Re: Open Street Maps

Scott Walde wrote:
> Sean Cavanaugh wrote:
>> Les Klassen Hamm wrote:
>>> So I looked at the routes on my gps, and of course they are rather
>>> random, have U turns, stop on a side street, etc. Is that helpful, or
>>> is it best if they actually travel consistently down one street, and
>>> so on?
>>>
>>
>> It is helpful. Most of my routes so far have been me just going
>> somewhere in the car. If you fire up the map editor (JOSM) and
>> download all the GPS data points that have been uploaded from s'toon,
>> you can clearly see the major roads that Scott and I travel on.
>>
> I concur. My first upload was just all my driving (when I remembered to
> take the GPS) since Dec 31st. There was lots of crap in there, but the
> main roads that I drove more than a few times were obvious. Strangely,
> they were also the ones I knew offhand what their names were. ;-) Since
> then, I've been taking roundabout routes at times just to drive on roads
> I haven't already mapped. Of course, I have often forgotten the road
> names by the time I get home, and looking them up on a map is a very big
> no-no. (derived work...)

That's the nice thing about walking, it's easy to stop and snap a photo
of the street sign. I imagine once all this snow is gone that biking
would be a very good option as well.

>> Of course, it is a lot easier to get figure out the streets when I
>> walk around to map out every nook and cranny of a street like the
>> windy ones with all the suffixes in the 'burbs, but every bit helps. :)
>>
> Taking notes would be nice. Of course, it's probably not a healthy idea
> while driving. Maybe a voice recorder would work.

I believe that's why OSM recommends taking a passenger when driving. ;)

As for driving, I believe I've found a way to improve my data aquisition
when in the car. It does require a bit more equipment though. I found
a nifty little program (unfortunately windows, but my lappy doesn't play
nice with Linux wrt lasting longer than an hour or two on the battery)
that will display data from the GPS in real-time, provided your GPS will
output NMEA. The program is called NMEA monitor (
http://homepage2.nifty.com/k8/gps/ ). You can save all the NMEA
sentences it receives to a log that you can then convert with GPSbabel
to GPX for uploading to OSM.

I think GPSdrive will do similar for Linux (with more features to boot).
Received on Fri Mar 2 23:23:19 2007