So its nearly 6 weeks since I started mapping. Time certainly flys while doing this surveying job! Have been covering North West Kent as that is where I'm normally based. Surprising at times what you find when you dive down a road/street that you have not visited before. Some you think, "I may come here sometime again and explore" and other places where you think " mmmm... lets get out of here before my wheels disappear"!

Most of my tracks are done by "driveby surveying" that is using my Navman N40i, which is OK for the raw logs, but as I found out don't trust it for anything else.

I normally whizz round unmapped roads while going onto or from work, to get the roads on the map then return later at leisure to pickup the detail.

So to date I think I've covered all the roads in Cliffe Woods in Kent, some bits of the surrounding areas. One area I've tried to sort out is the new layout at the M25 J2 /A2 junction, but have failed so far, go there by day it's full of traffic (a car park!) or at night its closed because its still being built!

Enough for now,......and before I forget thanks to TimSC for his encouragement email :-)

as mentioned above ;-)

Starte mit Abbildung von Merken.
Erste GPS-Teile sind aufgezeichnet. Wird am Wochenende ergänzt.

Background: I'm a retired software engineer and hobby sailor. I downloaded a file from CIL's (Commissioners of Irish Lights) website (www.cil.ie), with their written permission, with tech data about the AtoNs (Aids to Navigation) that they maintain around the Irish coast, approx 80 lighthouses and 200 other navigation marks. I used this to create entries in Google Earth (again with CIL permission), using MS Office to massage the data into GE's KML format.
See GE posting (http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/812193)
and GE KMZ download (http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=812193)
and in Google Maps at (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=812193&t=k&om=1)

I figured out the parts of KML that I needed by copying several examples from GE and pasting them into Notepad, but I don't see a similar facility in OSM.

I'd like to do a similar job in OSM, but am experiencing some difficulty in figuring out how to do it. I've gone through the FAQs and searched OSM help, but the best answer I can find (yet) is that I should probably use JOSM.

My question:
Part 1: Where can I find the file format, and some examples, for uploading waypoints (rather than tracks)?
Part 2: Can JOSM import bulk text data?

Regards
Dolphin3900

P.S. Some food for thought:

(1) GPS has been popular with sailors for much longer than with motorists/cyclists/trekkers, and I expect that there are plenty sailors with navigation and IT skills that would be interested in these answers.

(2) Maritime Navigators are interested in charts rather than maps, showing what's on (and under) the other 75% of planet earth (the seas), with details like lighthouses, navigation marks, water depth, hazards, tides, currents, harbours, anchorages, bottom type (different anchors for sand and rocks).

(3) Many modern boats can integrate PCs with GPS/radar/depth-sounders/logs(=speedometers)/weather instruments. Tracks that include depth data are common.

… See full entry

Jetzt auch Kartendienste zensiert

China ist dabei die Propaganda weiter auszubauen. So gehen die chinesischen Behörden gegen Anbieter von Webseiten oder Weblogs vor, die Google Maps oder Microsoft Virtual Earth auf ihrem Webangebot einbinden. Auch Webseiten und Kartendienste sind betroffen, die Taiwan als "eigenständiges Land" darstellen.

Mehr auf:
http://www.gulli.com/news/china-jetzt-auch-kartendienste-2008-03-27/

Don't get/use a Magellan eXplorist 500 to collect data. At the most detailed setting 0.01 km, I'm limited to 20km of data points. Well lets say having to stop every 20km or so wasn't a bad thing. luckily I was mapping a secondary road that had a town every 10 km or so. So I would save the trace when I got to every new town. The bad part when opening the folder to save the new trace my GPS would get exponentially slower. By the time I had collected 20 trace files it was now taking about 5 minutes to open the folder. At the end of the day it was drive for 15 minutes stop for 5, drive for 15 stop for 5 etc.

It works great for mapping the neighbourhood.

I emailed Magellan support about this issue.

In the mean time I decided to check my google spam mail and guess what I found. Yup the reply from Magellan, go figure? There response was try a 1 gig memory card.

I'm off on another mapping mission in a few days, so we will see what happens. I'm bringing my laptop along this time as a backup data logger for this GPS.

After a meeting today near Waterloo Station I filled in some detail around the station. It is amazing what extra detail you can add in if you get down to it. Shows the disadvantage of trying to map from Y! imagery. There are so many little service roads, stubs, estate roads, and variations in onewayness (in the same street) that you really have to be there to do it justice. Complicated here by fact that the station is all on raised level and there are roads, footpaths, bridges etc all coming in at different heights and up and over each other.

