess the main reason the streets have no name is because people have traced them from the Yahoo imagery. (osm.wiki/index.php/Yahoo!_Aerial_Imagery). From that people can trace out the street, but until someone visits the street in person, no-one knows the name of it.

HTH

There are 2 main programmes that make the maps on OSM. The main (and visually nicer map) is called Mapnik, and is what you see by default. But there is another map, Osmarender. You can access it by clicking on the + to the right of the map, and selecting Osmarender. It's updated regularly by people at home by the tiles@home project. Usually changes show up after about an hour on osmarender.

You're not the first person to think of this. Steve Coast brought this up in July on the talk@openstreetmap.org mailing list. There were a few suggestions thrown around, "noname=yes", "name:absent=yes" "name=__none__", "unnamed=yes", "named=no", "nameless=yes".

As Richard said, the german OpenStreetMap community is fairly active. Fair play to them. Let's map the world!

Hi Michel,

I'm going to Africa in a few days. I'm teaching Linux in Kenya for a month. I'm going to bring my GPS device with me. I hope I can get Kenya filled in a bit. I'm afraid I don't know anyone in West Africa, so I can't help much.

Great to see you on board.