[talk-au] Mapping things by importance

Delta Foxtrot delta_foxtrot at yahoo.com
Wed Jun 10 14:56:04 BST 2009


--- On Wed, 10/6/09, James Livingston <doctau at mac.com> wrote:
> Yeah, it's a bit of a nasty trade-off. I guess you have to
> make a  
> judgement call on how likely there are to be other mappers
> in the area  
> in the future, and how useful the alternate stuff you can
> map is. I  
> wouldn't necessarily say that anyone should take a river
> over the  
> roads, but just that if someone gets the chance to map
> something  
> hard(er) to get, they should at least consider it.

I should have clarified what I meant, if someone could spend 3 or 4 hours plotting out an entire town or map 3 or 4km of a river which would be a better use of resources.

With that said, things like really remote/rural towns and minor roads are hardly mapped at all, it's really hard to get data for those areas simply because of economies of scales and lack of people and vastness of the country, I'd say that would be pretty "hard" too :)

Having said that I'm going to be getting some data files from a GPS some grey nomads are taking with them on their trip north this year from Toowoomba to Darwin, don't know how useful it will be as they probably won't be going too far out of the direct route.

> As to what we're building the map for? I would guess that
> if you asked  
> that question to 100 random OSM contributors you would get
> about 300  
> answers. Much the same as if you asked the equivalent
> question to free  
> software / open source contributors.

As an after thought I realise it was more of a rhetorical question then a literal one, but my point was the information in a map has some practical benefit or people usually wouldn't bother making it. My convulted point was mapping out rivers more accurately than surrounding roads would be less useful since fewer people would need to navigate a river than roads.

> Definitely. You'd certainly need some way of remotely
> finding out  
> where it was, otherwise you'd have no chance of picking it
> back up.

Some HAM guys have experience in this area, not so much for mapping rivers but release and retrive of GPS and similar electronic devices, usually on helium ballons. Possible but I don't think it would truly be practical.

> Now that I think about it, I know a couple of people down
> in Tassie  
> who regularly go kayaking and have a GPS - I think I may
> need to go  
> pester them for some logs :)

I've been racking my brain trying to think who else I can pester for data logs but most people I know don't have a GPS or access to one.


      




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