Nachdem der Heimatort komplett war, bin ich dazu übergegangen in Drittweltländern zu mappen. Da wird es auf absehbare Zeit keine Community aus lokalen mappern geben, da die Leute dort mehr Probleme haben wie sie die Miete für den nächsten Monat zusammen kriegen sollen. An einen eigenen PC oder gar Internetverbindung wagen dort die meisten gar nicht erst zu denken.

Ich habe mein eigenes Mappen immer mit einem Aufruf an die OSM- Community hier im Blog verbunden. So waren flugs ein Paar Mapper zusammengekommen die dann z. B. Bamako in Mali oder Niamey in Niger gemappt haben. Es war da immer sehr eindrucksvoll wie ein Paar Mapper, der Harte Kern bestand immer so aus 2-3, in kürzester Zeit Millionenstädte aus der Karte gestampft haben.

Bei Bamako wurde ich dann übrigens von Entwicklungshelfern vor Ort kontaktiert. Diese haben dann in Bamako Mapping Parties organisiert und so sind dann auch ettliche Straßennamen und POIs hinzugekommen.

Ich persönlich finde sowas viel sinnvoller als noch den letzten Hundeköttelautomaten in Wanne- Eickel einzupflegen- aber jedem das seine.

Yeehaw, back to Niamey after allmost a year...
cu there ;)
Christian

Weel, as I said in my first post, the Bing imagery of Niamey (Niger) is a lot more up to date, so there can be a lot more tracing be done.

I did basically the same. Only when a small road just leads to one or two houses and it isn't very clear if it isn't just a private driveway, then I use highway=service.
With good aerail imagery one can begin to add stuff like outdoor markets, parks, woods, industrial sites etc. I never thought I'd say it, but here, Bing really is a godsent.
OSM ist just amazing. Even building outlines start to appear- see the train station for example.

I once had direct mail contact with someone from geekcorps.org. There are others, but I don't remember anymore (accidentially erased mail folders some time ago- grrrr)

There never has been a good hires Yahoo imagery. I traced over orthorectified PD maps. Hence you get the variable offsets in the old data. Please feel free to correct those.

GPS data is very sparse in Bamako. The quality seems to not very good. Fortunately, comparing Bing derived map data with Google data shows allmost no offset in the Bing imagery- nice.

Background:
Mali and Niger are among the poorest countries in the world. GPS adoption, high speed internet, let alone OSM- mapping seems to be allmost not existent. This is where the OSM community comes into play. As I allready mentioned above- there are interest from NGO's to have good map data for these countries.
Thanks everyone in advance for tracing

Help is a bit too strong. But if you are like me then most of your local villages around your home have been mapped allready. If you are up to some armchair mapping- feel free to jump in.
So far I haven't used any offset on the bing maps. I will check with the few existing gps traces that exist for the area. Give me a couple of hours...

Habe das relativ einfach mit "Viking" unter Linux hingekriegt.

Hm, don't you worry, your posts will sink into oblivion very soon...
To me the blogs are something I look into from time to time, I don't even read all of them. It is a very casual way of informing the world about your recent OSM stuff. Nothing to be remembered forever.

I know that the depth data of gebco isn't as detailed as one wishes for a nautical chart, but having at least some contour lines, at least- that's what I gather from your reply, will be nice.

Skippern wrote:
"The problem with marine tagging is that two sites (freitonne and OSeaM) uses different tagging schematics. There are a proposal though to unify the tagging schemes for marine tags."
IMHO, you are completely right, but I don't understand why OSeaM (which, apart from doing the website and working on the (much needed) editor, is basically a renderer), doesn't render both tagging schemes. Since we don't tag for the renderer, the renderer has to adopt to the tags that are actually used. This is how it allways was in OSM, and I think it is good practice. Additionally, tags like leisure=marina evolved completely independently from both projects and is used in europe over 2.300 times- why isn't that rendered? OSeaM introduced a new tag for Marinas which consists of harbour=yes+ harbour:category=marina. Well, it somehow fits their namespace, but it also ignores the work of a couple hundreds of contributors. BTW, the OSeaM tags are longer, more complicated and give no further information whatsoever than the earlier leisure=marina tag.

"I think the OSeaM crew have a special editor at hand for editing marine features, though I am not sure of the status of this editor. There are also a set of precompiled presets you can activate in JOSM that allows for some marine mapping." All true, and I perfectly understand that it takes time to write an editor, which is not finished to date. Meanwhile, one could use the freietonne "editor" to enter seamarks in the OSM database, and OSeaM can render them just fine. Two tagging schemes can happily coexist if all of the renderers show both of the schemes on the map- which is the ultimate goal of OSeaM.

