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I just had a week long holiday in South France near Montpellier. Visiting Montpellier I saw this building which has a very ornate looking outline (wiki "featured image" from a few weeks back). Rather disappointingly it is just a modern shopping precinct! I wonder who added that mapping detail. A local, or another holiday visitor?

I took my laptop with me so that I could offload photos and GPS traces on a regular basis, so was able to do a lot of photo mapping (much to the girlfriend's annoyance) of the various vineyard dirt tracks and little medieval towns we visited. I also experimented with offline mapping. No internet in our villa, so I took a few .osm files with me, and tried to make some edits offline in JOSM. This worked, but I found myself missing YWMS, so I didn't do much of this. So now I have a lot of photos and traces to work through.

While I was away a wikipedian messaged me to point out their use of OSM maps to create an image of Delhi bombings.

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No mapping activity as yet. Am researching for my undergraduate geography dissertation at the University of Manchester, and interested in what motivates people to participate in mapping and the OSM project.

I attended the State of the Map conference in Limerick in July as my first introduction into the OSM community, and am looking forward to the forthcoming Mapping Party in Manchester in October.

I would be pleased to hear from anyone who would like to share their opinions and experiences of mapping, and why they got involved with OSM.
If so, please get in touch with me either by replying here, or e-mail me at caroline.hangartner@student.manchester.ac.uk

Caroline

Posted by DJ_FoS on 22 September 2008 in English.

So my mapping of the streets near my house are now on the map. I can see that it didn't turn out perfect. My old model Magellan GPS is lacking in the accuracy department. Probably because it doesn't get a signal well enough under tree cover to receive enough signals for accuracy. I will have to go out and fix them. Plus I mapped the one way street backwards. Oops.

Location: Civic Centre, Kitchener, Region of Waterloo, Southwestern Ontario, Ontario, Canada
Posted by RRover on 22 September 2008 in English.

I spent some time yesterday getting tracks from the new deviation of the Pacific Highway.
Have a bit of cleaning up and additions to do as there are more small amounts of ancillary roadworks to be completed.
Have to go and track Pine Creek Drive (Old Pacific Highway) soon and update OSM accordingly.
Just started mapping with Merkaator and have found it easy to use.

regards

Darylr

Location: Archville, Bonville, Coffs Harbour, Coffs Harbour City Council, New South Wales, 2450, Australia
Posted by acrosscanadatrails on 22 September 2008 in English.

Im almost done mapping mount doug, i still need to put in the trail post markers.
Any idea on how to tag it?
Some of the trails do have names on these posts, and others is a guess. There is physical information maps at various places throughout the park, so i need to add those also.

Im not sure how to extend the park boundary.

Location: Blenkinsop, Saanich, Capital Regional District, British Columbia, Canada
Posted by JanneM on 22 September 2008 in English.

I'm a new mapper; I've been wanting to do this for a long time but not had the intestinal fortitude to actually start mapping and uploading. I live in Osaka, Japan. This is very gratifying in a way since I seem to be about the only one here mapping the city so I have lots of low-hanging fruit to pick. Seen another way, however, it's kind of scary and discouraging; the whole urban area is over 9 million people so I could spend the rest of my life mapping streets in this place.

Also, with very few people doing any mapping I don't have many examples to draw on for local features. My main problem right now are the big roads (the ones a step below motorways). While they are at the same level as the local streets, they are multi-lane, heavily trafficked and either one-way or two-way but divided by a sometimes quite prominent middle division. They are in other words really wide roads. One example - the one I have trouble with right now - is Nagahori street. Here's a (not that illustrative) picture of it: [http://farm1.static.flickr.com/115/299290678_d095b317db_b.jpg Nagahori Street]

I don't have a car or even a driver's license so there is basically no way for me to actually make traces down the middle of these roads. Those traces would have some issues anyhow since the roads can be very wide (the other road I need to start on - Sakaisuji - is five lanes wide) so the width really matters. In the case of Nagahori street, there's even a bus parking going down the middle of part of the street. 'm considering simply tracing the sidewalks and running the roads right in between, perhaps augmented with markers I put down at the center as I cross the roads on zebra crossings.

