OpenStreetMap
When I take my dog to the park, I've been taking the occasional detour so I can build up a map of all the walking tracks in the reserve. The OSM map now has way more coverage for walking tracks than any of the other maps I know of. There are still some bits I need to explore, but I'll add them as I go.
The other day I was at one of the ovals and some people asked me if I knew if there was a walking track from one oval to another. The map at the park which they were looking at didn't have any connection, but they thought there should be one. Luckily for them, I had some fairly recent OSM maps loaded in my n810 so I could be a little bit less vague when giving directions.
So then a few questions:
1) How does one generally go about mapping a creek? There are a few creeks in the area which you can't see from the yahoo images, and in lots of spots they aren't really walkable.
2) I'm also not quite sure how to label the reserve. There are signs that indicate it is called "Twin Creeks Reserve", but I don't think that this name extends all the way north, so I don't know where the boundary would be.
3) Is it possible to share nodes between ways in potlach? Or else, does someone want to fix up the dodginess around the northern field (Brown's field) - there isn't any gap between the field and bush. Or should I just put the field in a layer above the bush?
(oh, and first post)
Discussion
Comment from The New Andy on 14 August 2008 at 12:01
Also, from these map coordinates, switch to Osmarender and go north a few screens (at maximum zoom), there is some monsterous symbol there messing up the rendering. I can't quite work out what it is, possibly a bus or something like that... but about the size of a suburb.
Comment from ColinMarquardt on 14 August 2008 at 14:07
The huge bus is a known and now fixed problem, should be gone soon.
Comment from Biogenesis_ on 14 August 2008 at 14:49
Creeks are hard. Short of taking a canoe up one you sort of need to fudge them a bit. Basically wherever there's a creek crossing along a path take note of it with the gps and then kinda just "join the dots". In reality the only places most people will be caring about creek locations are at crossings or where it's obviously visible.
Quite often you just need to get on the ground, makes lots of tracks and take lots of photos then guess the rest.
In terms of the whole node sharing thing: Yes, nodes can be shared between areas. Not sure how to do it in Potlatch as I started with JOSM fairly early on.
Generally speaking when there's a change in landuse share nodes, when bushland (parks etc) border roads I tend to leave a gap, but opinions vary. Generally the renderers will draw roads thick enough that a small gap doesn't show up, and leaving a gap makes selecting just the road or just the landuse area *much* easier.
For areas where you have one thing inside another (such as an island in a lake) you need to use a multipolygon relation. Relations can be rather tricky to get right, particularly because the renderers sometimes don't show things correctly anyway.
Looking at that area brings back memories. I used to live in Epping and went to Epping Boys HS and one time we did running in the bush. Long story short, some guys got lost and ended up in South Turramurra :p. That was before they went and concreted the track around there.
Anyway, have fun mapping :).