[HOT] Kenyan or African OSM community?

[Daniel Westergren]

This is great! I haven't really been mapping much with OSM in Kenya/Africa
yet (but more in Sweden, where I currently reside). I organised a Google
MapUp in Nairobi last year to map Northern Kenya, my main area of interest:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/ct2omi1k07uskp8sqc5mkqu7b1k

The North Africa tagging wiki page is a great start. Several of my
questions are already answered there, like seasonal rivers, man-made water
wells and residential areas in remote areas. And like Pierre Béland points
out, better to categorize roads by their socio-economic importance. There
is a wiki page detailing how to map Kenyan roads according to the official
classifications: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Kenya. Is
there a way to tag roads to show that they require 4WD or that some areas
are prone to flooding during rainy season? And what about "roads" in
villages, which are used by 4WD cars although in a European country they
probably would have been tagged like a path or track? This is the home
village of my wife, for example:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/1.9944/37.9157

I think it would be great with a tagging page for Africa or even more
generally for "subtropical" regions. It would greatly help for new people
like me to know what tags to use.

It seems like many of you are using satellite imagery as the main source
for mapping? Since the Bing imagery isn't always updated frequently, are
there other sources you normally use to make sure you actually map what is
there now and not what was there a couple of years ago?

Looking forward to do more mapping in Kenya, both remotely now when I'm
based in Sweden and through local knowledge and upcoming visits to Kenya.

/Daniel


2013/8/23 Pierre Béland <pierzenh at yahoo.fr>

> The thinking behind this North Africa Tagging comes from our discussions
> while activating for Mali And Congo.
>
> While working on this wiki page, I insisted about the importance for
> people from the north to think differently how to map subtropical
> countries. I think that it is essential to categorize roads by their
> socio-economic importance. The road surface condition should not take
> precedence over the importance of the road.
>
> An other aspect is related to the infrastructures. We started to list
> important infrastructures like wells and water points. However, this needs
> to be more detailed.
>
> This year, the USAID - HOT Cap-Haitien project, north of Haiti, gave the
> HOT Project team the opportunity to pursue this thinking and develop a
> Humanitarian Map style. I had the opportunity to work for this project in
> a "subtropical" context and observe the local reality while the rainy
> season was approaching and approaching. Our motorbike mapping teams then
> suffered the road conditions deteriorating rapidly. We also saw the
> importance to describe activities or infrastructures that are important to
> the local communities.   The piedestrian paths, the crafts and shops are
> essential to describe appropriately such towns.
>
> The HOT mapcss style that Yohan Boniface and Will Skora are completing
> presently is focusing on such information and is very usefull to render it
> appropriately. The maps below talk by themselves.
>
> Map of Limonade, north of Haiti
> http://hotosm.github.io/HDM-CartoCSS/#17/19.66845/-72.12412
> Map for Kibera in Nairobi.
> http://hotosm.github.io/HDM-CartoCSS/#17/-1.31269/36.78819
>
> Pierre
>
>   ------------------------------
>  *De :* Harry Wood <mail at harrywood.co.uk>
> *À :* Mikel Maron <mikel_maron at yahoo.com>; Daniel Westergren <
> westis at gmail.com>; "HOT at openstreetmap.org" <HOT at openstreetmap.org>
> *Envoyé le :* Jeudi 22 août 2013 17h03
> *Objet :* Re: [HOT] Kenyan or African OSM community?
>
> During the Mali mapping work a wiki page was created:
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/North_Africa_Tagging
>
> Originally a 'Mali tagging' page was planned, but I suggested generalising
> more. I guess the process of spotting things in aerial imagery in rural
> North Africa will be very similar to east africa.
>
> ...but also pretty similar to south africa, and actually pretty similar to
> rural india. Not sure how to organise that actually. Maybe "subtropical"
> regions all have a lot in common.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Klimagürtel-der-erde.png
>
> Aside from that scoping question, I'd say the page could be improved to be
> more like mapping cheatsheet with actual images for easy reference.
>
> Harry
> ________________________________
>
>
>
> > The topic of tagging features specific to African context, good one.
> Actually really relevant right now, as Map Kibera does more work on
> sanitation mapping. Why don't we just have that discussion here on this
> list for now? Can you explain more what kinds of features you've been
> mapping, and how you've been tagging them? Are you doing remote mapping, or
> based in Kenya?
>
> >>There are several elements that are special to mapping in African
> countries, like roads, huts, enclosures etc. and I'd like some feedback on
> how to map some of those.
>
> _______________________________________________
> HOT mailing list
> HOT at openstreetmap.org
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/hot
>
>
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