Great job! Maybe someday every building from San Francisco to L.A. will be in OSM. Let’s do San Jose next.

Awesome job to all who have worked on Bay Area buildings. Congratulations to erjiang who coordinated the Cupertino import of buildings to the south of Mountain View. Maybe soon we can connect the buildings in the Bay Area with the ones I’ve traced in the South Valley region including Morgan Hill, San Martin, Gilroy and all San Benito County. I have been working my way north and have traced several of the buildings in South San Jose as well.

I noticed that the city of San Jose has a building footprint file available for the city. I emailed the city’s gis manager but haven’t heard anything back from them on the usability license for the data. That will be a big project since the data includes address points and building shapes for the entire city. If we can get several people involved in the area working on it, it should be doable. If anyone wants to jump in and coordinate this project, feel free.

Hopefully we can eventually have all the buildings added in the whole Bay area. Little by little, one block at a time.

A great idea! But why limit it to just a small cake? Larger areas like schools and universities could be mapped for additional compensation. We could even offer our services to larger groups like cities and counties who need help mapping buildings or features in a certain area. Maybe we can even find a way to get paid for things like converting existing gis data into OSM, according to established guidelines and with knowledge of the area of course. I too would like to find a way be compensated for my time in addition to making a great map. The tricky part is matching up the people in a certain area with needs to local mappers willing to help and then making sure they get paid. Maybe we could do something to what www.freelancer.com does or other similar sites but with mapping instead. There’s got to be some a framework already established so we don’t have to completely start from scratch.

Too bad the initial photos can’t be geocoded. Then they could be imported directly into JOSM and viewed right on the map.

I started mapping because the newspaper I was working for at the time needed good maps they could use in print for things like locating accidents, crimes, fires etc. Since the newspaper was relatively small and the maps weren’t used frequently they didn’t want to pay the huge licensing fees charged by ESRI and others. There were some services we looked at that would create a one-time custom map that we could scale and use however we wanted. The quality on these was descent. Then I found openstreetmap.org, and I saw what could be done with it. The original Tiger data was mostly accurate for a base layer but was off or lacking in a few areas. So I started spending time on my own and some company time when I could updating the map. As a result, we were were able to create several stylized maps that could be used for different locations. Now mapping has become more of an obsession as I map trails, buildings, landuse and more to make the map the best, most accurate it can be.

Now you just need to show them how to use a computer to edit or maybe a smart phone with OSMAND on it.:)

A great tutorial. Maybe you might want to link it from the OSM wiki software page. Osmand is a great ap for poiing (not in the dictionary yet but it should be - meaning to add points of interest to the map). For a true OSM experience, you can use a phone like the Motorolla Droid, which has a built in keyboard. Then it looks like you are a teenager walking around and texting when you walk through a shopping center trying to completely map it.

Great to have another mapper in the Monterey area! There is still plenty to do here. Jump on in. Feel free to let me know if you have any questions or problems with anything since I am familar with the area and have made numerous edits in and around the county. If you are looking for ideas on how to map universities, check out UC Santa Cruz or Berkeley. But dont get overwelmed and feel like you have to map everything. Just do what you can. Happy mapping.

I would take TIGER any day over an empty map. Sure some of them may be tagged incorrectly, but it gives people an excuse to get out and check them. Many have already been fixed and checked. I would hate to have to survey all those roads by hand. The TIGER data should only be selectively deleted in rural areas or where it hasn’t been touched. And the new data needs to be carefully verified to make sure it connects with existing data.

Cool, thats one big building. I love how it is rendered in osm.

Looks good. Adding buildings is never a waste of time because they really help to complete the map.

Osmand is an awesome program. There are two things I would like to see, the ability to add custom tags and capitalizing words in the name field. I think both have tickets for them. Osmand works great to do drive by POIing. Maybe we can get the phrase - adding points on the go - to catch on. :)

Keep up the good work

He did indeed contact me. He said he wanted to remove 85000 ele=0 tags. He said he just wanted to take out just the tags not needed and not change the shape at all. I didn’t see a reason why not, so I told him to feel free to make the changes he needed. While there may not be any problems with the changes he made, the proper guidelines still need to be followed. I think the person really has a passion for making the map better. I think he sees what he did wrong and has a desire to do the right thing. I am looking forward to seeing his positive contributions in the future.

Nice, its always good to see ca getting some love. These are good examples of micro mapping at its finest

I try to not cross major roads with landuse tags when possible but will overlap smaller roads. Either way is fine though. If you look at official munipality zoning codes, they will have many different codes like r1, r2, r3, c1, c2, c3 etc. osm doesn't have any way to diferentiate them. An area could potentially be divided into dozens of smaller areas. Things like flood plain aren't even defined in osm. Zones are highly subjective. Rather than worrying about the location of zones we should add what we can as time permits. There is way too much ground to cover to be worrying about minute details of preference.

$500 dollars for a smart phone? What is it a rolls royce? My 150 dollar android phone does fine except for the battery life. Anyway that is the nice thing about osm is there are many ways to contribute

They use it in the us for soccer, uh futball fields but that is it

Sorry to hear u were busted. But if you look anything like your profile picture I can kind of see why :) I think anyone who has been doing this for any time has received at least odd looks from concerned people. After all why would people want to create a free map?

Nice to see the us getting some love