It’ s been a while since I posted anything here, but since I saw that OSI is probably going to sponsor another round of mappers to go to SOTM 2010 in Girona I felt like I need to share my experience from last year.

At first I wasn’t sure how things will be in Amsterdam as I didn’t know anybody except from the mailing lists. But I found some great people that drive forward a great project. I understood that OSM is interesting for a lot of companies, and that we can compare (in some areas at least) with the commercial providers, and we can even be better (see Muky Haklay’s blog). I’ve seen great progress across Europe and North America and some great starts in other areas, and great ways to add data to the project without the need of expensive equipment (yes, I am talking about Walking Papers).

What happened in Romania in the last 9 months? Well, probably not as much as I had hoped but we moved forward: we started with a few micro mapping-parties (Vaslui, Buzau and Ghimbav) and this month we had a huge mapping party in Cluj-Napoca, thanks to the geo-spatial.org community. We managed to continue the collaboration with Norc, that gave us access to more GPS data and a lot more street-view panoramas and we started to put together some money for OSM advertising (you can see the OSM banner at the Cluj-Napoca mapping party). There are some companies in Romania that are using OSM data and some of them are offering back services (like the transparent WMS service from AlphaTelecom).

Speaking just for myself I finally bought a bike (more on this subject in the next post) and finish mapping my home town (including most of the buildings). I am planning some small mapping parties in the country side with my friends as there is a lot of things to cover there. I also started a project based on OSM data that I believe will be helpful for everybody in Romania that has a car or a motorbike (it’s still in Alpha stage so I wouldn’t say anything else but watch this blog for a future announcement).

Overall I am happy with how things moved in Romania after SOTM 2009 and I hope that one of my Romanian fellow volunteers will be able to attend SOTM 2010 (I already registered for the conference and bought my plane tickets). See you there!

After 2 weeks of work I managed to add all the data I gathered during spring and summer in my home town, Galati. This means that all the roads (including service) are mapped, and also all the blocks of flats are there. Next step is to add addresses to buildings and continue adding POIs using norc.ro panoramas.

Added a very picturesque road from Medias to Voila and Baile Rodbav (DJ141, DJ105, DJ106)

Added part of DN1 from the start of DN7C (Transfagarasan) to Sambata de Jos

Added DN24 Birlad - Vaslui - Iasi using GPS track logs, but it might need some tweaking in some parts.

Added the route from Galati ferry to Constanta through Dobrogea (the shortest route to get to the sea side from Galati)

Added the national road DN2B from Braila to Buzau. Used mostly the aerial view, so it might need some tweaking.

I started to add some blocks of flats around one neighborhood in Galati. Also I added some POI around the city.

I realised that I made some small mistakes while tagging some small roads around the blocks of flats. I will try to remake that part

This part of the city is not completed. Not much to say

Siderurgistilor neighborhood is finally completed. Will continue with Tiglina 1, and maybe Tiglina 3/M16.

I continued to work on Siderurgistilor neighbourghood, and also on Tiglina 2. Actually I finished up Tiglina 2 first. Next step: Tiglina 1 and the last part of Siderurgistilor.

I started to map this neighbourghood, it has the same problems as IC Frimu (lots of small streets), I hope to finish it in the next weekend.

I finished this quite large neighbourghood, because it has a lot of small streets.

Sunday November 11th I walked around the I.C.Frimu neighbourhood and mapped every little street that it's there.

On 8th of November I finished mapping the main roads of Galati.