Visakhapatnam is my hometown, it is the largest city (in area) in Andhra Pradesh. It is called the City of Destiny.

View of the sunrise in the beach makes my city pretty special from many other cities. One must experience the panoramic sea view from Kailasagiri Hills ropeway. It’s really awesome and will be your most memorable moment. This city always stands among top in natural scenery. Recently, India signed agreements for developing smart cities and I’m glad that my hometown was one among them.

Sunrise over Bay of Bengal at Ramakrishna beach in Visakhapatnam. Photo by Srichakra Pranav.

People enjoy a cable car ride at Kailasagiri Rope Way in Visakhapatnam. Photo from Deccan Chronicle.

When I came to know about OpenStreetMap and it’s crowdsourcing, I feel that I should contribute being a citizen of this city. An updated map will help anybody who want to know more about my city and I am happy that I am part of it. I mapped the region around the Ramnagar. Though it was well mapped, I concentrated on adding point of interests (POIs), missing buildings, streets. I also spotted some errors which I fixed. This made my hometown in OpenStreetMap better.

Before mapping:

By following mapping guides using JOSM the mapping journey was effortless and thrilling.

These are what I added: - missing POIs, - buildings and streets, - amenities.

After mapping:

During the mapping I learned the following:

• Ensure that the correct tag was used. There are lot of tags in OpenStreetMap and we should always verify if we used the correct.

• Maintain consistency of coverage. As much as possible, we should trace each and every building in a particular area (if visible in imagery). This ensures that the data doesn’t have gaps.

• Maintain quality of tracing. In the case of buildings, we should make sure that the outline location is at the base of the building according to the guidelines in the wiki.

Being a gourmand I always search for tasty and delicious food. Definitely that experience helped me to mark more restaurants, where they were not mapped before. I also mapped few amenities and shops which helps to explore more about my city.

It was fun and exciting to map my hometown. Apart of that, I also feel responsible to make sure the map is accurate and free of errors. I will continue mapping my hometown by adding more valuable data.