Visakhapatnam is my hometown, a coastal city in Southern India, it is popular tourist spot with temples, hills, parks and beaches. This city is also home to Indian Navy’s Eastern Naval Command. A constantly evolving city, Visakhapatnam ranked 8th in the smart city list of the Government of India for futuristic infrastructure development.

Aerial photographs of Visakhapatnam by Candeo gauisus, CC BY-SA 3.0

I have done a lot of mapping of my hometown in the last 4 months. But after going through several mapping guides and discussion with my colleagues at Mapbox, I realized that I can improve my mapping even further.

So, I started cleaning up my earlier edits and added points of interest (POIs) with proper tagging and naming practices.

This is how I went about the whole process:

• Add missing POIs.
• Add correct tags for existing features such as roads, statues, sculptures,o verhead tanks, fitness centres, parking areas.
• Correct alignment of roads based on imagery.
• Remove duplicate roads.
• Split roads into correct segments.
• Add missing connections.
• Fix letter case for names.

Throughout the process I made sure to go through the feedback on my changesets and made the necessary corrections. After working on the feedback the map looked cleaner and I continued adding POI’s and buildings.

Learnings:

• Communication during the task and clarification of doubts straightaway.
• Mapping my hometown helped me in getting to know the correct tagging system in OSM and naming protocols.
• Shortcuts in JOSM
• Proper use of Building Plugin
• Using proper tags for road classification using Indian roads classification wiki

The entire process has been a great learning experience for me and it definitely helped me improve my mapping skills. That said, lots of features can be added in my hometown. So, I will be continue my work here on OpenStreetMap.