A related issue with Nagahori street and others is that the sidewalks are wide - as wide as a one-lane road - and separated from the car lanes by trees, bushes and so on. I don't know if I should map them as separate roads by itself or if I should just figure their width into the main road itself?

Location: Minamisenba 1-chome, Chūō Ward, Osaka, Osaka Prefecture, 542-0018, Japan

The cable to connect my GPS to the laptop arrived this week, so I thought I'd have a go at doing my first bit of proper mapping (rather than just adding pubs and postboxes, and fixing the spelling of street names).

I've made a first pass at the streets of the village of Bramshall in Staffs - I've also added in the two pubs, and the village's postbox. There is quite a bit left to do - lots of footpaths and little private roads, and a church to add spring to mind (and a few other roads in the countryside around).

I could probably also do with another go round with the GPS, making waypoints in strategic positions instead of relying on the track, which doesn't mark quite often enough. I'm quite pleased with it for a first go though :-)

Notes for me:

1) Check where Church Lane turns into Leigh Lane.
2) Check where Leigh Lane goes (left or right north of the village).
3) Add in Bennetts Lane
4) Get name for the A-road.
5) Get church location
6) Map the footpaths.

Location: Uttoxeter Rural, East Staffordshire, Staffordshire, England, United Kingdom
Posted by ndm on 21 September 2008 in English.

Spent a glorious Saturday cycling to the Newbury Showground for the Royal County of Berkshire Show.

There's now some better connectivity to the showground via Hermitage -- and I've marked "the paths untrodden". The service roads for the showground have also been marked.

It was interesting that some of the previous OSM road names seemed to be more a vague description, than the actual road name -- luckily I've found the signposted names.

If anyone wants a fun cycle I recommend the lanes near Bucklebury -- some hills but nothing too steep.

Plus, I seem to have foun the countryside equivalent of the "Living Street" -- the "Quiet Lane".

Location: Chieveley, West Berkshire, England, United Kingdom
Posted by ivom on 21 September 2008 in English.

Did a street check in borgerhout intramuros. This was fired by the search results SOTM in Antwerp (matching the names availble by the commune and that what is in OSM. Named roughly 20 streets in an hour, postprocessing also one hour.

I comes to my mind to start figuring out, how to get the commune borders generated. When I put OSM and the streetnames list together. I need some time to figure out how to query through postgis and how to form the queries to find the streets on outerlimits of certain districts (Berchem and Borgerhout for starters).

For now I think a good start would be to find ways which are attached to more than one commune.

Location: Borgerhout Intra Muros, Borgerhout, Antwerp, Flanders, 2140, Belgium

Today I rode with my bike around the Prestelsee in Graben-Neudorf and mapped the missing ways around it. I have seen that north of the lake the whole streets are missing, I think I will map those in the near future. The lake seems a little bit wrong in his shape. I will have a look at it in the same procedure as the streets in the north of it.

Would be better if Yahoo have better satelitte images of the area.

Posted by HannesHH on 21 September 2008 in English. Last updated on 29 March 2012.

Please be aware that this is a quite heatedly discussed subject. One side says "yes, this is how to do it", the other "no, that is just wrong". So please decide for yourself what "side" to choose (and of course decide case by case).

Many people map areas using new nodes. This might be the (seemingly) most easy way but it has several disadvantages when the area in fact is "attached" to nearby streets in the real world:

a) When moving the streetnodes around, the area has to be adjusted by hand. That's unnecessary extra work.
b) It's gluttony, the right nodes already exist.
c) Due to not connecting street and area there might un-intended gaps when rendered.

How to map:
Simply start your area and click on the already existing nodes, it's like magic!

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