The stars have aligned to allow me a full weekend next week (29th & 30th Mar) of surveying in my city and I am planning on using it to gather as much address data as humanly possible for the west side of the city including the suburbs.
However, I need help adding buildings to allow for easier and more accurate surveying. The main reason is due to weird numbering in many areas where houses/businesses can be numbered as 1, 2, 3, 3a, 3b, 4a, 4, 5. When numbered like this it can be difficult to accurately map everything quickly. As an example, a few days ago I was able to gather data for over approx. 1,000 homes in just over 2 hours where the house numbers were not in a strict sequence simply because I had building outlines to tie everything to.
I have set up a job using Mapcraft to split up the task. If you know how to use MapCraft you do not need to read any further, just grab a slice and start adding buildings (pretty please) ;)
If you have never used MapCraft before, I have written a step-by-step guide on how to go about using it in conjunction with JOSM. To log into MapCraft, first, log into OSM as you would normally do, then click here to take you to the main MapCraft page. Hit login in the top right and allow it to link to your OSM account.
Firstly, you need to make sure you have remote control turned on in JOSM , here’s how to do it:
Next, go to my MapCraft job. You will see the following screen:
When you load a slice in JOSM using the remote button (9) you will see something like the image below. It is essentially a bounding box encompassing the cake slice, but it also includes data from outside the slice so you can not just start editing. The image below only has a single layer (12) at present
Before you start editing, you need to need to get the cake slice information which will show you, in JOSM, the boundary of your cake slice. To do this, in Mapcraft, click Info (3) and click the “Remote” button (13) next to the WMS layer For Editors link.
This will add a new layer called Mapcraft-cake-223 (12) to JOSM showing the boundaries of the cake slice, in this case, cake slice # 14.
This can be toggled on/off by clicking the eyeball (14) next to the layer name.
Next, add your imagery layer using the imagery menu. This will add an additional layer (12) for, in this case, Bing imagery.
However, now you need to move the Mapcraft-cake-223 layer above the Bing imagery layer using the blue arrow (15) so that everything is visible all at once, openstreetmap data, cake slice outlines & imagery.
Now JOSM should look like this
You can see a number of building outlines have already been added inside your cake slice but there are still a few missing at the bottom of the cake slice (highlighted)
Some are inside the cake slice boundary (16), these are safe to edit (17) and some are outside the cake slice (18). These should not be edited by you as another person may be editing that cake slice. If you both trace the same building it can cause conflicts or map errors, as in 2 buildings sitting on top of each other.
That’s it, I hope this has been of some use and if you would like to show some love to Galway City I would be very grateful as it will make my surveying much more effective next week with the end result looking something similar to this area which I surveyed a few weeks back.
Comment from BlueTiger on 23 March 2013 at 14:12
Thanks for the nice write up DaCor. I have updated few slices. – BT
Comment from osmisto on 25 March 2013 at 14:21
Very impressive! Now I’m ashamed that I’ve not written instruction like this in mapcraft wiki page. ;)
Comment from DaCor on 25 March 2013 at 15:10
osmisto,
I am planning on tidying up the instruction above and also writting instruction for Mapcraft job owners on how best to setup and manage a job using that tool.
By all means, feel free to translate it when Im done :)