@GinaroZ
My bad. Linked to the wrong version. Should be better now.

@imagico, I scanned at 1200 dpi on a cheap Epson all-in-one scanner-printer-copier, and downsampled to 400dpi for these versions. Other than straightening the images there was no other editing–the images in the book are really sweet, I have to say!

@alexkemp, thanks for the heads up, apparently Wikipedia changes URLs after uploads for some reason. I have corrected them all. Sorry about that!

I used a smartphone (Samsung Galaxy running Android) with the Mapillary app to collect ground-level images. If you set up the app to store data on the SD card, you can then pull the images plus the gpx files off the SD card, merge the gpx files into a single file using EasyGPS, and then you have the GPS traces for mapping. I always had to run it off the cigarette lighter outlet because running the camera plus the GPS function exhausted the battery very quickly otherwise, and also had to direct the a/c vent toward the camera or it would overheat in summer.

@stephan75, when I was struggling with the data volume, other mappers recommended Osmosis, that’s all.

Well, well, rather interesting correlation, no? Cartography has its uses!

Mapstor sells scans of the maps (see https://mapstor.com/map-sets/country-maps/turkmenistan.html). I bought them quite some years ago but found them unwieldy when viewed on a computer screen. The paper maps are much easier to review and study.

No, had not heard of it, thanks! Will take a look.

It’s an ad hoc “team”. My security officer insists that I travel with a security detail and chauffeurs, and another embassy officer has to come along as my “control officer”. With that many people riding along, there are lots of eyes to identify POIs, find street signs, city/town/village names, and so on. I punch the data into MAPS.ME while they point out things I miss. It’s a team effort. So no, there is not a permanent “team” for OSM, but the mapping is often a “team effort”. :-)

Thanks for the kind words. This is a target-rich environment–so much data that needs to be collected, and as long as I’m making a trip as part of the job, I may as well collect information useful not only to me but to other mappers.

@alexkemp, thanks very much for the tips! I’ll give the SVG-> PDF option a try. My intended end product is a wall map roughly a meter high.

@Warin61, yes, no joke!

@eneerhut, you will have a head start as I am presently on vacation in the United States and won’t be back in Turkmenistan until late January. Good luck!

@althio Thanks for catching that.

@SunCobalt Thanks for the tip. I have tried figuring out overpass turbo and osmosis (but not osmfilter, will have to take a look); however, the time required to master them is more than I can spare given the demands of my day job. When I retire I’ll have more time to devote to acquiring new tools :-)

@kucai, I use a 16Gb RAM Samsung Galaxy smartphone with large (minimum 32Gb) SD card to store the images. The main reliability issue is that it has a tendency to log out of Mapillary periodically for no apparent reason, and if I am in an internet dead zone (there are many in Turkmenistan) it refuses to collect images until I can log back in. In summer I have to position the phone close to the windshield defroster vent on the dashboard and crank up the air conditioning so it blows directly on the camera, or it will overheat (direct sunlight+camera+charging battery+GPS generates lots of heat). When it overheats, it simply shuts down.

I have another Samsung with less RAM (8 Gb) and have found when it has collected a few thousand images, it takes forever to boot Mapillary up and sometimes simply locks up. 16Gb seems to work much better.

Main tip is to plug it into the cigarette lighter to keep it charged, and monitor the battery. I also carry a backup smartphone for when this one fails for some reason.

Good for you!

Many thanks! It counts 152 gas stations. I think we had about a dozen when we started mapping in 2015. Nice to know we’ve made some progress! :-)

Or to be able to deliver the tax bills more efficiently.

@rorym,

Thanks, I looked at that, too. As I see it, there are two problems with using tracktype on this road.

First, it is not a track. This wretched road is part of the national highway network, believe it or not, and thus is supposedly a trunk road (highway=trunk) and not a track.

Second, with regard to the tracktype tag, none of the values fits this road. The tracktype grades go from paved (grade1) to unpaved variants. This road was paved once upon a time and still has asphalt on from 20- to 80-percent of its surface, but is so rough that using tracktype=grade1 would be horribly misleading. I don’t want to be responsible for misleading somebody into a broken axle!

The smoothness tag isn’t perfect but the criteria in the wiki were something I could work with–“very bad” seemed the closest, and I added a maxspeed:practical=36 tag since that was the average speed we enjoyed over that stretch of road.

@Verdy_p, To help you understand what my job entails, what U.S. goals are here, and what difficulties are involved in doing anything with civil society in Turkmenistan, I suggest you read my embassy’s Integrated Country Strategy, which you can find at https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/285262.pdf. It is a public document, and I am sure you will find it interesting.

As for having my “project…budget cancelled” there is no need to worry about that. My mapping is purely voluntary and data collection in the course of official travel incurs no additional cost to the U.S. Government. There is no budget to cancel.

Regarding NGOs, my embassy is the only embassy in this country issuing grants to independent NGOs. Promotion of civil society is a major focus of my embassy. Of course I interact with government officials here; I also interact with private citizens and groups. Your fears are unfounded and may be put to rest. Please read the Integrated Country Strategy.

As far as your complaint that I have not shared my prior publication history on the wiki, I am unaware of any such requirement. I have no intention of spending the time necessary to compile such a list, or even an abstract, not least because virtually nobody in the OSM community would find any of it interesting and most would find it dreadfully boring.

@Verdy_p wrote above, “We know also that he also does not fairly understand the effective administrative structure of that country, and is unable to organize his own collected ideas into something really understandable.”

Now, that is in insult. Telling a professional political scientist whose job includes understanding the political structures of the countries to which he is assigned, who has spent over three decades in diplomacy, has risen to an ambassadorship, who holds an honors baccalaureate in political science, and who has researched deeper than any other foreigner the political structure of Turkmenistan based on Turkmen law and regulation that he “does not fairly understand the effective administrative structure of that country” is telling that professional political scientist that he is incompetent. In addition, I have written well over 2,000 reports over my career on the political, economic, and sociological situations in my countries of assignment, and have never been accused by anyone else of being “unable to organize [my] collected ideas into something really understandable.” This is a second insult. I believe my contributions to the wiki have been both substantive and well organized, and are as clear as they can be made. Let the reader judge whether Verdy_p’s behavior is in keeping with OSM community norms.

It is not my fault that Turkmenistan has chosen an administrative structure that is by Western standards overly complex and to Westerners confusing. It is my job as a diplomat to document it, and I have chosen voluntarily to share my insights with the OSM community and to put them in the public domain. I do not believe that I am incompetent (and neither does my employer), nor do I believe that I could have presented the administrative structure of Turkmenistan any more clearly.

Finally, as regards Verdy_p’s continued insistence that I asked for help, on June 4, 2018, I posted the following statement in my diary, “I have at least started OSM wiki articles on the major cities of Turkmenistan…The intent is to institutionalize all I have learned about mapping in Turkmenistan so far, before my tour of duty ends sometime this calendar year. If other mappers have suggestions for information to add to these articles, I am all ears.” On June 9 I wrote in my diary, “I’ve created stubs of articles on the five provinces of Turkmenistan…Please take a look and let me know what’s missing. These are works in progress.” In other words, I asked for suggestions on content to add to the wiki articles, presumably content only obtainable by a local mapper, not for anyone to do wholesale reorganization or editing of the articles, particularly editing that would corrupt the information provided. I reiterate these diary entries in order to set the record straight.