[talk-au] Hi, a noob starts some mapping.

[John Smith]

--- On Mon, 17/8/09, Lindley Bowers <lindleybowers at gmail.com> wrote:

> drlizau invited me to this mailing list, so I thought
> I'd say hi. I'm mapping under the name
> Brentyn.

Welcome to the list :)

> Since discovering both Trails and the gps on my
> iPhone, I thought I'd do a little mapping around the
> Toowoomba area near where I live. I've never had
> anything to do with mapping, gps or gis before so I'm a
> bit of a noob with it all. (So feel free to send any
> advice/corrections my way if I'm doing it all
> wrong).

This isn't a criticism just something I think you should be aware of, the GPS chip in iPhone's doesn't seem to be the best, it jumps all over the place if you don't have a clear view of the sky.

> Anyway I've been having fun discovering the rich
> diversity of houses and scenic routes in our area. But the
> best part is just cruising around in the car with my 11-yo
> son who's getting quite good at writing down street
> names now. :)

Get 'em hooked while they're young :D

> So far I mapped Meringandan and Meringandan West, 1/3
> of Highfields and a few blocks in West Toowoomba. I
> don't always get to grab the street names so sometimes I
> might just be adding in streets without their names.

This page on the wiki describes some tips when starting with a blank canvas so to speak:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Starting_with_a_Blank_Map

I've mapped out several rural towns from almost nothing, but because it was just me and because I wasn't looking to have an accident in traffic I haven't worked out a good way to quickly grab street names.

That said as long as you have a GPS trace someone without a GPS would still be able to enter the street names. Some state governments provide websites with street name lookups, although I don't think QLD is one of them.

> I'm guessing that roads or highways with a median strip
> need to be set up as two oneway ways so that routing
> understands where you can turn around. What I don't know

Yes

> is that when a turning opportunity comes up (either a break
> in the median strip or a road intersection) how you are
> meant to tag the little bit of road between the two ways?
> With the name of the main road, or the name of the
> intersecting side street? Any other tags as well? eg In

I usually tag them with the same information as the most important cross street, since that section of road is for the cross street(s).

> Toowoomba I split Taylor Street between Greenwattle and Tor
> Streets so that I could do the block on the south side
> correctly. However at the intersection of Taylor and
> McGregor you can cross over Taylor. How is the bit of road
> to be tagged? (I also added crossovers to Warrego Highway
> where Postmans Ridge Road joins up). I'm also guessing

You just join both sides of the cross street togeather and make sure you don't mark it as oneway=yes :)

> that if the median break only allows turning into a road, no
> U-turn or only turning from one direction that some kind of
> relation needs to be constructed but relations are beyond me
> for now. 

This would be a restriction relation, not just a tag, I've never tagged one of these so I don't know the specifics but this is the wiki page about it:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relation:restriction

> One motivation for helping out with mapping is the
> number of times I've ended up in the middle of some poor
> farmer's paddock by trying to follow the directions from
> other various online maps. But the clincher for me was when
> I saw on more than one popular online map was falsely drawn
> a railway line up a very steep hill beside Hogg Street
> between Mort and Tor Streets in Toowoomba. Is it ironic that
> that is just beside the Baillie Henderson Hospital (a mental
> institution)?

You've been googled too! :)

I've been told to enter private property, go up trails in national parks, and any number of other bad routes. Happened to me so many times.

> Trails on the iPhone uses the maps from cloudmade ...
> but it seems to takes weeks for osm data to appear on their
> map. Is there a better iPhone app I should be using?

I don't know if the iPhone app caches, but OSM does, you can force it to refresh tiles however, either on a per image basis or by going to this site:

http://informationfreeway.org

It shows the zoom level on the bottom towards the left hand side, when that says z12 you can move your mouse over the map and press the 'r' key on your keyboard to get it to re-render tiles from zoom level 12 to 18.

> Anyway, I'm having fun and hope that I contribute
> more than I break as a noob.

There is an undo feature! Except I can never remember where to find it.