Thursday August 23, 2017

A day we all look forward where we will be able to learn how to help other people with small things such as mapping communities. Today in CWTS++ we learned that we have already made 12,000+ edits in mapping within our group! I was so happy to find out that all of our hard works and interest in mapping had a wonderful result. Also, Mr. Olario wanted us to know about the flooding that happened in India and that it needs to be mapped for the authorities to easily locate residential areas that are unknown to them. We were also taught how we can improve mapping and how we can map more accurately like editing mistakes such as the unaligned roads and houses that are mapped the wrong way and etc.

After that we discussed our homework which is the field papers by group. In the field papers we printed our neighborhoods and try to gather much information before the next meeting. Within my group I noticed that they were able to map missing roads, streets, they also named the streets and gathered the house numbers within their neighborhoods. I have also mapped the name of the stores that surrounds my neighborhood. Most of the stores were canteens since it is near a university.

After we’ve discussed our home works, each student will represent their group to discuss about what they have learned in their works to the whole class. When listening to the group 9, They seem to have a problem with their imagery that lead them to create edits and features that has already been mapped. The other group stated that they have gathered the name of the residents who lived in the house they were surveying. A speaker in another group addressed the safety that we have to consider in mapping since some neighborhoods seems to have dangers that lurks within the vicinity so we mappers really have to be careful. We still have to update and continue this homework. Nevertheless, this discussion has helped us to know what we still lack and what we still have to do in gathering information for our field papers to be accurately mapped.

We were also introduced to JOSM or Java Open Street Map Editor. It was already installed in the computers in the computer laboratory and we were tasked to open it. He first discussed the difference between the id editor and JOSM. When you edit maps in JOSM, you could download the map and you could use it online while iD editor needs wifi access. For me this is much more efficient since i don’t have an internet connection, i only use a pocket wi-fi to have an internet access. We pressed Ctrl + n to open the editor and we learned features such as the building feature where we can make boxes to represent the buildings. We were introduced to lines and nodes. He also taught us shortcut keys such as the ‘s’ key to press select ‘a’ to create lines ‘b’ to create buildings and many more shortcuts that we still have to learn.

We were tasked to install the JOSM editor and use it as our default editor when editing maps. On this day i have enjoyed everything that i have learned and i am willing to apply this to help more communities around the world. I would also like to thank Mr. Erwin Olario for teaching us new ways to contribute in this field! #pupsjcwts