Over the weekend we had a great time micro-mapping Hyde Park in Northbridge, and made some new friends! Some attendees of the recent Geogeeks/QGIS Users’ Group presentation evening joined our mapping adventures for the first time.

After getting everyone set up with a surveying app on their phone/tablet, and having our much needed coffee, we wandered around in rough groups adding whatever we could see. We ended up with a lot of double mapped features, because we weren’t very clear about who should map what to begin with. But this was not a big problem: the duplicates were easy to fix up after the fact in JOSM, and as a learning exercise, it was well worth letting everyone follow their interest and explore the world of OSM tagging.

That is the corner of the park that we most thoroughly mapped. Most of the POIs were added on the day, and the grass/garden areas were surveyed on paper and traced in after the fact.

This was a very successful way of surveying shapes under tree cover. The pages are screenshots of OSM data over imagery prepared in JOSM (with a “type:node untagged” filter active). After drawing on the pages (ahem, getting Dean to draw on the pages for me), I used Google Drive’s “scan document” feature to get a digital copy without any perspective distortion. (Writing this, I realise that there is a scanner in the house, which would have been easier!). I then used the PicLayer plugin for JOSM to align the images in the editor, just like satellite imagery.

Because there was such a big focus on learning OSM, only three of the pages were surveyed, but it is such a powerful technique, that I will be filling out the remaining sheets on subsequent visits.