OpenStreetMap
So I got my Garmin this week! It's really been a lot of fun learning how it works and thinking of the work in terms of tags and mapping details.
At first when I looked at Portland metro on osm I thought "wow it's DONE! ... What's left for me?" Well "fortunately" I searched for food in the area and the nearest was a few miles away.
So now I know my task... to add points of interest wherever I go. Today I tagged fast as I could while my wife was driving... Taco Bell, Wendy's Walmart, things like that. And now when I feel cooped up in the house and it's late and there's nowhere to go I can walk around downtown and tag all those restaurants everywhere. Oh well, for a month anyways before my move. :-)
Any other n00b projects I ought to work on in Portland to build my skills? If the city has all the streets basically done I don't need to make tracks do I? Just add waypoints and information, or would tracks at this point still have some value?
-DC
Discussion
Comment from eAi on 30 December 2008 at 23:11
The mapping looks pretty good as it is. If roads are missing names, they're worth adding, but again, that looks like it's pretty much done.
Points of Interest are certainly really useful, and you could spend however much time you have doing that, depending on the level of detail. You can, in theory, tag every shop there is! I'm not sure what the general policy is regarding this, though having this data available is obviously useful (and Google etc have it). Certainly restaurants, post offices, cafés are all useful.
If the urban areas are done, you could investigate parks (such as Forest Park to the west of the area you linked to) - adding more trails, paths, parking etc to these.
Beyond that, you can try mapping other areas (ideally ones you know) from the aerial photos (or from visiting them!). Even if you can't do everything, every little helps!
Have fun!
Comment from Circeus on 30 December 2008 at 23:41
Amenities, like school, libraries, hospitals etc. Landuses can be interesting to map too. Admittedly, a lot of work seems to have already gone into fixing and improving the Tiger data (though the overwhelming poor use of _link tags in the conversion could still be corrected in a few places, e.g.)
Comment from donaciano on 31 December 2008 at 07:31
Well I did a bit today and made my first upload. Took me a while to find the waypoints importer for JOSM, once I had that it started moving along. Tags took forever at first, then I started getting up to speed. Added some bus stops, lots of fast food, public restrooms, parks, that sort of thing. Then finally made my upload. Strangely it had several nodes marked as modified. Uh oh. Maybe I nudged some around a little, hope nothing stupid. It seems like when you make for example the main data layer invisible you're still able to select nodes in it until you manually select the other layers. Perhaps that's where all the edits came from when I was trying to figure out why I couldn't select my waypoints after I made main data layer invisible. Too bad it doesn't auto select the next lower layer when you make one invisible.
Still it was overall bearable. ;)
Thanks for the tips guys.
Comment from LivingWithDragons on 31 December 2008 at 12:40
Ah you are joining other mapping addicts that move house when they've run out of roads to map!
If your garmin doesn't show you the OSM map then it can still be good to take tracks. You can then compare your tracks (if you know the GPS signal was good) to the road position which may have been from the TIGER import or Yahoo imagery.
I know of people that are mapping the location of bins because I've done all the roads & footpaths. Well, maybe someone will make use of the bin data.
Comment from Minh Nguyen on 1 January 2009 at 06:02
Power lines!
(power=line on a way, and power=tower on each of its nodes.)