[OSM-newbies] Starting with JOSM and OpenStreetMap in general

[Rick Collins]

At 03:21 PM 10/9/2007, you wrote:
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>Rick Collins schrieb:
> > At 11:57 AM 10/9/2007, you wrote:
> >
> >> It's a common way of thinking about things, and there's been many
> >> projects tried doing this in the past, and none of them got
> >> particularly far. The way that we are doing things - treating GPS logs
> >> and various imagery as mere backgrounds to be manually traced over -
> >> has proven to be stunningly more successful than throwing raw GPS data
> >> and raw computing power together and hoping for the best.
> >
> > Yes, I can see that.  It would take a significant effort in software
> > design.  However, it would greatly reduce the amount of effort for
> > getting data into a useful form.  The current OSM method seems 
> very tedious.
>
>Developers are scarce, users are plentiful, so there is basically not a
>shortage of people drawing over backgrounds (be it imagery or gpx
>tracks) on the other hand there's not many people with the resources to
>program this.
>Especially since some GPX errors are not easily spotted by an automated
>process, and if you need too many traces it's actually cheaper in human
>time to draw by hand instead of collecting many tracks so you can
>auto-average them.

Yes, but there is a middle ground where a user does not have to 
manually enter every point that goes into the system.  I can collect 
100 tracks with less effort than I can edit just one.  But I was told 
about a command that converts the GPX data directly into OSM 
data.  So that is the first step I was looking for.  Manually 
entering every point is an absurd use of human resources and would 
ultimately limit the capability of the project.


> > If I can't get JOSM to work well, I might just work on a program to
> > automatically convert GPX to OSM format.  The mass processing of
> > multiple collected data sets may not be currently feasible, but JOSM
> > just requires too much hand work.  It would take many hours for me to
> > make a useful contribution this way and I just don't have the time.
> >
> > But I am not done trying JOSM yet.  We'll see how that goes once
> > things are back up at the web site.
>
>You might want to take a look at osmtrackfilter, although I'm not sure
>it's 0.5 ready yet.

Thanks, I'll look for that.