Case Study: Wallan, Victoria, Australia

For those who don't know, Wallan is a town just out of the north of Melbourne which is on the brink of having a massive boom, which will soon see the area up among other satellite cities such as Sunbury and Pakenham. NearMap is a new Australian aerial photography company which works with OSM and vice versa to build up great maps. OSM uses NearMap's imagery (which normally has a resolution of 7cm for the 5 largest cities which gets updated monthly with new imagery, which helps to keep our maps up to date) to build our maps upon. NearMap then take the OSM data and render their own mapping layer on their site. A classic win-win situation. Imagery was released for an area of Victoria which covered most of Wallan on April 21. Having just visited the town on a drive a few day before, I thought I would make some improvements, which also involved a few other contributors pitching in too. I have captured a few snapshots of the town as the mapping progressed:

April 21:

How Wallan looked on OSM before NearMap imagery was available

April 22:

First of new roads of old part of town drawn, some newer roads drawn

April 23:

More new roads mapped, Hidden Valley Estate (roads in north east corner of town) getting mapped

April 25:

More of Hidden Valley mapped, new estate next to freeway mapped

April 29:

Town is road complete (excluding street names) for areas with NearMap coverage.

Just thought I would show others worldwide what excellent progress is being made with Australian mapping since NearMap lent it's very kind support.