OpenStreetMap
spot of mapping while on holiday in Egypt. Little bits around the souq of Luxor and also scratching at the surface of Cairo.
Cairo is another mondohumungous chaotically semi-developed mega-city which feels like it could benefit massively from having a good free map. So far the OSM coverage is semi-developed also. Like with Sao Paulo, the streets appear with glistening sun-baked clarity on the yahoo imagery, but even just quick-sketching all the streets will be a lot of work. On the plus side many of the streets of Cairo seem to be without names anyway, so maybe a sketched map will be an almost complete map! How can we organise many hands to make light work of this?
I did do some proper GPS photo mapping to record some details on the ground, as seen from our tour coach window. Here's an interesting https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:natural=cliff in the middle of the city.
Hmmm I see now that GPS fun is in breach of Egyptian law (WikiProject Egypt) Oopse!
Discussion
Comment from LivingWithDragons on 28 December 2008 at 20:08
As I started to read your post I thought I remembered Egypt being quite strict on GPS time things.
I tried to do some yahoo tracing for a bit, just as every little helps. Unfortunately the backgrounds on potlatch never seem to load for me (loading takes forever), and JOSM WMS is broken with Firefox 3. If the high-res coverage is good then that sorts the problem of avoiding GPS usage.
Comment from Harry Wood on 17 January 2009 at 13:05
JOSM can now fetch Yahoo! Imagery using the 'WMS' plugin (not the 'YMWS' plugin) The installation steps are documented, but maybe not very clearly. I'll write down my experiences with view to adding this info somewhere on the wiki:
For windows you need to download webkit-image, unzip it, and move the contents so that the DLL files and the EXE file are somewhere "on your system path". The best way to achieve this might be to place them alongside josm-latest.jar Keep the 'imageformats' subfolder alongside too, so all the contents of the zip
Then restart JOSM and do 'WMS' menu -> YAHOO (Webkit).
The new behaviour of the WMS plugin (which is not yet documented), is that it dynamically fetches tiles of the background layer, as you scroll around in JOSM. Now I'm not sure how exactly this works, but you may need to be at a good imagery viewing zoom level (e.g. position the zoom level such that scale in the top left says ~150m)
...and then you wait. In my experience it can take up to 30 seconds for any imagery to appear. I don't know whether this delay is to do with the speed of yahoo serving the tiles, some delay initialising/running webkit, or a deliberate delay as part of the logic for deciding when and where to fetch tiles. If nothing appears after a minute, then it maybe isn't finding those DLL files correctly.
In my experience Potlatch has always been quite good at fetching Yahoo imagery. Of course you need to tell it do so (3rd icon at the bottom) and there can be a delay of 10 seconds or so before it shows any imagery, perhaps worsened by a slow internet connection, but apart from that I'm not sure why you might be having problems.