[OSM-talk] Some time ago ...

[Aun Johnsen]

Gah! I could kill my webmail client!!!

On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 6:16 PM, Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping at googlemail.com>wrote:

> Was it intentional that you've send this as private mail?
>
>
> Am 04.01.2010 18:25, schrieb Aun Johnsen:
>
>
>> On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 4:47 PM, Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping at googlemail.com
>> <mailto:ulf.lamping at googlemail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>    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? ;-)
>>
>> I started a littel later than you, about a year later I think,  don't
>> remember if I had my first edit in April or May of 2008. Tools was still
>> somewhat odd, and edits took ages (probably about a week) to show up on
>> the map.
>>
>>
>>    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".
>>
>> I also gathered tracks with GPS, at first I didn't have proper tools to
>> get my tracks to the computer, so I struggeled for quite some time to
>> get that right. I have also done tracings from lansat, mainly large
>> lakes or mangrove areas but also some prominent rivers
>>
>>
>>    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, ...
>>
>> I see a lot of activity from the German community, I know that Brazil is
>> somewhat behind in the track, and we will probably continue to be behind
>> for quite some time. We have still not been able to get any good press
>> coverage even though we as a community have sent out two press releases
>> (from the entire community), I guess that will come as the community
>> grows and we get more on the map. Maybe the German community have some
>> advice to how we can do it better?
>>
>>    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" ...
>>
>> We have used some effort to do data imports, almost all survey data by
>> IBGE (the mapping authority), city GIS offices, and similar are PD. We
>> are almost completed with an import of borders from IBGE, and have a
>> complete highway import from same source, though the data is nowhere
>> near the quality of TIGRE. This imported data is the only data available
>> for large parts of Brazil.
>> Some of us have on own initiative gotten hands on municipal survey data,
>> but have had some problems extracting useful data as they mostly have
>> come in some form of Proprietary file format such as AutoCAD .dwg.
>> Getting this data extracted would allow us to do imports of municipals
>> where we have no active mappers.
>> I have also mapped as much as I can of my home town and a few close
>> cities, in Brazil we have several communities where it is dangerous for
>> outsiders (especially white "Gringo"'s such as me) to enter, that limits
>> my movements some. Also my work prevents me from doing my own survey for
>> more than 6 months every year (that make me only half-time OSM'er?)
>> Access to hi-res data and more import data would allow me to contribute
>> somewhat also during the time when I am not able to do any surveying.
>>
>>
>>    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.
>>
>> I want access to more data under comparable licenses, preferable PD, so
>> that I can contribute all the time. In my desperation for more data I
>> have actually handplotted possition from out-of-copyright paper maps
>> just to get something on the map.
>> P.S: A few of us are working on translating the wiki to Portuguese, in a
>> hope that this can attract more mappers, I have in that work noticed
>> that there are some pages documented in German only, if the German
>> community could be so helpfull to give English translations, than we
>> would be able to translate more pages to Portuguese (the few words I
>> know in German is not worth mentioning in public).
>>
>
>
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