OpenStreetMap
Street-level imagery
Since last Thursday, I’m touring the Netherlands with the band I’m in. I brought the GoPro Max sponsored by Meta, because I thought it would be a great opportunity to get lots of footage for Panoramax which has little coverage in the Netherlands so far. We’re staying in the same place all the time, near Epe in Gelderland and fan out for the gigs almost all over the Netherlands. We’ll be playing until the 31st of January.
Unfortunately, it’s been very foggy since we arrived, so the imagery is not the best. It is also very cold, and the third trip (to Zutphen, if I remember correctly), the metal on the holder hinge shrunk and the camera tilted back, so that footage was fairly useless.
I upload the images to mapillary first, after all, they sponsored the camera, so it takes a while to get them onto Panoramax, and the internet at the accommodation doesn’t seem as quick as what I’m used to.
Here’s a link to the footage gathered footage on Panoramax, but it’s still a work in progress, of course.
Mapping by survey
Of course, I can’t stop myself from mapping from the van window or walking around that little bit between sound check and gig. I’m mostly adding bicycle parking (I know it’s a clichee that the Netherlands are great for cycling, but good Lord, are they!), post boxes, defibribrillators, missing shops and whatever else. I’ve also added a bit of roof:material=thatch, because I find it fascinating how much is still around, compared to Ireland. Even though I was told by our sound engineer that some of it is made of plastic. Disgusting. But since I can’t see that from afar, I’ll still map it as roof:material=thatch.
Mapping theatre details
Every night, apart from when we’re off like today, we’re in a different theatre, and usually we don’t know what to expect in amenities. Some of them are fairly large theatres with a corresponding large backstage area with many amenities like showers, microwaves, washing machine and tumble dryer, games etc. We don’t have a self-service washing machine at the accommodation which I had expected, so I would personally like to know beforehand what to expect at a theatre. For future reference, I have started adding the facilities with a backstage prefix such as at Het Kruispunt in Barendrecht:
I know this is very niche micro-mapping, but why not?
Mapping from satellite imagery
If you follow my journey, you’ll know that I have a big interest in history. How interesting to find that the start_date of the houses is mapped everywhere! From what I could see, there was a huge import of buildings (only the larger ones, no sheds or garages) with their addresses and start date in 2014. Needless to say, that has become quite outdated. I’ve added a couple of the cabins, static caravans or whatever they are around where we are staying. But it must have made such a difference for OSM Netherlands to have that open data. Something we can still only dream about in Ireland, but it goes to show that there is always work in catching up to do.
Rita storm damages in Texas, 2005 - Bob McMillan / FEMA Photo
French 400 kV power towers summary - François Lacombe CC BY-SA 4.0
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