We are always looking for new exciting ways to promote our website. I believe this is one of the more better and creative ideas...

Case Study: Wallan, Victoria, Australia

For those who don't know, Wallan is a town just out of the north of Melbourne which is on the brink of having a massive boom, which will soon see the area up among other satellite cities such as Sunbury and Pakenham. NearMap is a new Australian aerial photography company which works with OSM and vice versa to build up great maps. OSM uses NearMap's imagery (which normally has a resolution of 7cm for the 5 largest cities which gets updated monthly with new imagery, which helps to keep our maps up to date) to build our maps upon. NearMap then take the OSM data and render their own mapping layer on their site. A classic win-win situation. Imagery was released for an area of Victoria which covered most of Wallan on April 21. Having just visited the town on a drive a few day before, I thought I would make some improvements, which also involved a few other contributors pitching in too. I have captured a few snapshots of the town as the mapping progressed:

April 21:

How Wallan looked on OSM before NearMap imagery was available

April 22:

First of new roads of old part of town drawn, some newer roads drawn

April 23:

More new roads mapped, Hidden Valley Estate (roads in north east corner of town) getting mapped

April 25:

More of Hidden Valley mapped, new estate next to freeway mapped

April 29:

Town is road complete (excluding street names) for areas with NearMap coverage.

Just thought I would show others worldwide what excellent progress is being made with Australian mapping since NearMap lent it's very kind support.

The fact you can add major changes which have occurred around you immediately.

Sometimes you have to wait months, even years to see a major change on a map, such as a new freeway opening. In Melbourne, Australia, our most dangerous and busy railway crossing was recently removed, with the rail line and road shut for 10 days for grade separation. The major works are now completed, and the new station location, new rails and re-opened road with no more level crossing are now present in OpenStreetMap, in preparation for opening day!

Thanks to the fantastic NearMap PhotoMaps which OpenStreetMap has been given for Australian mappers to use, I and others are now able to add so much more to the Australian database. For a little fun, I thought I would map in as much detail as realistically possible, a McDonald's in my home city, as well as the roads and footpaths surrounding it. I wonder if there is any other fast food outlet that is as well mapped as this in the entire world!?

Just thought I would let people know that I am repairing the Hume Freeway in country Victoria, Australia. Using exising GPS tracks and the knowledge I have collected from a few recent trips I have had on the freeway (before I had any GPS :( ) I am aligning the carriageways to the most dense lines of the GPS traces, updating and adding tags such as ref=NHM31, maxspeed=110 and lanes=2. Rest areas and interchanges are also being mapped if there is GPS data available. If there is no GPS for an on/offramp but I know it exists, I will roughly draw it in.

Is it just me or is the Slippy Map having problems? It won't load the slippy map for any of the renderers. It just comes up with "More OSM coming soon" tiles.

Anyone else having the same problems? I live in Melbourne, Australia and it has been happening for the past couple of days. I can still edit like normal in Potlatch.

I think it might be timing out too quickly but i'm not sure.