Today my new and first GPS device arrived, a Garmin Legend HCx. I already recorded the first track and uploaded it to osm. It is a footpath that I wanted to add the first day I properly discoverd osm and saw, that it was missing. Now I am looking forward to map more.

Hämeenlinnan tieverkkoon ei paljoa ole haja-asutusalueita lukuunottamatta lisättävää. Aina silloin tällöin jotain uuttakin kuitenkin kartalle eksyy.

Ajelinpa härskisti Vanajan voimalaitoksen porteista sisään kameralle irvistäen. Sieltä irtosi yksi nimetty tie lisää.

Pyöräteitäkin alkaa olemaan jo aika kivasti kartalla. mapnik-layeriin tuli myös ilokseni mm. leikkikentät.

Lipsahti myös Hattulan puolelle ja kohta on Katinalan kaupunginosa 54-tien itäpuolta lukuunottamatta täydellinen. Samalla reissulla Pälkäneeltä takaisin piirtyi myös tie 3073

Just back from a week in Cumbria, there's so much mapping needs doing up there! The road network, the cities, towns, villages, footpath/hiking trail network, NCN routes (71&72) all need a great deal of work.

I mapped the village of Thornhill pretty thoroughly as I had a bit of time available there. (See map link)

Otherwise i've been improving the road network and adding some details to towns where I visited.

I think that Keswick, Whitehaven, Carlisle and many others are strong candidates for mapping parties. Unfortunately I live too far away to organise one. (besides the time issues!)

Yesterday's planet.osm has now been imported into OpenPisteMap - things will be a bit slow since the tile cache has been purged.

It looks like quite a lot of new piste map data is in there, some of the resorts are looking fairly complete.

It´s impressive to see all the new lakes render in western Sweden. I just finished the largest one so far, hope to see it in the map quite soon.

Konnte einige Tage im Skiurlaub zum Kartographieren nutzen. Leider nicht sehr umfangreich. Ergebnisse hier: osm.org/?lat=47.0959&lon=9.9442&zoom=13&layers=0BFT

Today I downloaded and installed JOSM to see what it can do. It was actually really easy - I'm using it on Windows which comes with Java already installed by default. That JOSM is awesome! Really great program, love it. With JOSM it was easy to see all the TIGER errors that need to be fixed just in San Francisco. Can't wait to get started.

So I'll start fixing it up as soon as I figure out what all of the conventions are for streets and other objects. It looks like they all have a direction (even if it's a two-way street), and they have nodes where the interesections are, and divided highways have two streets side-by-side, etc. I know there's a guide on the wiki, I just need to read it more carefully. The other thing I don't understand are the tags - it seems like the TIGER data has so many tags just for each and every street - what tags should I include if I add a new street or path?

But the big question I have about this is: how is OSM backed up? If I spend a lot of time fixing all the San Francisco data, can it accidentally get deleted? If so, can I just download some data (like San Francisco Bay Area only) onto my computer and back it up there? (I mean, in a format that would make it easy to upload to OSM again, if necessary?)

Mapped (almost) all the buildings in University of Toronto (where I'm going to school right now) and nearby Ryerson University, tracing their outlines using Yahoo imagery. I missed a few buildings because they were missing signs or were under construction. I added the addresses of most of the buildings (shown on the signs) so if someone gets a geocoder running then it can use them. They should show up on Mapnik tomorrow.

Manca lo svincolo e il tratto in direzione Rimini che parte da qui.

I tracciati gps dell'A14 intorno a questo punto non sembrano molto buoni e non si capisce se sono presi in entrambe le direzioni o meno in quanto spesso si uniscono.

went away to a remote part of the country. Recorded some tracks that already existed, didn't bother to record ones that didn't, and in one place where I had, I didn't download the tracks soon enough, and overwrote part of it with newer, already existing tracks.

So be it. I made some spelling corrections on a few roads in the area, putting in the ð's properly. I guess this sort of half arsed mapping is what you get when you aren't in your own car with your equipment set up.

Something strange has happened in the north of manchester/south pennines area. Most roads seem to have been mapped (probably from the imagery) but the ways are not marked as highways so they do not render. I'm not sure why this is but it's in need of much fixing!

I'm not sure if it's possible to check if the ways used to be correctly tagged and have lost them, or if they were never fully tagged. Tagging as highways will sort the rendering, but someone will need to visit to get all the street names.

Have added several streets in St Annes (Fylde, Lancs, UK). If anyone wants a whole town to call their own, then this is the one!

Most streets that I added were from GPS, and some were just interpolated between known points when I knew the road was straight.

Yahoo imagery is non-existent here (Google has great coverage unfortunately)