OpenStreetMap

z-dude's Diary

Recent diary entries

edits that exactly copy other people's nodes.

Posted by z-dude on 22 September 2013 in English.

added a bunch of villages to Mali, then noticed that someone else does an edit which exactly copies a node, resulting in duplicate nodes.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/2164174568 if you look at the area around this node, the 3 villages to the south and 2 villages to the north overlap my old village nodes.

is this some editor bug where software is deleting other people’s nodes, and rewriting those nodes with the exact same info? Is this a caused by an edit bot?

China hates mappers.

Posted by z-dude on 14 March 2013 in English.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/13/cocal_cola_gps_map_china/

“The perils of doing business in China were highlighted again recently after it was revealed that Coca Cola is under investigation following allegations it illegally mapped parts of Yunnan province.”

“China is also planning to increase fines for providers which fail to include its “full territory” when compiling maps, as sometimes happens when cartographers decide disputed lands such as the Diaoyu Islands don’t belong in Chinese territory.”

Marine Boundaries need some work.

Posted by z-dude on 18 December 2012 in English.

The current marine boundary in OSM uses bot generated 12nm circles which does not always correctly show the proper international boundary which is reached by an international treaty.

The international Boundary Commission lists the actual marine boundary between Canada and the US.
http://internationalboundarycommission.org/products.html#maps The boundary by Maine needs to be updated.

Also, the Canada / St. Pierre Miquelon boundary needs to be updated from the bot generated lines. http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/61505.pdf

The US State department has a good list of resources for marine boundaries all over the world. http://www.state.gov/e/oes/ocns/opa/c28187.htm

Looking at the current map, some marine boundaries show the 200 mile Exclusive Economic zone, while most of the world shows the robot generated 12 nm line.

Here’s the Canvec rail lines in Smithers BC. http://www.openstreetmap.org/edit?lat=54.77618&lon=-127.17589&zoom=16

I really appreciate that people are importing canvec data, and appreciate the streams and lakes, but there was already a nice set of rail lines in northern BC made by ipodolsk http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/ipodolsk and that data has been overwritten by what appears to be less accurate canvec data as the canvec rail lines have exaggerated shapes.

In Northern BC, other keepright errors that I fixed seem to have Canvec and Geobase imported data overlapping each other. In most of the cases I have seen, Canvec and Geobase had identical nodes, so we didn’t gain much by re-importing roads.

I’m sure that importing data from Canvec and Geobase is a huge task, but I think that in a lot of cases, we don’t need to delete old road, or old rail lines to re-import more Geogratis data from the Government of Canada.

Best of luck.

Location: Smithers, Regional District of Bulkley-Nechako, British Columbia, Canada

Balloon Mapping, Mapknitter, Hak5.

Posted by z-dude on 30 August 2012 in English.

On Youtube, I saw a Hak5 interview with a person who uses balloons to map events using a high altitude balloon - interview starts around 2 minutes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jyOu5TetKw&feature=g-u-u He mentions how to use balloons to map, and what the restrictions are.

Referenced links in the article http://publiclaboratory.org/map/toorcamp-2012-makah-passage-neah-bay-washington/2012-08-09

http://mapknitter.org/

I always find these edits fun to see. Typically a node gets moved a few feet.

With my Garmin Oregon, I typically get a very repeatable track with a clear sky. It’s when you get 200 foot tall giant trees that tracks differ by more than 10 feet.

I do have a question: with the Glasnos GPS systems, is the accuracy better? I hear that it’s supposed to be better in the areas where you ave tall trees and canyons. Has anyone tried mapping with the new Garmin Glonass devices yet?

Location: Suncrest, Burnaby, Metro Vancouver Regional District, British Columbia, V5J 1Z3, Canada