OpenStreetMap
This is my first diary entry. I have recently completed my self-appointed task of drawing all the houses in the small Swedish town of Vellinge (6000 inhabitants) based on Yahoo.
All houses are covered except newly built ones. I'm now going to fill in remaining street names and number the houses with a printed map sometime in spring... I have thought about how to draw houses in areas without Yahoo coverage, and decided I'm going to do a field experiment with the areas in Vellinge that aren't covered in Yahoo. I happen to know that most of the houses are identical, and if I just know how many there are and where they start and stop, it should be possible to draw approximations.
Are there any other suggestions of how to draw houses in areas where there is no legal aerial photography?
My personal next stop is the larger town Trelleborg in the southeast of Vellinge, with about 20 000 inhabitants... At least it keeps my abstinence down during the winter months!
Discussion
Comment from wilpin on 6 January 2010 at 11:37
Quite impressive; you may want to add names to several residential highways
Comment from brianboru on 6 January 2010 at 19:51
I've drawn buildings by surveying them counting paces ( I know that 63 of my paces = 100m) parallel to the walls. If you want to get precise alignment you can take bearings with a hiking compass. If you don't have a compass then getting a GPS trace as an "extension" of a building edge by walking in a direction that a wall would take if it hadn't "gone around a corner". This does assume that you can see or walk all round a building - not alway appropriate for residential areas where you can't get into people's back gardens ( but you can always ask them)
Comment from robert on 7 January 2010 at 00:49
Great work!
Comment from Grillo on 9 January 2010 at 04:40
Thanks for the positive comments. I'm aware quite a lot of street names are missing. This is because large parts are drawn using Yahoo coverage (I went to school in this town and grew up close to it however, so I know it pretty much by heart), and I thought it would be nice to have all the houses drawn in so that I can number the houses when I'm out checking the street names anyway. I also know that some of the roads are not connecting as they should or are wrongly tagged. This is also something I will fix in spring.