OpenStreetMap
First Time Editing, Thoughts and Plans for the Future Work
Posted by Nedim Gegic on 28 January 2018 in English.Today is my first day of editing here on Open Street Maps. I used OSM few times before but never edited anything. Today I decided to contribute and here I am. I did some road corrections in a village near my town and I added few roads there and a few houses and building.
Going over the work done by contributors before I have to note that most of the things are there, outlined, but they’re not correctly positioned. I’m not sure if it could’ve happened that because of some update roads and buildings move a bit from their place. But anyways in a next few months I will put all the things in their place and hopefully add everything else as well. Correcting smaller areas, like villages is no problem at all since there are not many things and it’s not that crowded, but the problem will be when I start doing corrections in my hometown Lukavac. There are many things (roads, buildings, railways, and etc.) and since on top of all of that they’re out of their place it’s hard to look at that and navigate. I might, when I come to doing corrections at that place, delete everything in a block or two and start a new, unless I find a way to turn off certain things from showing up while I’m doing work on other things.(For ex. hiding buildings while I’m correcting roads)
All my nearby contributors are not active. Most of them logged in 5-6 years ago and from the younger ones there are few that logged in around 11 months ago but made no contributions. So I guess I’ll have to do this all by myself. I might ask someone from my uni or hometown to join me but honestly I doubt anyone will do it.
So for now I’ll mostly be doing corrections on the existing things and then I’ll start adding the missing things.
Discussion
Comment from kucai on 29 January 2018 at 03:04
welcome to editing!
You’ll find out that those offset will become part of the game soon enough. What probably happened was that the buildings were traced on older imagery compared to what you are currently seeing. And there is nothing to prevent a newer imagery in the future to have different offsets of the building that you traced now.
Even if you are able to obtain precise gps coordinates for a point, and then re-aligned the imagery, you’ll still find that things don’t really line up somewhere else. We have to live with that imperfection, close is good enough!
In your situation, I would do one of these: If there are already a lot of buildings traced, I’ll locally realign the imagery to fit those buildings and start tracing other things that needed tracing. This way, everything will be offset by a constant value. Perhaps in the future when I really feel confident that I have a good reference coordinate, I’ll try get an agreement from others to shift the whole area (and imagery) to the more accurate coordinate. (don’t know how practically relevant when applying offsets to city sized area, I traced villages mostly) If only a handful of buildings had been traced, might just ignore them. In JOSM you can filter out buildings to declutter the map.
In most cases, I just said fuck it. :) hehe
Comment from andy mackey on 30 January 2018 at 07:53
Before moving or drawing buildings it is best to show all GPX traces. Next see if the roads and the GPX traces align, use the best average to align the Ariel to the traces. Only map the outlines to that newly aligned view. All the editors have a way of doing this. You should not believe your eyes until you have checked the alignment. It’s a pain to have to move a lot of stuff so check first. Welcome and Happy Mapping
Comment from Nedim Gegic on 30 January 2018 at 10:21
@kucal Thank you :D
I see. Thank you for telling me that, I’ll keep that in mind now.
I see. I’ll have to do some reading about offset and realignment and once I feel comfortable enough I might try doing that. Sounds like a good idea. But I guess for now I’ll just leave things as they are now xD.
Thank you for your comment it really helped me and saved me a lot of trouble in the future :)
@andy mackey I see. I’ll have to check that as soon as possible. Since I’m still new here I’ll have to do more reading and practice until I get to know all of these things. To be honest I didn’t even know that there are some other editors for mapping, I’ll check them out and try the thingy you’ve recommended. Thank you for your comment it was really helpful :D and also thank you for welcoming me :D
Comment from NaturalRaport on 31 January 2018 at 14:39
Thank you for valuable informations :)