Today, I received a file containing the coordinates of all border markers between Norway and Russia from the Norwegian Mapping and Cadastre Authority. This is a transcript of the coordinates found in the official protocol between Norway and Russia, defining the border.

The Excel file (comments in Norwegian only) is available from http://www.foseid.priv.no/gustav/2008/osm/Russkoor.xls and the official border maps were already available at http://www.grensekom.no/grensekart.php

The only problem is that the coordinate system is Pulkova 1932.

Sodele, lange nur gestaunt, heute endlich angemeldet und gleich ein paar Gässchen und Punkte eingezeichnet - hoffentlich hab ich nix kaputt gemacht ;-)

I have been making my first steps, apparently being the first one to map at the island of Pantelleria. At least I see no other data except the coastline imported from somewhere.
That brings me to my first problem: The coastline has some kind of triangular inland pond that doesn't exist in reality and happens to overlap with the local castle. I can't get rid of this "pond"; every time I try to delete it, upload of the change fails. Any hints on what to do here?

Testing to see what happends.

I added the parking area and the beach, and a grass area for playing.
Hopefully it will all get rendered.

Question:
The yellow metal reflective poles which usually go around the parking area just at the start of each foot path. .. these can be removed with a lock and key for park staff to drive over it. How do we tag this?

Also, the metal bar that gets put up at night, to prevent cars from going into the parking lot. .. this one is usually left in the 'open' position. How do we tag this?

Beaches and Tides:
on the yahoo imagery, it shows the beach at eithor high or low tide, depending on the time of day the photo was taken. .. so when were out there at low tide... with the GPS right at the water spot... is this where we draw it? .. or is it at mid-tide.
In some places.. this makes a big difference.

Beaches and parks: .. In many cases.. the beach is actually part of the park.. as the park technically extends out in the water for a certain unknown distance (unless there is a boye out there) my guess would be that proper tagging procedure would be to draw the whole park outline, then draw the beach within the park.

Thats all for now :)
Happy Trails ...
P.S. Great to learn that 'TrailRunner' for the iPod uses OSM :)

So Eastwood Mall just opened last weekend and I finally got to see the area between the huge central building (tentatively named One Central Park) and the 1800 and 1880 Eastwood Avenue last Monday after work. I've subsequently refined the building footprints in that area. Since I don't own a GPS unit, the positions and shapes of the new buildings that aren't on the Yahoo! layer are approximate and interpolated from other known buildings.

The updated data should now show up in today's Mapnik update. :-)

Bloody, bloody hell.

While trying to draw a pretty long strip of beach on the east side of Barbados, I accidentally added a distracting point to the coastline. But that was harmless compared to the disaster that followed: When trying to delete the point, I deleted the whole coastline. Potlatch is now saving for about three hours and I can't undo my mistake.
Even worse, Osmarender already removed the coastline (and thus the whole landmass) from zoom levels Z12+. Now it's actually public.
I'm really stuck and clueless. I guess I keep my editor instance open all night and hope that tomorrow the saving will be finished so that I can undo the whole mess.

Bloody, bloody hell ...

...

Heute nur einige Kleinigkeiten korrigiert. Bei manchen kurzen Straßenabschnitten ist es schwierig herauszufinden, zu welcher Straße sie eigentlich gehören.

Esta semana he digitalizado el viário del Polígono Industrial Oeste en Murcia-Alcantarilla y alguna calle en El Palmar, pero solo he nombrado algunas.

Habe heute erstmals getestet, ob sich das Nokia E90 zum Joggen eignet und bin ein paar Wege zwischen Fronhausen, Roth und Bellnhausen abgelaufen.

Ergbnis: bedingt geeignet. Das Teil ist doch ziemlich schwer und klobig. Aber in der Seitentasche der Laufjacke geht es einigermaßen. Im Sommer sehe ich allerdings keine Chance, das Teil irgendwo unterzubringen - vielleicht muss dann doch ein Garmin Handgelenk GPS her.

Man sollte auch vermeiden, das Handy zwecks Wetterschutz in eine ESD-Tüte zu packen (hatte gerade nichts anderes zu Hand). Diese Tüten sind beschichten und verhindern den GPS-Empfang. Zum Glück hat es nicht geregnet so dass es ohne Tüte ging.

