[OSM-talk] Some time ago ... (was: Sourcing street names - what's the policy, and why?)

[Ulf Lamping]

Am 04.01.2010 10:30, schrieb Aun Johnsen:
> Ok, much of Europe are surveyed, and have good Y! or other Hi-res
> coverage, US have probably the best Hi-res coverage around, along with
> Japan, Australia have its Nearmap. What about the frikin rest of the
> world? I am desperatly trying to map Brazil, and not even half the
> states have Hi-res quality to work from.

Hi!

Just a retrospect how the situation developed here in germany from my 
point of view. Or: why it's nice but not required to have Hi-res aerial 
imagery ...


The state in 2007 ...
Around march 2007, the state of the area I live (Nürnberg) was almost 
"white". There was also no high res aerial pictures, no other mappers to 
ask for help in my area and the tools to work with quite odd (to be 
polite). The servers were unreachable from time to time. Oh, and did I 
notice that even mentioning "I'm using Windows" was a good way to get 
"strange" response from all parties involved? ;-)


Then I went mapping ...
Simply mapping with my GPS reveiver, a digital camera and a piece of 
paper. You can be sure this was quite an effort, but it was nice to see 
more and more stuff appearing on the map. Oh, at that time it took about 
a week that stuff actually appeared on the mapnik map. The "OSM 
available" landsat aerial imagery was so fuzzy that I've only used it to 
map some lakes with it.
At that time I wasn't even sure that OSM would get into a useable state 
someday - nonetheless I've spend the effort because it "feeled right".


Time moved on ...
More local mappers appeared, more feature definitions on map features, 
the tools got better, OSM articles got into the german press!, we had a 
germany user meeting, ...
In February 2008 I've started the local regular mapper meeting, as it 
seemed that it was the next logical step. I wasn't even sure how many 
people would come.


Now ...
In this area we have a lot of mappers, activities like mapping parties, 
fair booths, local press contacts, ... in other words: we have a community.
On the software side: We have good aerial imagery from Yahoo! (and 
others), Servers are pretty stable, tools are usable, ...

The "big" cities Nürnberg, Fürth, Erlangen are mapped almost perfectly 
now (things can always be improved), but going a few 10km's away there's 
still a lot of stuff to do.


So ...
It will take years to build a good map of brazil and parts will probably 
never be explored. It will take a *lot* of effort. But that's no good 
reason to use copyrighted or other "tainted" data. It's just a much 
better idea to make a good mapping example yourself and try to get other 
people interested and then "on bord" ...


Regards, ULFL

P.S: All that time it was - for me - simply out of question to copy map 
data from Google or other alike sources to get free and open map data 
that will remain free and open.