Hello again everyone, many thanks for your fast and informative feedback! It’s great to join such a welcoming group.
There’s lots of great advice in everybody’s emails. If I distill it to one key point, I think it is... 1. Don’t touch admin boundaries or you’ll “rip me bloody arms off”, to quote an old TV personality. Further to this, don’t join natural features with admin boundaries etc. Point taken, I’ll steer clear of them all. 2. From what I can deduce from your points, the river itself (in real life and as mapped on OSM) doesn’t carry any administrative information whatsoever. It’s purely a natural feature like clearings, tree cover, beaches etc. (This is obvious from a technical point of view but not something I had properly understood in a broader sense before). Please correct me if I’m wrong in this. 3. Taking on board the helpful comment to “work on what interests you”, I think I’ll focus on natural features and recreational features such as tracks and popular campsites. I worked out today how to hide all administrative boundaries in JOSM to make sure I don’t accidentally link to or alter them. 4. I spent today reading tutorials and working out how best to map natural features. I selected a small unmapped area, mapped everything I could and then deleted the day’s work to make sure I didn’t upload any mistakes I might have made before I worked out the process and a coherent workflow. 5. The natural features I’d like to add are tree cover (i.e. “wood”), large clearings, beaches and oxbows, wetlands etc, especially on public land. Apart from some large wetlands and oxbows, there are many stretches where none of these features have been mapped. Could I ask for your feedback on the following process please? 6. In many places, the area to be mapped is bounded on one side by the river and on the other by the outer edge of tree cover. Nearly all other features lie within this envelope. The approach I trialled is as follows... (this approach is only workable if small sections are done at a time.) 7. In a small area, map the outer boundary of tree cover, starting and finishing this way at the river. Split the river way at the start and end of the new tree cover way and create a multi polygon using the river boundary and the tree cover boundary as the outer boundaries. Then work within this area and map all sizeable clearings, beaches, oxbows and wetlands etc as inner boundaries etc within this multi polygon. 8. This approach provides a uniformly mapped area from the river outwards, with no gaps between adjacent polygons. A potential sequence along a transect from the river outwards might include for example, the river, a large beach, woods and trees, interrupted by a series of oxbow lakes and wetlands etc. The slowest part of the process will be mapping the many large wetlands as there are lots in some places. 9. If the river itself carries no administrative meanings (see above) then it is ok to refine the river boundary. Life is too short to do this along long stretches but some refinement would be useful where popular campsites, most of which are on big sandy beaches, abut the river. This way the river-beach boundary would be accurately placed (acknowledging changes in river water levels). 9. I can then add tracks and campsites etc within the mapped area before uploading it all and starting a new section. 10. There are natural gaps in tree cover in many places along the river which means that the above process can be repeated on sections that are not immediately adjacent which simplifies things. I haven’t contemplated how to map very large areas of continuous tree cover without creating a nightmarish multi polygon but I can avoid this more complex problem for some time as there’s lots of small, discrete gaps to fill. 10. After a few sections I’ll probably go bonkers and give it all up, but I’ll be driven up the wall even faster if I stay locked up under the important coronavirus laws without a task like this to keep me occupied. My apologies for sending you all such a long message but once again I’d really welcome your feedback and suggestions. I’ll then work on a small area as a pilot, upload it, and welcome your feedback on things I can improve on, if you can bear hearing from me again. Thank you once again for your generous help. Best wishes Ian _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
