I've finally added some lot numbers to the map in my area. Took a little walk around some random streets and was able to figure out the number pattern. That allowed me to fill in ever address in the village.

Hopefully when the Nominatim gets updated we'll be able to search for lot numbers in Charlestown.

Actually if you look at the Bing overhead shots of the area you'll notice many houses in there not accounted for. It's actually more of a conceptualized lot scheme than the actual one. You'll notice at Enid's Barber Supplies there's a W and E component to the lot number. The area between Adelaide and St. Stephen's is one lot width, the others are two and each lot may have up to 4 main divisions.

But THAT is something for another time. :-)

P.S. Zoom in on the map to see Charlestown

Started using the village name signs along the road to define rough boundaries. This will make the points of interest show up in the right place in the search results. If you don't have a boundary or an is_in tag they will often show up as being in the wrong place since the search program has to guess which they belong to.

A while back I started watching for distance markers along the highways. Here there's one every 1 KM on both sides of the road, both showing the distance to the capital city. There's three highways going out of town and all three have them.

Originally I was tagging them with something like:
distance_marker=5K

But lately I learned about tagstat and tagwatch, which allow us to check a tag and see how it's being used by others and what's the most popular.

I noticed almost 400 uses of distance_marker=yes and very few uses like mine where the name is used as the tag. So I decided to fix mine so they match that format since it makes more sense and is more flexible. (It's also recommended in the distance_marker discussion page)

So here's how I did it with JOSM. First of all I used tagstat to download the distance_marker=yes set and see how it was being used. Instead of putting the marker text in the distance_marker tag it's put in a name tag.

I then downloaded my editing area to make sure I had all my old distance_marker tags. Next I used JOSMs new filter dialog and filtered distance_marker. This has the effect of hiding all distance_marker nodes, I then checked the box marked "i" which inverts the filter, hiding everything else and showing only the tag I want to see.

I then selected the nodes one by one and added a name= tag so instead of distance_marker=5K I now have:
distance_marker=yes
name=5

Since KM is the default measurement here and in most of the world I decided to remove the K, this also more accurately shows what's on the signs.

So consider adding the distance markers in your area. On a stretch of highway they can be valuable landmarks and help people find out of the way addresses and locations. On a map they would give travelers a good sense of where they are on their journey with less worries that they've taken a wrong turn when they can match the road markers with exactly what's on their maps.

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Decided I'd add the Marree Man to OpenStreetMap.

I let a friend borrow my GPS for a trip way out in the jungle. A little village called Kato. Not much detail there yet, apparently it's all trails with no real roads. I have to wait to see his pictures maybe I can clean it up a bit more. But there you have it.

Introducing... KATO!
osm.org/?lat=4.6597&lon=-59.8318&zoom=14&layers=B000FTF

Since my GPS was stolen I lost interest in OSM for a while. I tried using Walking Papers for a bit but I'm just too busy to pull it out and write stuff all the time so gave up on that. Don't get me wrong, Walking-papers.org is a GREAT project, but I'm a bit too busy for it. Now I've gotten a new GPS ordered and have been feeling the itch again. So while I'm waiting for it to arrive I've started to add oneway streets and other stuff I've learned in the last month of ... DRIVING a scooter. Yep. :) So I'm trying to figure out how I'll mount the thing on the dash since they don't have exposed handlebars like a normal bike. Once I get the bike and the GPS together though... the map is gonna really take off.

Also I've found a contact at the University who will pass on my OSM advocacy flyers to the professors and will personally explain the project to the computer science prof. Give that a try people, if the right CS professor hears of OSM they could design a whole curriculum around it and inspire tons of improvements in the whole workflow of things. There's a ton of great CS projects that could be done with OSM data.

Anyhow... looking forward to my new GPS and getting back into mapping regularly. :)

Well I've got some sad news. Yesterday while on the bus my GPS was stolen as someone reached in the window, grabbed it off my lap and ran off. THIS SUCKS! Sitting in the back of a bus means you're crowded in and nowhere to go. I can beat myself up about it, but ultimately it's the thief who caused it not me. Anyways... Guyana is on hold for now until I figure out how to get another GPS. It's funny cuz he has no use for a GPS and it's not a phone like he thought when he grabbed it. Hopefully he's able to sell it and doesn't just throw it in a trash pile, then maybe the person who buys it will see my name and email on the startup screen. Most likely it's gone forever though. Just when I got my bike mount kit too, was working on getting a motorbike working so I could map a lot faster.

I'll just have to take notes on paper and focus on points of interest in known areas for now. I'll have to focus on advocacy as well since nobody's mapping here now. ;)

Keep your eyes and hands on those GPS devices people.

-Don.

So my wife wanted to visit the local gardens, fine I say... but I want to see ALL the flowers. ;) Actually I just mapped the whole thing.

Looks sort of masonic or something.

While it IS true that Georgetown sometimes gets flooded after heavy rains... this wasn't quite what I expected to see on the map.

Below I'm showing Georgetown in the OSMarender layer, the east side of the town is rendered with no coastline, it started after an update I made in JOSM this morning where I added Bel Air and several ways in that area. Not sure if it's a 0.6 api and JOSM bug, or something I did.

