OpenStreetMap
I just ordered my GPS online and am waiting to get started. Playing around with JOSM and others apps trying to get a handle on things. :)
I'll be moving to Guyana soon and want to help fill in that big black hole of nothing that shows up on most map sites. One month left! So it's time for me to quickly pick up some mapping skills!
Now one problem I have is that potlatch doesn't have zoom imagery close enough to see the streets in Guyana, it's all a huge cloud layer. Is it best to use JOSM or something else in this situation? Or is arial photography blocked so that people don't make derivative works based on it? I was just thinking to use that to check that my lines aren't off or something.
With all that said, I'll be going through the FAQ's, docs and things attempting to learn how to fill in a large blank area. I'm gonna look up points already made in the area I'm moving to and see if I can get in touch with the people who've started there.
Discussion
Comment from seav on 26 December 2008 at 02:07
Good luck! Many people would be envious of you for having a huge virgin territory to map. :-)
As for aerial imagery, you can access them from JOSM (via a plugin) as well as in Potlatch. If there's no clear imagery, then we just have to wait for Yahoo! to acquire more imagery; it's not a case of disallowing derivative works since Yahoo! has allowed OSM to trace streets from their imagery.
Comment from amapanda ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️⚧️ on 27 December 2008 at 23:25
Hi donaciano,
OpenStreetMap is based on creating a free map of the world. There are lots of maps of the world, but they are copyright and we can't use them, because then our map would not be free. So we need to do it all from scratch. It's similar with aerial imagery. There are only a few sources of aerial imagery that we can use. There is worldwide low resolution data covering the whole world that we can use. That's probably the cloudy layer you see.
Yahoo have brilliantly let us use the aerial imagery from their maps. That includes some high quality parts of some areas. That's probably what you're seeing in some areas. Unfortunatly this doesn't cover all areas. many parts of the developing world are not covered.
It wouldn't matter what editor (Potlatch, JOSM, etc) you are using, you wouldn't get any better imagery.