How did your GPS fare in those thightly-packed streets ?

I find the best remedy against strange looks is to be more visible, not less. Wear a high-viz jacket, or even a bright-yellow T-shirt with the OSM logo and/or “surveyor” printed on it (many shops offer print-on-textile services). That may not work as well in India where even officials can be looked upon with suspicion, but it should help.

Another thing to do is to print some OSM leaflets to distribute if people ask questions. Turn an akward discussion into an evangelising session :) Evangelising OSM, especially to the not-so-techie population, is still ugely important.

One last thing people do to avoid stares while surveying is to survey during very early morning. That’s too much work for me :p It probably also make you look even more suspicious.

General RSS feeds is on the osmose todo list.

I like it too :) You should mention it on the talk mailinglist.

Other QA tools include http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/ and http://osmose.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/ , but I can’t find an RSS feed for them (osmose has an user-based feed, but apparently no bbox-based one).

You need to pay mapbox to see their satellite imagery as a user, on your mapbox map. But like with Bing, OSM contributors have a special permission to use them for free to improve the map.

Taken from JOSM’s default list of available imagery providers, the url is tms[17]:http://{switch:a,b,c}.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/openstreetmap.map-4wvf9l0l/{zoom}/{x}/{y}.png With JOSM you just go to preference, tms/wms, and activate the corresponding entry. I’m not sure what the procedure is for other editors.

Note that OSM itself doesn’t provide or manage satellite imagery. It relies on third-parties that kindly allow us to use their imagery for mapping. Aquiring and processing high-res imagery is a time-consuming and costly business, so it is often not very up to date nor comprehensive.

The most widely used imagery comes from Bing, but there are other providers, from mapbox (who promises low-res but frequently-updated imagery soon) to local sources to self-made shots using DIY balloons or drones. If you ue JOSM, there is a nice pre-made list of existing imagery, and with any editor it is easy to add imagery not in the default list if you know the link. Have a look, maybe some sources are more up to date than Bing for your area.

JOSM (and many other tools, standalone or integrated) Make it easy to correlate a series of photos with a gpx file : right-click on the photos layer, then “correlate”, then choose the gpx file, then adjust the time shift to get all photos at the right place.

As it happens, my camera (lumix dmc-tz20) includes a GPS chip but it is crap, witha granularity of about 1km, unusable for maping. Photos taken from smartphone have the advantage of storing which direction (north, south, etc) you were pointing at. The lat/long is not as precise as with a dedicated GPS device, but it isn’t a big problem for photomaping.

When cycling I just have one hand on the handlebar and another on the camera. I dont go very fast, and I do not shoot every single house. Even if you end up walking and stoping every now and then, the bike is worth it just to get to the mapping location. Some people do video mapping instead, with a sports camera like the gopro. Garmin even unveiled a sport camera with a gps unit recently.

I was never tempted by audio mapping, prefering instead to take pictures (using a small but good/standalone camera, and a treking gps).

The advantage is that you grab all details in one second, instead of 2-3 second per detail with audio. I tend to cycle instead of walk. The disadvantage is that you need daylight and that some residents get suspicious and ask angry questions (but if you brought some OSM printouts, this easily turns into an OSM advocacy opportunity).

I’m currently preparing a complete mapping of my home town’s addresses (population ~9000) by bing-tracing all the buildings before I go (re)survey. I expect fieldpapers will be great to use if buildings are already there.

Lastly, I recently (finally !) ordered a tablet (10.1’), which I hope to use to edit the map during the survey instead of after, making maping both faster and more opportunistic. We’ll see how convenient that is.

I haven’t really formed an opinion on coastline vs boundary. I expect it differs legally from country to country. To me this looks awfully silly and makes me wish for county borders away from the coast, but I can understand the argument that only the country itself, not its constituent counties has sovereignty out in the see. To think that it I’m rowing between those islands I’m in Ireland but not in Mayo nor Connaght feels weird, but I haven’t argued against the established order so far.

Water bodies are difficult to map because their shape changes quickly. Tidal water is the obvious example, but the convention of mapping the high water mark is fairly well established.

Lakes may seem static but they are not. In Ireland we have a lot of turloughs that can swell to hundreds of meters length in a matter of days, stay around for a few weeks or months, and disapear again. Even for an identical “fill factor”, the shape may be different from year to year. This is an extreme case, but all the lakes of the world probably fit between “static” and “turlough”.

So how do you map such a beast ? No one outline will be correct.

• Figure out wether your satellite image was taken during a wet or dry spell.
• Accept the fact that your mapping is going to be subjective, and that different sources (canvec, satellite, ooc maps, etc) will draw a different shape.
• Keep the coastline’s “mean high water” convention in mind.
• Use natural=wetland around the natural=water where applicable.
• Compound all that and use your best jugement.

Some of these are listed in the top 10 tasks on the wiki. In particular, I find overpass’s clickable POIs page quite usefull, it’s a proof-of-concept originaly expected to go on the main osm.org page, I’m not sure why progress seems stalled.

Welcome :)

Finding local mappers can be hard, depending on your luck. One way to look for them is to use whodidit to find recent edits in an area, but those contributors aren’t ganranteed to be locals.

Edits usually get rendered within a few minutes. See help.o.o for similar questions.

Remember that OSM is about the data before being about the rendering. There are many renderings available, and the easyest way to make your own is to use tilemill.

Salut,

je ne suis pas spécifiquement au courant de cette mission, mais une rapide recherche google pointe vers la mission HOT sur leur site et sur leur mailing list. Le mieux est sans doute de les contacter via la mailing-list (inscription ici).

Also https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/17501/when-mapping-polygons-surrounded-by-streets-should-they-share-nodes-or-be-traced-separately

The biggest reason not to share nodes between a way and an area is that it is geometrically incorrect, because the landuse doesn’t extend to the middle of the track. If the track is to be considered part of the landuse, then it should be included completely. Difficulty to edit and size of the download are valid but fleeting reasons.

See this help.o.o question.

Joli rendu :) Un peu “brillant”, mais ça devrais être mieux pour l’impression.

Impressionant ! Proposé comme image de la semaine. À quand les cartes IGN -OSM ? :)

A further complication is that the rendering style changes, tags get deprecated and removed from renderer’s config, etc. So even with Jonathan’s hypothetical tool, you’d be rendering yesterday’s data with today’s style. Still, would be cool to have :)

That said, have a look at http://owl.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org/ : you’ll see recent changes in an area and can even see the old geometry by hovering your cursor over an item’s “back arrow” icon.

“Who needs multipolygons ?”, right ? :p

Very promising. I added some issues in github. Thanks for the good work.

Félicitations :)