OpenStreetMap
So, after messing around mapping Uganda I was inspired to try and make the area around home as close to 100% mapped as possible. Not necessarily addresses, etc. but 100% land-cover (not zoning/administrative) but looking at imagery and creating a ‘raw’ “this is what is on the ground” map. I started with simple/small polygons for ‘heavily’ forested areas basically coming off the administrative boundary for Pike National Forest, but that didn’t really work the way I imagined and also would have been extremely tedious, so I started over with a larger polygon delineated by 285, 126 and the South Platte River - made this landuse=forest and then used relations to ‘insert’ meadows, rocks, etc. I tried doing a complex relationship where the aforementioned forest was the outer polygon with residential as an inner polygon hoping to make forest/meadow/etc. inside the residential areas part of the outer polygon - didn’t work, not sure why; seemed a multi-multi-polygon relationship isn’t behaving intuitively. Anyway, just finished up Burland, so please feel free to check it out and give me feedback.
Discussion
Comment from Dr Kludge on 8 September 2012 at 02:12
I came across Sun City West while out driving one day. It was a real intense effort to clean it up. First I had to align most of the TIGER imported roads before I could get to the landuse mapping. At first I did want to use a relationship for the golf courses. I mapped around this issue but it did not look right. It sounds like what you want to do. A golf course was created as the “larger polygon”. I then created two smaller polygons. I created the relationship with one outer and two inner polygons. I then whet back and traced both of the smaller polygons again to add the residential landuses. I did this because JOSM would complain about no tags on the inner polygons of a relationship. This produced the desired rendering that I was looking for but I was not as happy with the level of complexity that I left for additional mappers that may want to touch the area.
I hope this helps, Greg
Comment from russdeffner on 10 September 2012 at 20:44
Thanks Greg, I too worry a bit about the complexity of the area now that I’ve added all these relationships, etc.
Comment from russdeffner on 2 July 2013 at 17:16
So I have since learned somethings about landuse vs. natural keys, and have (or am working on) changing all landuse=forest/meadow/etc. to the more appropriate natural=* tagging scheme (and not worrying so much about landuse and natural polygons overlapping - they are different/should not be considered the same ‘layer’)