Also check out DigiKam - it's about the best photo manager I've found and has a geotagging plugin.

No prodding should be necessary now - I've got nearly-real-time re-rendering running on OpenPisteMap now, so it should re-render automagically. How soon this actually happens is dependent on how loaded the server is - at the moment it is lagging about 2 days behind the main OpenStreetMap database, but the aim is for it to only lag behind by about 5 minutes. There is a graph on the left hand side of the map which shows how up to date the database is.

I don't believe anyone is serving contours tiles for the whole planet at the moment - the size of the database and tile cache is very large for the whole planet and exactly how you render them depends a bit on the use you're going to put them to. For example, the cycle map is mostly concerned with the flatter areas whereas the piste map is of most use in very mountainous terrain - rendering the piste map with the same settings as the cycle map would result in the contours being unreadably close together.

It should show up some time tomorrow when Mapnik goes through it's Wednesday rendering cycle.

"I must admit I do feel silly but I can never remember how these welsh roads are spelt!"

Yeah, I've been mapping the Ynystawe area (Swansea) with a camera - I'm sure it's only a matter of time before someone decides I'm a terrorist/kiddie-fiddler/crazy-person since I keep wandering up and down all the cul-de-sacs taking photos of road signs, bus stops, mailboxes, etc. :)

There are some third party map servers rendering in other languages. For example, OpenStreetMap Cymraeg:
http://sucs.org/~rollercow/cyosm/

Yep:
http://www.google.co.uk/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=51.693735,-3.896971&spn=0.006039,0.022659&z=15

The southerly waterway is the River Tawe, the other waterway on the North side of the High Street is the River Clydach. After crossing under the High Street, the Clydach River actually joins the Tawe. The bit heading up to the North East is actually the Swansea Canal, which crosses the River Clydach on an aqueduct.

So as you can see, Google have it completely wrong - I suspect someone traced it from aerial photos without understanding quite what was going on.

I found just wandering around my local estate very enlightening - you get to discover all sorts of things like footpaths you never knew existed. Although I do wonder how long it'll be before someone accuses me of being a terrorist, with all this wandering up and down cul-de-sacs with a GPS and camera :)

I think the road ended in the main beach carpark at the bottom of the camp site. Someone really needs to map the perimeter of the carpark and campsite, and there is another small carpark just to the north, which is accessible through a gate from the main car park.

The cycle map (http://www.gravitystorm.co.uk/osm/) and the piste map (http://openpistemap.org) have contour lines derived from NASA's SRTM3 data set. It would be something nice have as an optional layer on the main map, although it does make the tiles a lot bigger and slower to render.

Yes, mapping (especially if you're on foot) can take a surprising amount of time. I've certainly put in a fair few hours wandering around between Cwmrhydyceirw and Clydach and that isn't an especially big area. I guess that Gower might be a bit quicker since it isn't all densely packed cul-de-sacs, but it is still a lot of work, along with pretty much the whole of Swansea north of Gower Road.

If you've got a lot of through-roads, driving is much quicker, but I haven't worked out a good way of recording road names while driving. When walking I just wander around with GPS and camera and take geotagged photos of road signs, etc.

Lat and Lon is given by the location of the node you're tagging.

Regarding the spelling of colour - people *should* be spelling a tag how it is specified in the proposal or Map Features (otherwise you have to make renderers, etc. understand all the possible spellings of each tag).

I've also started a proposal for other kinds of buoys:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Proposed_features/Buoy

Comments would be appreciated.

I'm not sure where the chart makers (e.g. Admiralty, Imray, etc) get their data from for buoyage (do they survey it, or is it freely available from somewhere?) It would be nice to be able to import data for at least the laterals and cardinals from somewhere rather than surveying them ourselves.

See my diary entry: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Steve Hill/diary/1272

It is looking pretty good though! :)

I notice there are no contour lines in that area though - I'll have a poke at the database later and import some more SRTM3 data.

"Maritime Navigators are interested in charts rather than maps, showing what's on (and under) the other 75% of planet earth (the seas), with details like lighthouses, navigation marks, water depth, hazards, tides, currents, harbours, anchorages, bottom type (different anchors for sand and rocks)."

I've been considering mapping some of the local buoyage while windsurfing - should be easy enough to take my GPS out with me and drop way-marks for each buoy. I'm not sure how best to record other details such as buoy names, etc. since taking a camera or notepad to sea with me isn't really an option. :)

Recording water depth data in the OSM database (in a useful way) might be tricky - I think you should probably take this conversation to the mailing lists and try and get some input from people there as to how this could be achieved. The piste map and cycle map projects have been generating contours from Nasa's SRTM3 data - it is possible that the best option for water depths is to put point heights into the database as nodes and then use a similar method to render them into contour lines. However, you're going to need a lot of samples to make the data meaningful.

"Has OSM got any plans for charts"

I've not heard anything said about it, but the great thing about OSM is that you can go ahead and set this stuff up :)

"Some chart data (e.g. tidal current direction/strangth and water depth) varies with the tide, and therefore with the time. Would it be possible to include variable data (tide-dependent) in the waypoints (place-marks)?"

For water depth, I'm not sure what you gain by having "time dependent" data, rather than just recording depths relative to the chart datum (which is what the paper charts do).

Since you can have pretty much any tag keys and values you like, there is scope for placing time dependent data in the tags by putting the time reference in the key. For tides I guess you'd want the reference to be "minutes after low tide" or something, but I'm not sure how you would handle the many variations such as spring tides, neap tides, etc. Again, another one to discuss on the mailing lists I think.

"Before you even ask, could I remind you that my programming languages are COBOL, ICL mainframe assembler, SAS, and some VB, which makes me an IT dinosaur, not capable of doing much programming on a PC."

Time to learn then. :)

Thanks. I will further investigate how OSM does it then.