That makes a lot of sense. I too learned how to map things mostly by looking at how other people mapped similar things, long before I knew my way to places like wiki and mailing lists.

Thanks for sharing.

Segun esta pagina wiki, el “name” es para el nombre oficial. El nombre tradicional, se sugiere ponerlo en name_alt.

So Seattle has a 3.5 million population and 400 Meetup members. Belgium has 10 million and 133. Do you have an especially thriving local community or is the cliché of the USA not having many mappers simply not true?

@StephaneP j’ai répondu sur ton blog, en englais.

My wife had a good laugh with your comment :)

@phillippec , true, I might increase picture frequency in the future. And of course wider angle would be better. Do you have any experience with dashcam footage for mapillary? I wonder what it looks like within their platform.

Nope, just a group of hobbyists. The one in front had the accident. As they were stuck waiting for police they covered their cars to protect from the fresh salt on the road.

Completely correct to undelete, but I do recognize the dilemma. I see no simple solutions.

En mi auto funciona bastante bien con el soporte de Mapillary. Depende un poco de como lo pongo; al inicio pusé la camara lo mas lejos posible del soporte, y ahi si da vibracion. Pero me di cuenta que salen bien las fotos igual cuando esta mas al medio el telefono.

To add to naoliv, what to do when you stumble upon an area where existing elements do not align current sat pic? The best is of course to align old and new elements correctly. But if there are no (or not enough) GPX traces available, it might be best to shift the sat pic according to the old data. Maybe previous mappers had something more to work on, like private gps tracks. If you’re convinced the new picture is better, it’s probably easier to adjust all existing elements first, and only then start mapping new things. Of course, the worst option is to ignore the problem, and have different adjustment for old and new stuff. I kind of messed things up like that in El Alto, Bolivia when I added huge suburbs; it’ll be quite some work to fix that up.

I also like mapping like that. Just tracing roads on an empty canvas. The corner of the world I keep finding myself is around Coroico, Bolivia. Recently, I’ve been improving the huge woods there, still picking up some missing roads and hamlets there. After a while, you start noticing other people improving on your work - that is the most fun of the whole thing.

Yes, governments like their shapefiles. One “shapefile” is composed at least of a shp, shx and dbf file. The dbf contains the attributes (things like names etc.), the shp file contains the actual geometry. Free software like QGIS and expensive software like ArcGIS combine these into pretty maps. If you load the files into QGIS, it will probably make it easier to find what data has a copy in OSM.

I would expect admin areas to be relations forming a polygon (a closed line) in OSM. However, this random place has a closed line for a border: osm.org/way/33104058 (Relations allow several admin areas to contain the same lines as building parts. That means less data and easier editing: if you correct the border, all admin areas using that border are fixed) Maybe one of the several tiger:… contains an ID field you can use. The OSM id is pretty random, that you can basically ignore.

This doesn’t seem to be in OSM yet, right? If it were, here’s how you’d get the members out of Overpass Turbo: http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/b7I

I think the editing you want to do, can easily be done in the old standard editor Potlatch2. See osm.wiki/Potlatch_2/relations .

If you need an editor for just editing tags, as said above, Level0 could be it; Here’s my experience of using Level0 to work on some stuff collected with Overpass-Turbo: osm.org/user/joost%20schouppe/diary/35194

If governement is to use this data, they will need to do quality checking that’s for sure. Admin areas are OFTEN damaged by uncareful mappers.

The idea really is to turn the project you mention into something global. It’ll depend on contributors and resources if this thing turns into a global service where local chapters “adopt a region” or if it will be a tool you can install for your own region.

Meanwhile, there simply is no reason to wait. It is quite simple to set up an IFTTT recipe that will send the Neis-one RSS feed of new contributors to a Google Doc. Add some nice formulas, and you have a nice spreadsheet of who started mapping, with handy links to see what they did and to a place to send a message. Here’s a bit of info. If necesary, I’m willing to expand on that, or even help you set it up for your area.

We’ve been doing this for a while now, and while it is hard to measure impact, we have had some people joining the local Meetups and the mailing list after receiving the welcome message.

@rayKiddy: a POI focused map that lets you filter just certain types of POI’s? Here are my favourites: http://www.openlinkmap.org/ http://openpoimap.org/ http://thenextis.com/

Also, http://www.Overpass-Turbo.eu . Zoom to your are of interest, hit the wizard, type “amenity=school”, hit run. Ready. When you do run into trouble, I have found that it is indeed hard if you don’t have a background. But the guys at http://help.openstreetmap.org are, well, very helpful.

Well, some friends here have been thinking about creating a map like the nice heatmaps you often see, but where the heat comes from avarage age of the nodes in the tile. And maybe also one where the ‘heat’ comes from number of different contirbutors. These maps might help to identify the kind of places you mention: a lot of data, but little movement.

Ben, I revived my old little project a couple of months ago. Ruben jumped aboard and he’s taking it to a whole new level, with the help of Polyglot. The idea is to build a little platform that collects new contributors and makes it easy to welcome them, and to follow up on what they do right and wrong. There is a call for contributors on the wiki page about the project.

I really like the way this is going. Stil would love to see an effort to include paved/unpaved at low zoom levels in a country like Argentina.

The problem with standard style being both a mappers tool and the most viewed map style for non-mappers seems to be quite recurrent. The approach of “let’s make a better looking mapper’s tool” is ok, but has it’s limitations.

It seems like for a lot of people, osm.org should showcase the full depth of mapped data. If we want to do that in a visually attractive way, we probably will need things like transparent tiled layers or more interavtively displayed themed objects. That’s a whole different project of course. But knowing that such a project is underway, might make your project a lot easier.

For the paved/unpaved rendering: I don’t see much difference between the scenarios. What I am missing though, is a view at low zoom levels.

This is very cool. Mapazonia might be interested too.

It might be interesting to differentiate between settlements, roads and rivers. To keep things speedy, you could have four buttons to replace the “yes” (with all of them linking to the next picture): “settlement”, “road”, “river”, “more than one of the above” For areas already kind-of-mapped, it would be nice to have an overlay of mapped things, and be able to give feedback on map completeness.

Glenn, they did introduce more than just a few needles in the haystack, I believe about 40.