[OSM-talk] Pretoria, South Africa

[Nic Roets]

> things like parks and open spaces, then you have nice green areas that
> add some colour to the map.  One thing to note though, when i tried to

I added a few. My osmrenderer + firefox does not show areas with
leisure=nature_reserve, nor areas with amenity=school. leisure=park
does work.

There are quite a number of unused areas, which are not official
nature reserves. Should I tag them as nature reserves ? Actually I'm a
bit worried that tourists will see a nature reserve on my map, start
walking / hiking / driving there and then get mugged by some of the
vagrants. And that even goes for some of the official nature reserves.

> drawn have GPS traces associated - if you derived the vectors from GPS
> traces, its best to upload them to OSM - so that we have "proof" that

Done. I hope keeping them private will be OK.

> issues).  If you derived them from an old map or something, or if SA

It's not impossible that we will be able to strike a deal similar to
the Yahoo! one with www.madmappers.com and / or
http://w3sli.wcape.gov.za/ and get access to 1:50000 topographical
maps.

Alternatively we can investigate the possibility that, when these maps
were created a few decades ago, they fell in the public domain. This
would mean that we will be able to buy up secondhand maps and use them
without restriction.

But then I won't get my exercise, and the data won't be up to date.

> as I remember it the entire N1 coridor from J'berg to Pretoria is
> surrounded by housing estates.  SA is a good example of how OSM can

These housing estates all have access control. If I'm able to sneak
in, I may not be able to sneak back out again. They typically only
have one entrance and people always list the road the entrance is in,
in their address. So even without data for their insides, OSM will
still be a good navigational / routing tool.

I'll rather concentrate on the suburbs North of -25.73

> new areas.  Hey, if you have any contacts in Durban or Cape Town, I'd
> fancy a mapping weekend there.  Jan 2008 maybe!

Perhaps George, which is also a very popular tourist destination.
Wouter Brand lives there. Perhaps you'll be able to persuade him to
share the tracks he collects for Track4Africa.