On 5 April 2010 16:28, Tom Hughes <[email protected]> wrote: > On 05/04/10 15:43, Tim François wrote: > >> I understand that with an area mapped there is less impetus to head on >> over and start making tracks and surveying. But just leaving the area >> blank when we have this fantastic opportunity to populate seems silly, >> no? This far down the line, it doesn't look like there are any mappers >> in the immediate area of which I was talking about. > > I speak from personal experience - when we first got the Yahoo imagery I > enthusiastically traced the nearest largely unmapped area to me (Harlow) > from the images. That was several years ago and to this day most of the > roads in Harlow exist but are unnamed because nobody has taken up the baton.
On the other hand, when I first started in OSM I didn't have a GPS logger. However, I was lucky enough to live in an area where despite having no roads yet in the database we did have fairly good Yahoo coverage. I traced all the roads in a ~2 mile radius. Since then I have had plenty a nice walk around the area naming roads, finding addresses and other POIs. For me it was enough to get over the initial barrier and now the area round me is one of the most complete in the area. I think we can all agree than mass imports of OS data into OSM isn't the way to go, but providing raster images for tracing and comparing can really help. We must of course be careful that people treat it with the caution it deserves - going out and surveying the roads yourself should always be done but quickly getting roads traced/surveyed lets us OSMers get on to mapping the stuff that gives OSM the advantage over the 'competition' -- the POIs, local knowledge, secret footpaths, traffic restrictions etc. -- Matt Williams http://milliams.com _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