Did 40mins of walking today and mapped a pocket of bushland in Kahiba that needed doing (view on osmarender layer). The Great North Walk runs through here which means that it's now mapped contiguously from here to Glenrock. Ok, so that's not very far but it's being done! I'm not sure exactly where it goes through Glenrock. The Southern section of the walk is mapped, and eventually ends up at a lookout (marked) but after that I'm at a loss. I know it comes out at Burwood Beach, so I guess it's time to backtrack from there. It then officially goes up the beach, which may be difficult to map as there's no "path" there.

The rest of the walk into Newcastle CBD is along residential streets. Maybe it'd be worth making a route relation that includes the bush tracks and residential streets?

Heading West of the map location the Great North Walk continues through more streets, crosses the Pacific Highway, then dives into the bush again somewhere in Charlestown. Somehow it crosses the Newcastle Inner City Bypass (presumably by tunnel?) and heads down a thin strip of bushland between the bypass and Charlestown (Hillsborough?) Golf Course. All this is next on the list to map, once my legs have recovered from a couple of long mapping rides in Glenrock.

The tracks in Glenrock State Conservation Area are *almost* comprehensively mapped. The only section left to do is a small area in the North East corner of the park. Unfortunately I live South of the park, so I don't head that way very often. It's about a 20-30km round trip to do mapping in that area.

I still haven't bothered doing much street name collection in Newcastle. It's, well, boring :p. Mountain bike riding is just so much more interesting! That, and I don't have a P&S camera for recording them yet.

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Einige fehlende Straßen in Grombühl wurden ja inzwischen schon eingetragen, aber es fehlen noch einige.
Bin gestern Grombühl nochmal komplett abgefahren. Jetzt werden die Sachen nach und nach eingetragen. Gibt hier doch mehr Geschäfte als ich dachte.

Just did some roads at Beenleigh, as well as finishing up most of the Gold Coast Hinterland roads.

I just came across a backup with 3 years worth of gpsdrive tracks (of my own). I've been through half of them so far and it paid off. A good couple secondary and tertiary roads between Cork and Galway (mostly westcork, Skibbereen and north from there) and a few of the tertiary roads around Co. Galway, that I was missing.

Most of these roads haven't changed in the last 3 years and if there are small mistakes, they'll be easy to fix. Better than no roads at all. Westcork is worse than the mid-west with lack of mapping.

There seems to be a general problem with mapping rural areas on Open Street Map, in the UK. It ranges from whole towns that almost aren't mapped to small hamlets, and their maze of connecting roads.

Towns I imagine we can gradually get to map - it's going to take a long time as it relies on local people doing it.

The small roads are a very time consuming thing to do, and can't be done feasibly on foot and even by bike would be seriously exhausting.

It's unfortunate that Yahoo seem to be the worst provider of online satellite imagery - the areas that we have the worst coverage directly correspond to those that aren't on the Yahoo imagery at good quality. Look at west Brighton for example, it cuts off exactly along the line of the imagery.

I've been looking at South West England - around Honiton, a town I know pretty well from many holidays near there over the years. I'd love to be able to map it, but there must be hundreds of miles of unmapped roads just within 10 miles of there... Have a look at Google Maps for example...

I'm sure I'm not the first to consider this. Does anyone have any ideas as to how sparsely populated areas are going to be mapped?

Bramsche Gartenstadt ist jetzt in Bezug auf die vorhandenen Straßen annähernd vollständig.

Streckenverlauf der Bahnlinie von Bramsche nach Norden bis Essen (Oldenburg) anhand von GPS-Tracks an die Realität angepasst.

Tracciatura di alcuni sentieri e strade forestali.

An e-mail to the Norwegian list, got me thinking on how to get access to the Norwegian national borders. The fact that someone think you should be paying royalty to know where your country ends, sounds a bit strange.

Step 1: Ask the Norwegian Border Commision for more information about the Norwegian-Russian border. There are some maps on their web page (presumably in the public domain, Norwegian law Åndsverksloven §9).

I sent them the following e-mail today:

I forbindelse med arbeid for OpenStreetMap.org, har jeg behov for å tegne inn den norsk-russiske grense i et kart. Jeg er klar over at Norsk Eiendomsinformasjon selger tilgang til en database der denne informasjonen inngår, men dessverre gjør deres lisensbetingelser at jeg ikke kan benytte meg av denne den.

Jeg lurer derfor på:
* Har dere koordinater for grensemerkene, og i hvilket format er disse eventuelt tilgjengelig?
* Finnes det, utover grensekartene, noen informasjon om hvor djupålen i grensevassdragene går?

På forhånd takk for svar.