Working from the limited high-res Yahoo imagery and the excellent Perry-Castaneda mosaic put up yesterday by Jean-Guilhem, I've been ticking through bare bits of Pakistan map adding what look like the most important features (settlement names, metalled roads, railway lines, major waterways). There's a *lot* to do, because there's a lot of unmapped territory.

I hear that some post-flood imagery is coming online soon and it'll be good to go over that and tag broken bridges, destroyed road sections and refugee camps. For reference, the special tags that developed out of the Haiti response are here: osm.wiki/Humanitarian_OSM_Tags/Humanitarian_Data_Background -- here's where you'll find bridge=collapsed et al.

One thing I've noticed is that some other mappers are laying roads where black straight things are... but follow the photos along for a while and they turn out to be canals (most roads are dusty). Caveat cartographer! Double-caveat when you have roads running *alongside* canals, which is also very common.

Interesting to note that the current waterway tagging schema is implicitly drainage-biased (it's all the soggy British and Dutch in the project!); I'm using waterway=canal and waterway=ditch for major and minor irrigation channels, but I wonder if that's ideal?