OpenStreetMap
Matt and I went on a mission last night to boost the POI completeness and generally check the area over around Holborn in central London.
We were specifically aiming to get this done and inputted in time for the weekly Wednesday night mapnik re-render. It's funny. I've never really paid much attention to this in the past, in relation to my own mapping. I think it does annoy/confuse newbies (and maybe a quite a few experienced mappers too) that you don't get to see your work appear on the main homepage map until after the weekly re-render. Of course I should mention that we now have the awesome nearly live tiles map.
But for my own purposes I'm happy to just slap in the data and forget about it. "If you've got time to worry about how your map looks, then go out and survey some more!" is my philosophy.
Not last night though. We were on a mission to see some map improvements sharpish. But I was also on a pub mission, and I ended up leaving my inputting to the last minute. I had to head back to the office to get my data entered at about midnight! Happily it looks like I got it in there on time, and Holborn is now looking...
osm.org/?lat=51.51765&lon=-0.11572&zoom=17
...POItastic!
Discussion
Comment from Tom Chance on 29 January 2009 at 09:30
This is great, central London really needs more POIs in there! The fun bit will be keeping it up to date :-)
Comment from amm on 29 January 2009 at 09:47
Nice work!
Although the road network is reasonably complete in central London, I think your example shows nicely that the POIs still have a lot to go in central london. Perhaps we should have a Metadata mapping party for central london, once we start mapping again at the Wednesdays meetups. Adding POIs, speedlimits turn restrictions and house numbers...
Comment from Harry Wood on 29 January 2009 at 09:58
Yeah. We need a larger army of contributors! The army is getting larger though.
Also updating nodes is much less technical than dealing with ways, so I'm hopeful that we might see fly-by contributions from local people to do simple POI updates, but some more dedicated OSMers will probably need to work on getting the POIs in there in the first place!
Comment from IgnoredAmbience on 29 January 2009 at 18:00
Let me guess, Cloudmade product launch venue?
Comment from Harry Wood on 29 January 2009 at 23:57
Well yes. That may have had something to do with it :-) I didn't get paid any overtime for a full on evening of mapping, promoting OpenStreetMap at the pub, and then going and inputting the map data... but hey, it is the kind of thing I do for fun!