Welcome to the Open Street Map project. In case you didn’t already know, our maps are made by volunteers from all over the world making changes to the map database. If you click the ‘edit’ tab at the top of the map view it will open a simple online, flash based, editor which you can use to add information based on your own local knowledge of the area. There is also a more advanced editor called JOSM which is a more traditional GIS type editor with a more difficult learning curve, but much more power. There are also plugins available for ArcGIS and some of the other professional GIS suites, but the recommended way of editing is using either JOSM or potlatch (the online editor) since they are custom made to suit our data model.
We currently have very few map editors ‘on the ground’ in Africa so any contributions you make to these areas would be greatly appreciated and really help out the project. Let us know if we can be of an assistance to you, either in adding to the dataset, or helping you make use of the data for your GIS work. There are many people who do tracing of satellite imagery in Africa to try to build up a simple base map and we may be able to assist you in this way as well. That way you can focus on getting on the ground info like street names, hospital locations, etc, without having to create the base map yourself.
Just a quick reminder though, please keep in mind that we cannot accept copyrighted data from other sources into our databases unless we get a get proper permission to do so. This is to keep the dataset open and available for use by everyone.
OpenStreetMap
Discussion
Comment from AndrewBuck on 26 June 2012 at 17:00
Welcome to the Open Street Map project. In case you didn’t already know, our maps are made by volunteers from all over the world making changes to the map database. If you click the ‘edit’ tab at the top of the map view it will open a simple online, flash based, editor which you can use to add information based on your own local knowledge of the area. There is also a more advanced editor called JOSM which is a more traditional GIS type editor with a more difficult learning curve, but much more power. There are also plugins available for ArcGIS and some of the other professional GIS suites, but the recommended way of editing is using either JOSM or potlatch (the online editor) since they are custom made to suit our data model.
We currently have very few map editors ‘on the ground’ in Africa so any contributions you make to these areas would be greatly appreciated and really help out the project. Let us know if we can be of an assistance to you, either in adding to the dataset, or helping you make use of the data for your GIS work. There are many people who do tracing of satellite imagery in Africa to try to build up a simple base map and we may be able to assist you in this way as well. That way you can focus on getting on the ground info like street names, hospital locations, etc, without having to create the base map yourself.
Just a quick reminder though, please keep in mind that we cannot accept copyrighted data from other sources into our databases unless we get a get proper permission to do so. This is to keep the dataset open and available for use by everyone.
-Buck