On investigating in JOSM the coastline shows up and seems unchanged, the Mapnik layer has been updated and shows Bel Air with the new ways and the coastline looks fine.

On reflection I DID adjust the coastline since it appeared that the main highway was going out into the ocean, I grabbed a few nodes and scooted then North until there was a clear gap between the highway and the ocean. Not sure why that messed up OSMarender. Also bizarre is the perfectly rectangular shape it makes as if the nodes somehow got chopped off in a bounding box somewhere.

Strange,
-Don.
P.S. The diary map doesn't save which rendering layer I'm using so you'll have to manually change to OSMarender to see it.

Took my first trip to Parika the other day. Had an hour to kill and was already halfway there so we went the rest of the way. I hadn't realized Parika was untouched. Didn't actually get much done there, the streets seem long and unconnected so I'll need a bike or car to get it done.

Secondly, I've gotten so far behind on putting in my waypoints I've just given up on that for now. Will do more frequent map drawing with JOSM or Potlatch and then when I get a LOT of free time sit down and catch up the waypoints. They just take so much time to go through and verify that I didn't miss any of them. I gotta go back and recheck basically all of them I've done in the last 3 months. Gotta figure out a better workflow for dealing with those.

So below is Parkia, and a ferry and a marketplace and one road. Gotta label those, but not today. :-)

-Don.

So the other day I'm asking a buddy where to find something and he says "Go South". It seemed a bit vague to me. "South? How far south?" "No SOUTH!" "Is this any South in particular or shall I walk to Brazil or what?" "SOUTH! You know South" "No I don't"...

This continued for quite some time... really.

Finally I got it out of him that "South" means "South Ruimveldt". Yup, and "North" means "North Ruimveldt", East and West as well. Wow imagine that. Seems odd that one particular town/village gets to steal the title of North, West, South and East... but it seems that's the only village that's broken up into 4 directions so it makes sense.

Here's another for ya. Several times I've been with a local and asked "Hey what's the name of this street?" I'd get a "First Street" or 'Third Street'. It seems like every village names their streets the same unless it's prominent. Efficiency I guess.

So the other day I'm with a friend and casually mapping as we walk around he tells me "First Street", "Second Street", etc.. then I see a street with an actual sign on it and the name was something TOTALLY DIFFERENT. So I ask "Is this Third Street or is the next one Third?" "No this is Third" "So why does the sign say ______?" "Right, well we just call it third".

So.

Gonna have to double-check all those First and Second streets I've mapped. :-) Thankfully it's not many so I haven't dug in too deep yet.

Anyhow, in Guyana I'm gonna be making good use of that localname tag or whatever it is. A lot of places and things here have common names and actual names. Sure is confusing when people tell you to go to a street that doesn't exist.

Mandala is a good example of this, it's a major road, but everyone calls it... Back Road. This is different from Front Road which actually IS named Front Road. They run parallel so I guess they're buddies or something. :)

Well I'm finally HERE. Have uploaded the first 2 days of zipping around the city in the buses and on foot. I haven't had any time to write down any street names or mark waypoints since everything's kind of overwhelming at this point. :) I found that there's an official ordinance survey map the government sells copies of here, so it's probably very unlikely but I'll look into seeing if there's any public domain data I can get permission to use.

Most streets here have channels along the sides that are about 3 feet wide and 3 or 4 feet deep where the rainwater runs, they all connect and feed into the river. There's about 2 roads in my maps where the driving is around 50 mph, those would be divided roads with concrete barriers in the middle. I'll try and take some pictures but internet access here is proxy filtered and I'm finding things blocked.

So I got my Garmin this week! It's really been a lot of fun learning how it works and thinking of the work in terms of tags and mapping details.

At first when I looked at Portland metro on osm I thought "wow it's DONE! ... What's left for me?" Well "fortunately" I searched for food in the area and the nearest was a few miles away.

So now I know my task... to add points of interest wherever I go. Today I tagged fast as I could while my wife was driving... Taco Bell, Wendy's Walmart, things like that. And now when I feel cooped up in the house and it's late and there's nowhere to go I can walk around downtown and tag all those restaurants everywhere. Oh well, for a month anyways before my move. :-)

Any other n00b projects I ought to work on in Portland to build my skills? If the city has all the streets basically done I don't need to make tracks do I? Just add waypoints and information, or would tracks at this point still have some value?

-DC

I just ordered my GPS online and am waiting to get started. Playing around with JOSM and others apps trying to get a handle on things. :)

I'll be moving to Guyana soon and want to help fill in that big black hole of nothing that shows up on most map sites. One month left! So it's time for me to quickly pick up some mapping skills!

Now one problem I have is that potlatch doesn't have zoom imagery close enough to see the streets in Guyana, it's all a huge cloud layer. Is it best to use JOSM or something else in this situation? Or is arial photography blocked so that people don't make derivative works based on it? I was just thinking to use that to check that my lines aren't off or something.

With all that said, I'll be going through the FAQ's, docs and things attempting to learn how to fill in a large blank area. I'm gonna look up points already made in the area I'm moving to and see if I can get in touch with the people who've started there.