I did a little more mapping of the Grunewald on the weekend, picking up a few previously-unknown-to-me ways and completing a few bridleways. OSM is now one of the few maps of Berlin that have the track across the Havelberg right (i.e., not completely straight).

Fixed a small bug in the Berlin cycle route RR1 around Dahlem-Dorf: It doesn't go along Archivstraße but along Domäne Dahlem, and both directions pass west of Dahlem Dorf station. There were also a couple of oneway tags missing along U3.

Oh, and I really like the new data layer.

I've created some proof-of-concept KML tiles for Google Earth (and hopefully other KML-aware applications). Open http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20080611/031b2ce7/attachment.kml to give it a try and let me know what you think. More info at http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2008-June/027159.html.

There's an extensive article on OSM and the new http:/www.openrouteservice.org/ at http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,555174,00.html .

On another note, I'm just back from visiting Linux Tag in Berlin osm.wiki/index.php/OSM_at_Linuxtag_2008 -- I will unfortunately miss Frederik's talk, but I'm looking forward to pizza tonight.

I went on a bike ride last weekend to map some more cycle routes in Berlin. Route RR8 to Hoppegarten is now mapped apart from a hole in the middle: I lost the route a couple of times. Check on the new cycle map layer (very nice!). On the way back, I was hoping to follow RR7 from Ahrensfelde, but that has not been signed yet, as it seems.

I'm wondering whether it actually makes sense to create the routes as the administration sees them. RR7 and RR8 are "radial routes", which lead from the centre (Schloßplatz) to different points on the perimeter of Berlin. But for a large distance (about 5 to 10 km, I'd guess), they're the same. Having each as its own route relation would mean a lot of extra work to maintain the duplicate part. The other things is that the routes aren't marked as separate routes: The signs just mention various destinations, but no route number. The refs and the distinction between radial and tangential routes is merely administrative.

Supposing you've made it outside Berlin (after some 30 km), it gets really quite nice for biking...

After cycling through for months, I finally did some clean-up of the map around Südwestkorso. It's one of these typical Berlin dual-carriageways, in this case with parking down the middle. From the aerial photography, it's quite difficult to make out how it intersects adjacent residentials, in particular at what points you can cross the middle strip. These details were very much wrong. Furthermore, a few neighbouring one-way streets were missing. I do wonder how the street names were obtained.

I'm guessing a lot of the dual-carriageways in Berlin need similar clean-up with respect to intersections.

The fact that I travelled through countless times without realising there was work left to do does give some credit to the opinion that aerial mapping without surveying is evil. The map just looks too complete afterwards. But there should be better ways to show incompleteness than not mapping at all.

By the way, having the map in front of you on your GPS makes it a lot easier to spot such mistakes. I doubt I'd have noticed just from looking at the slippy map.

I recently had the opportunity to do some mapping in Aranjuez. Most of the inner city grid of one-way streets should be there, though I'm sure to have messed up some of the directions. There's also a couple of incomplete streets. Camera-mapping would really benefit from some way to store the orientation...

I haven't uploaded the GPS tracks yet, but will at some point.

Not sure who to thank for this, but the Grunewald is once again a forest and not a giant cemetery in the Mapnik rendering. The holes all show up, though the ones tagged natural=scrub aren't filled yet.

Thanks!

Done some work on the Grunewald in Berlin. There appears to be a whole network of bridleways in addition to the tracks and footpaths. It seems that in order to get a useful and complete map, there is a need for distinguishing between major and minor tracks and footpaths. For now, I hope to use the track surface (surface=dirt) to mark minor tracks, which should render less prominently.

The Grunewald is covered in a grid of rectangular pieces called "Jagen", and there's often tracks along the borders. These borders are usually clearly visible from the Yahoo aerial imagery, but they're not always actual tracks, so there's a few false tracks in the map currently. Maybe these should be entered as forestry=ride or similar? Can anyone point me to forest areas that have been mapped in detail?

There's also a whole network of bridleways waiting to be discovered. Any horse-riding mappers in Berlin?

I've tried adding the various lakes as holes to the Grunewald-multipolygon which turned out not to do what I wanted (for osmarender at least). I'll wait a bit to see what mapnik does before fixing these.

While I'm waiting for my new GPS, I've been doing some mapping of Oman from memory and Yahoo imagery. The aerial photographs of the Muscat capital region are fantastic!

Hello to the mappers from the region that have uploaded highways and GPS data. I hope you don't mind me getting involved.

It appears that Locosys is presenting an updated version of the NaviGPS (B)GT-11 at CES: The SirfStar III powered (B)GT-31. http://myces.bdmetrics.com/PDT-284795/Locosys-Tech-Inc-/GT-31-BGT-31-Handheld-GPS-receiver.aspx

So after three months of use, my NaviGPS GT-11 has stopped working shortly after Christmas. It seems the built-in battery is dead. I can't say I'm too happy with the product -- aside from the battery problem, GPS reception has also been less than convincing.

Even though it's too expensive, I'm considering getting a Garmin Etrex Vista HCx. Is it feasible to take an Etrex for a run?

I've been mapping parts of Emmendingen while I'm here for the holidays. JOSM + camera is great! I need to get around to actually uploading my GPX traces -- currently I'm just loading them directly into JOSM.

Anyway, given there was hardly anything on the map before, I was quite surprised to find that another mapper is also working around here. Greetings! If a user turns up as 'anonymous' in the Potlatch history I assume this means their edits aren't public, right?