[OSM-newbies] placing a POI at a precise location

[SomeoneElse]

On 04/04/2011 10:40, Alexandros Papadopoulos wrote:
> I've had pretty much the same question for some time now. The tricks 
> suggested above sound good but I'm not sure how to actually implement 
> them: I have been marking POIs on my Garmin unit for months (mostly 
> during a roadtrip through Asia) and would like to add them to OSM. 
> Many of them are (e.g.) drinking water amenities in the middle of 
> nowhere, so importing the POI from the GPS is really the only way to 
> place it accurately on the map. POIs are also usually not connected 
> with tracks, because I wasn't recording tracks all the time (no 
> frequent access to computer, and my GPS can only store 10,000 track 
> points)
>
> Is there documentation anywhere on how to do that from a Garmin 
> device? I can get the POIs onto MapSource, but don't know how to 
> transfer them to OSM. Manually adding them to the map with Potlatch is 
> inaccurate, error prone and extremely time consuming.

In order to get Garmin waypoints into OSM for Potlatch editing, the 
trick I use is to (manually) add a small track to the file at around the 
location of one of the waypoints.

As an example, in the GPX that you saved from mapsource, if this is one 
of the waypoints

<wpt lat="53.3372638" lon="-1.2587144">
<ele>85.9228516</ele>
<name>001</name>
<cmt>23-OCT-10 14:05:17</cmt>
<desc>23-OCT-10 14:05:17</desc>
<sym>Parking Area</sym>
<extensions>
<gpxx:WaypointExtension 
xmlns:gpxx="http://www.garmin.com/xmlschemas/GpxExtensions/v3">
<gpxx:DisplayMode>SymbolAndName</gpxx:DisplayMode>
</gpxx:WaypointExtension>
</extensions>
</wpt>

Then, using a text editor, adding this:

<trk>
<name>SOME_WPTS</name>
<extensions>
<gpxx:TrackExtension 
xmlns:gpxx="http://www.garmin.com/xmlschemas/GpxExtensions/v3">
<gpxx:DisplayColor>DarkGray</gpxx:DisplayColor>
</gpxx:TrackExtension>
</extensions>
<trkseg>
<trkpt lat="53.3372638" lon="-1.2587144">
<ele>306.7978516</ele>
<time>2010-10-23T13:02:53Z</time>
</trkpt>
</trkseg>
</trk>

between the </wpt> and </gpx> of the file containing just waypoints 
should allow you to upload them.  If the waypoints cover a large area 
you'll need to manually zoom in to the location of the waypoint, then 
unlock using whichever Potlatch version you're using (click and unlock 
in P1, alt-click in P2.  In both versions you'll want to edit out tags 
that have a meaning to Garmin but not to OSM (such as "cmt"); in P2 you 
can do this easily by clicking "advanced" and deleting the tags that you 
want to get rid of.

Cheers,
Andy