[OSM-talk] How to perfect the map

[Lars Aronsson]

Until now I have mostly been mapping blank areas, traveling a 
road, uploading a track log and drawing the road for the first 
time.  But I'm now coming back to my own town and the map looks 
very rough, not at all like those German cities.

I tried now to sort out the footways of the cemetery next to me.  
Someone had marked the cemetery as an area (nice!), but the area's 
boundary was equal to the outermost footways, and it really should 
be a rectangle a little larger than that.  I couldn't separate the 
common corner nodes in JOSM (is this even possible?), so I had to 
draw a new rectangle, tag it as cemetery and then remove the old 
one.  The result is better, but there is still a little gap 
between the cemetery and a forest/park next to it.  These two 
landuse areas should probably have a common border, but I think I 
will have to go there and see exactly what that area looks like.  
And then there are some public buildings that I should map.  But 
how do I get the exact position of the corners of the building?

I went to 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Mapping_techniques

but this page describes how to do the kind of "rough mapping" that 
I have been doing so far.  It doesn't describe how to capture 
buildings, or how to separate (or when not to separate) landuse 
areas from cycleways.

All the wiki pages on "map features" describe how to add 
denomination to an amenity=place_of_worship, but don't say when 
a church should be drawn as a dot amenity or when the outlines of 
the building (and surrounding park) should be mapped in detail. I 
think we should make wiki pages that start with real world objects 
instead of tags.

Is there any written description for that kind of detailed 
mapping?

Do you print out the OpenStreetMap at zoom=17 of a few city blocks 
and bring it with you to check all the details?  Or can you run 
JOSM on a PDA while walking around?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se