When I started getting involved in mapping on OSM around July 2021, I asked myself: “But why hasn’t anyone made a guide to help me map this country?” and indeed, there was no specific guide to contribute on North Korea!

North Korea Mapping Guide

Beginning

After learning and integrating all the basic OSM tags (including highway=*, building=*, natural=*, landuse=* etc.) and mapping some small towns of the country, I thought about creating a personal page of recurring tags for easy retrieval.

Then the idea came to me to make a thematic page on the contribution specific to this country.

Access to the terrain in North Korea is complicated, and a good understanding of satellite imagery is essential, so a guide to the subject becomes all the more relevant. So I decided to create one!

Then I searched on OSM wiki for country-specific guides… and there wasn’t much, or not as much as I’d hoped. However, I did find some useful pages such as Highway Tag Africa, UN Mappers Democratic Republic of Congo. I later collected the ones I found in the Mapping Guide category of the OSM wiki.

Creation

To create my guide I first made a list of things I could see on imagery, in rural and urban areas, and explained how to describe these objects.

Then at some point I looked for more information about the country, so I consulted a whole bunch of websites, trying to target the ones that explained satellite imagery in that country. The blog AccessDPRK by Jacob Bogles stood out among all the sites and was very useful in helping me to understand what was in the country and what it looked like, then I was able to document a whole range of objects more easily.

I also discovered the existence of the “North Korean studies” research field (a sub-field of “Korean studies”). Some of the research articles dealing with imagery were useful to me, such as Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein’s study on public markets.

Then, I collected patterns and explained how to map them, consulted the OSM Wiki to find out how to tag certain objects and added them to the guide. This phase was the most time-consuming part of writing the guide, as there are many objects that can be described from satellite imagery, such as schools, marketplaces, memorials, juche study hall, etc…

In July 2023, I even created some new tags because I found the existing unsuitable (man_made=sign) or to provide more precision (memorial=immortality_tower).

Why a guide?

There are several advantages to creating a thematic guide to a country:

• provides information on tags used in a given territory
• harmonizes cartography across the territory
• helps identify objects from satellite imagery

The guide also served as an inventory of objects recognizable from aerial imagery, easy to consult and to improve.

Layout

Syntax

I fine-tuned the guide by asking for editorial advice.

You need to ask yourself questions about your guide: who is it for? what is the purpose of the guide? do I want to explain all the tagging possibilities or make a recommendation? does the structure of my guide meet these objectives? etc. But above all, you have to write down the results of your questions in the guide, which is what I did in the introduction.

On the other hand, there are a number of syntactical tricks to make a guide more easily assimilated by everyone:

• Use “strong” verbs, which are the opposite of “weak” verbs. Strong verbs express a more precise and clearer idea, than weak verbs which can be too imprecise.
• one idea = one sentence
• avoid repetition
• do not incise
• avoid using parentheses to express an idea. This is a clue that the idea needs to be made into a sentence, that the sentence needs to be moved elsewhere, or that the information is unnecessary.
• use the same words to describe the same things, to avoid confusing the reader. For example, I used only ‘satellite imagery’ instead of ‘satellite image’, ‘satellite view’, ‘aerial image’, ‘view from space’…

Wikicode and graphics

For the wiki layout I used my knowledge of wikicode. Being a Wikipedian since 2016, I was comfortable with wikicode and OSM Wiki using it made my task easier. I also had to import several templates to get an efficient and pleasant result. I tried to achieve a uniform presentation of the information to make it easier to read and find your way around.

Communication

I talked about my contribution guide in various places, and was advised to add it to the Community Index, which I did in November 2022.

I’ve opened various topics to spread the word about the guide, but above all to ask for advice, thanks to the various OSM community networks such as Telegram, the international forum, the French forum, by e-mail to the HOT Team, etc…

Conclusion

The creation of a contribution guide is a task that can be very useful in harmonizing practices, encouraging contribution in a country and ultimately improving the mapping of a territory! It’s also very rewarding and interesting to do.

In short, be curious, have fun making contribution guides, consult them, improve them and talk about them!