When out and about, I often notice a small detail here and there missing in the map such as a post box or atm and of cause I want to add it. But by the time I have finished what ever I was actually doing (these aren't mapping trips after all) and could enter the POIs I have frequently forgotten about them again :-(. Anyone else has the same issue? So I have always wanted to be able to just take out my phone press a few buttons and the poi is in the database, after which I don't have to worry about it anymore.

Well, I have last week finally gotten around to start adding an on-the-go POI editor to GpsMid, an app to display OpenStreetMaps on any java enabled phone. It isn't much yet, and still needs quite a bit of work, but definitely is starting to become useful, at least to me. So I though I'd blog about it here, as others might find it useful too and I would be interested to hear feedback of what would make this feature most useful to others.

So how does it work? Well, first of all you need to make your self a GpsMidlet. As GpsMid is originally an offline app, all the map data gets stored together with the app in it's own binary format. For this, there is a little converter Osm2GpsMid that takes a planet extract, for example the UK extract from GeoFabrik and creates a midlet from the area you have selected, preferably city sized to not overload your phone. The resultant file is now ready to be copied over to your phone and installed. Once installed, you will be able to browse the map, or use a Gps to find your location. To add a POI to OpenStreetMap you need to move the cursor (screen center) to the location where you want the new POI. Then you can select the "Add POI to OSM" from the menu. This gives you a list of possible POI types from which you can choose. Once you have selected a type, you can still add an arbitrary number of other tags to the POI before uploading it to the OSM database. In addition to creating new POIs you can also modify, add or delete tags of existing ways. For example it is possible to add a name to an unamed way or correct an existing name, add a maxspeed restriction or remove a wrong oneway tag.

Altogether I hope this already has some uses, although it clearly is still early days and still has a bunch of caveats and usability issues that I hope to work on in the future. The main two problems of the POI editor I guess are the fact that map shows you the data from whenever you have downloaded the planet extract. So you might think a POI is missing when in fact it has been added in the meantime. The second problem is that this can even be your self, as GpsMid continues to show the old state even if the POI was added by itself. So regular map updates are recommended if you want to use the editor.

Anyway, in case you do feel brave enough to give this a try, download the latest nightly build of Osm2GpsMid, convert your area and start mapping POIs!

Feedback or questions are much appreciated.