Thanks for the response.
Well, to be honest, ATM, I completely lost track of what to tag at all. There are lots of wikisites on seamarks that are so incomplete that it renders them useless (pun not intended- LOL), there are at least two tagging scheme propsals on buoys and whatnot. How should I know what gets rendered and what not- most of the wiki sites are way older than half a year. Right now the detour via freietonne seems to be the only way to enter the data in a more or less consistent way. If and when it will get rendered on OSeaM- I don't know.

I'm really sorry for my public outbreak- I must sound like bashing the OSeaM maintainers all the time - something I really don't want. In the essence they are volunteers like me. Their knowledge on the topic is way beyond mine and I have the deepest respect for all their immense effort to get this project under way.

I just don't get the utter lack of information on their side. Why not render the freietonne signs- since it is the only consistent way of adding seamarks to the database ATM.

To say something good about OSeaM at last- a couple of days ago I realized that you can download .kap files (Rastermaps) for your chartplotter. This really blew me away. I can use OSM with my beloved opencpn chartplotting software - fantastic. This really is a step in the right direction, because now you can actualy use OSeaM while being on the water- things like that will push the project immensely. The more useful the project will get for the user, the more users will join and the more data will get collected, verified and corrected.

The POI overlay of freietonne was a bit clunky in my book, but it was the only thing that worked since about half a year ago! (I run Linux- so their seachart on a stick thingy was not working for me). An integration of seasigns into the map is much more elegant, so thanks for making the Garmin map. Unfortunately, mkgmap never really worked for me on my last remaining windows machine. When the time comes I will try again with a newer version. So thanks again for your offer to help. Right now I have to tackle the tagging issue ;-).

The more uses and formats the database gets- the better.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts,

Christian

Waldo wrote:
"@robert: "I don't see how a PD fork would prevent parallel work.... It would just be a one way gift to Google."

And a gift to the people of Haiti."

The people of Haiti got that gift allready, our license has the least legal obstructions, is freely available and will be "forever".
I'm not much into this "they vs. us" game and I'm very thankful of google to donate their aerial imagery in the first place.
The OP wanted to prevent duplicated efforts. This can only be possible if both licenses are 100% compatible both ways. We would need a constant syncing of both databases if the duplication of efforts is to be prevented. This simply can't be done by just canging our license. This would only mean that mapmaker gets better and the duplication of efforts would be just the same. The easiest way would be if Google would loose the "noncommercial" in their license since our license is allready very "open".

The duplication of efforts is a nuisance but I don't think that it's a fault on our end.
My 2 cents, Christian

It wasn't meant to blame. There are thousands of mappers and almost as many opinions of what's worth to be mapped, and what not. I just wanted to express my view of the matter. Unfortunately- I have to admit- this probably might not be the appropriate place. You are right, I will contact the user privately.
Cheers, Christian

Concerning your PD map problem:
Heard of http://warper.geothings.net/ there you can georeference your jpg or png files (convert your pdf's and dwg's) . The can then be used as an overlay for your josm session.
Happy mapping, Christian

The American zipcode database is in the pupblic domain probably because the US governement mustn't put a copyright on its work. This is the same reason why the Tiger road data for the US got imported into OSM or why you can download marine cahrts from NOAA without any problems.

Hm, Yahoo hat bei meinem JOSM noch nie funktioniert (ubuntu), deshalb kann ich Dir da nicht wirklich weiterhelfen. Landsat funzt, aber eben viel gröber in der Auflösung. Ab und an bekomme ich auch hier die roten Fehlerkacheln, nach ein Paar Minuten warten, wms layer löschen und wieder neu starten gehts dann aber meistens.

Nimm JOSM- da kannst du so weit reinzoomen wie Du willst.
Die Bedienung ist IMHO zwar bei weitem nicht so intuitiv wie Potlach, aber manchmal braucht man JOSM einfach.
Grüßle, Christian

Hm. Problem is that most of the imported ways are not even roads by "european" standards. The tagging sheme of Niger is very vague at this point. Most of the imported ways seem to be sand pistes, which do not even come close to what we (Europeans) would call a "road". It mostly is just a strech of land where it is easear to drive than somewhere else. On the other hand I could be completely wrong since I've never been there.