Background

For a long time, I’ve used the OpenStreetMap as my main driver for online maps. Whenever I’m hiking, the route or big parts of it are planned according to OpenStreetMap, walking from viewpoint to viewpoint.

A few years ago, I made some tiny contributions to the maps in Leiden where I live(d). As The Netherlands is mapped rather accurately and there are a lot of active people in this country, it only stayed at a few minor contributions.

That changed when I moved to Bonaire a couple of months ago. Bonaire is a small island in the Caribbean. In the past ten years, the population doubled and a lot has changed.

Contributing

Some of the contributions so far include:

• Adding hiking trails;
• Adding streets, street names & amenities;
• Adding development projects;
• Resolving open map notes. A lot of map notes have been added over the past few years mentioning that certain amenities are no longer there, or a request to add them. I’ve resolved now almost all of these notes (and of course an RSS subscription is notifying me of any new ones that may arise).

Adding trails is a lot of fun since it’s just enjoying a walk with your phone set to record a track, and thereafter importing the GPX file etc. Adding street names and amenities is a bigger challenge since you need to constantly be writing these things down in your phone.

Challenges

There are several things that make mapping sometimes a bit of a challenge. The available satellite images/aerial photos from Bonaire are either cloudy or outdated (or both). Even with a detailed GPX track and notes from my phone, it’s in some cases difficult to add stuff at the right place if the satellites images are too old or too vague.

In The Netherlands, there are a lot of high quality open data sources. Even though Bonaire is part of The Netherlands somehow (it’s complicated might be the best way to describe that relation), aerial photos from PDOK are not available here. Neither is a basic registration of addresses that is used to keep track of addresses and buildings (See Wiki:NL:Basisregistratie_Adressen_en_Gebouwen

Going forward

For the next few months that I’m here I will do my best to improve the maps. A good and recent aerial photo should help (future) mappers in this area. Perhaps an import from the cadastre can greatly enhance the roads and road names at once.