Can this imagery be used for general editing as well or is there an agreement to only use it for this challenge? You could get it added to the editor imagery indexes so it shows up as an option automatically whenever users are editing in Texas.

My OSM journey started when I bought a second bicycle. I already had a simple $10 bike computer on my mountain bike but I wanted a way to track rides on my road bike as well. Instead of dealing with two different wheel magnet devices, I got a GPS based Garmin Edge cycle computer to use on both bicycles.

After a few rides I realized that the trails in and around my city (Manhattan, KS) didn’t exist in any existing map provider’s database. I thought to myself “I really should be able to use this GPS data my Garmin is collecting to add these trails to a map.” From there I landed on opencyclemap.org.

But my first edit was not directly bicycle related. The roads in this area were all unimproved TIGER data and were so far off that I had to realign my entire neighborhood before I could even add the bicycle trail I originally wanted to put in. And once you start fixing TIGER data, it is hard to stop!

In addition to adding data to the map, I have used my skills as an IT professional to improve OSM related software. I have also performed some more complex map edits like fixing up admin boundaries across most of the US, dealing with various TIGER messes and creating route relations for highway networks. But I still frequently make edits and/or notes from my phone as I visit new places or notice errors while using OsmAnd to navigate.

I wrote a blog post about dual carriage ways way back in 2011. Honestly not sure if it is worth the bits it takes to transfer any more but for what it’s worth…
http://ksmapper.blogspot.com/2011/03/dual-carriageways.html

You can also select multiple ways and use Q on all of them at the same time. Like a row of connected buildings.

You mention increased use by governments. Wouldn’t this require full-on public domain (CC0)? You obviously are not a big fan of share-alike but you don’t mention attribution anywhere. I suspect that while a decent number of people might be willing to drop share-alike, a LOT fewer would be willing to drop attribution. So government use seems to be off the table no matter what.

Thanks for pulling it all together into one place. I’ve done a lot of editing of county relations but it is an ongoing process. In particular I don’t think I was aware of the alt_name tag being of use. But it does make sense.

And I agree on leaving the generic boundary=administrative and admin_level=6 tags on the ways. That way even simple editors that don’t handle relations well will still be able to tell users that it isn’t just a tagless way.

Maperitive is an easy way to render your own map from OSM data. I wrote a blog post about using it.

Another option is Tilemill.

Didn’t see amm’s comment before posting mine. I must have skipped the part in the documentation where it talks about GPX. That might actually work for your Garmin. But getting it into OsmAnd is still interesting to me.

Well obviously OSM can’t give you the data in every format ever. So the question is how do you take the data from the osm.org format and transform it into something usable by your device(s).

The way to get notes out OSM in a machine usable format is via the Notes API. You can get either XML or json format. From there some conversion to a format that the device can read will be required. I’m guessing the Garmin takes some form of GPX file? And I’m not sure what OsmAnd can use but this use case does actually interest me a bit so I might take look at that…

Since this is a new feature on osm.org it doesn’t surprise me that there aren’t many tools to use the data yet.

Umm… This is K S U.

KU over in Lawrence is not nearly as well mapped!

GO WILDCATS!

You can add tags to your uploaded traces. Just click on the trace details then look for the “Edit this trace” button at the bottom left. From there you can modify the description, tags and visibility of the trace.

These changesets have not been reverted. There are duplicate nodes all over the map.

Done

No I haven't created a trac ticket. I kind of wanted to get the orginal author's opinion on it since deleting nodes is specifically mentioned on the plugin wiki page. But since I haven't heard back and have had multiple people say that they find this feature useful, I guess I will create a ticket.

I actually made one more change since I wrote that blog post: I added a new mouse curosr image for the "remove nodes" mode. Just a little extra polish :)

Perhaps the photograph of the movie star was geotagged and had some mappable elements in it, behind the movie star.

There was a discussion a while ago on the talk mailing list about submarine cables:
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2011-October/060413.html

But I pointed out in the next message that this particular source did not appear to be suitable for OSM (license issues aside).

But maybe someone found another source. Not sure this is really OSM suitable data though. As you point out, it is pretty much impossible to verify the route except for short sections at the shore.

Do I get any extra credit for having covered the entire state of Kansas? At this point I seriously doubt I'll catch fx99 though. I got slowed down by some horrible, terrible, awful TIGER data that my mapping OCD wouldn't let me ignore. It was truly bad! Most of El Dorado was shifted by 100-200 meters and the geometry was all warped. A couple of neighborhoods were over 300 meters off!

Not sure why people are so confused about nearmap. They gave us explicit permission to relicense existing contributions under ODbL. It doesn't mean they are changing their license or anything else. It was a generous offer and we should all say "thank you" and move on. It is too bad we can no longer use this source but mapping happened before ANY aerial imagery was available and it will continue without nearmap.

Even if you think this is the right thing to do, it is still premature. More people are agreeing every day. I have even seen several people changing their minds. Because people were forced to make a choice, I know some people who were still undecided selected "decline" because that was the only way they could get back to editing the map while they decided. A "decline" is reversible. An "agree" is not.

So you may be destroying historical data and doing extra work for nothing.

I actually used it a little tonight in the spirit of "know thy enemy". Honestly I'm not all that impressed. I guess as a POI adder it is a decent tool. The tagging interface is more refined than anything we have in OSM. There are a lot of presets for most of the fields and the presentation is pretty clean. But editing geometry of roads is just downright painful. Unless I'm missing something in my OSM trained mind, you can either edit intersections as point features or road segments as line features but not both at the same time (like to straighten a road over several blocks) Oh and any object you touch is locked from further editing (including more edits by you) until the edit is reviewed.

"meh"

Unfortunately the sheer name recognition factor of "Google" will probably attract people in droves. If OSM happened to have a few million dollars sitting around I bet we could do an effective PR campaign. Google has stirred the "citizen mapper" pot. If we could now say "yeah... but we're better!" I bet we could attract a bunch of new users. How much does a full page ad in the NY times cost? :)

@olejorgenb: But that's just the thing. It isn't your data. As soon as you hit the "Save" button, it becomes Goolge's data and you have nothing to do with it anymore.