Unlike many Indian cities where ambiguity in street names is common, Chennai stands apart to this. In Chennai, street names are displayed at the end of each street, not just the main roads even interiors roads have names displayed. I am in Chennai for a vacation, having noticed this I set out on a field survey for street names around my residence. In the survey, I could observe that, streets less than 50 metres in length and streets where four-wheel vehicles cannot enter also had a specific name displayed at the end of the street. Such detail in public information helps in creating perfectly labelled maps and gives the mapper knowledge of where street with a particular name begins or ends. With such information, Chennai is a delight for open mappers and a comfort for service delivery. While streets in some localities are well labelled on OpenStreetMap, some effort is required in others.

Hi Everyone, This is Pavan. I am a GIS Professional and new to this community. Visakhapatnam is my hometown, which is a coastal city in India with a population of nearly 2 million people. It has been selected as one of the 20 cities under the smart cities campaign by Government of India and Spatial Information will play a key role in its development as a smart city. MVP colony in Visakhapatnam is where my family’s permanent residence is situated and I have been editing and creating data in this area. I have created most of the buildings in 12 sectors of MVP over the past 3 months. I am looking forward to create geocoded data for this area and seek help for this purpose. At present, I live in Delhi and it’s been five years now staying away from my hometown. So I would like to interact with locals from the region to check for any recent development and improve already created data. Some info for those who are interested in this activity: 1) For online mappers, Banks are an authentic source of information if you see a bank tagged in the OSM, search for “bank name + MVP Colony” in google, you will get the address of the bank with plot number and Pincode. This information may be entered into the space provided for address in OSM preset or the respective building where a bank is tagged. 2) Interested members from Visakhapatnam may provide info from ground by updating plot numbers from layout maps for the sectors. Or one may tag addresses based on local knowledge as well. Looking forward to interact with you.
–Happy Mapping.