For 2016 I have a few goals. *One of those goals was to contribute to OpenStreetMap more often. *To get the year started off right I decided to contribute to*OpenStreetMap (almost) everyday for the month of January. I haven’t taken on a big project in OpenStreetMap project in a couple years. In fact, I hadn’t*done anything in two years! *For someone who praises*OpenStreetMap, I wasn’t contributing at all! *My last map-out was the University of Connecticut’s main campus and I had only made one minor edit between then and my January map-a-thon.
I needed a goal. I couldn’t just map all willy-nilly. *I first thought of mapping where I currently live in metro Boston, but most of the area has been fully mapped for a long time. So, I shifted my focus north, to map out my hometown, Littleton, New Hampshire. It’s a small town in the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire. *Littleton has*recently become*“cool” and has a burgeoning art scene. It’s a nice small town and it needed to be mapped.
The Plan
I started with pretty much a clean slate. *Beyond what I would call the base layers (some cleaned TIGER roads, GNIS features, national forests, etc), there were only a few buildings and place markers in the town, some of which I added a while back. *I figured if I mapped 15-30 minutes a night and a little longer on the weekends, I could get a big chunk of the mapping done by the end of the month.
I decided I was going to digitize buildings and improve as many other features as I could. My plan was to first focus on the features along the main roads in the densest parts of town, and then work into the neighborhoods. I also wanted to be consistent in my digitizing and attributing. That meant I used the same imagery, building type categories, and addressing schemes throughout the project. Consistency was key.
Data Sources
I used the Bing imagery available in the iD editor*for digitizing features. *For addressing and feature naming I used the Town of Littleton’s tax maps powered by Littleton based*geo-consultants, CAI Technologies. *Most probably wouldn’t professionally digitize using older leaf-on Bing imagery, but I used what was available. *If was editing OpenStreetMap in QGIS or ArcMap I could have pulled in better*imagery, but I wanted to use iD. To improve my accuracy, I would frequently cross reference with the tax data and Google images. I also used the Mapbox imagery*to spot check locations as necessary.
Time Commitment
I planned for 15-30 minutes a night, and on the weekends I*was able to commit to some longer time frames. On average*my working sessions would last a little longer than 30 minutes.
The Results!
I mapped from January 11 until February*3- technically not a full month, nor all in January. *I got a late start because I was too busy not starting other New Year’s resolutions. *I also missed one Friday night and kept mapping into February because I didn’t realize it wasn’t January. My Changesets are visualized below. *A couple times I did venture outside the borders of Littleton, mainly to add school building footprints.
Bspauld Changsets – 1/22/2016 to 2/3/2016
I didn’t get nearly as much done as I wanted to.* *I greatly over estimated how much I could get done each night. *I thought I would be able to get a majority of the buildings digitized and addressed*in the downtown area and along the main roadways. *I was able to get the main buildings completed along the core roadways, but I didn’t even touch many of the side streets and smaller neighborhoods. * I was able to clean-up and update a number of existing features, including many of the points of interest*that were already there.
View of Littleton, NH – I mapped maybe 20% of my goal
When I realized that I wasn’t going to meet my goal I switched gears. I started to add and update*as many “important” features into OpenStreetMap. *That included the local hospital, schools, parks, important businesses, tourist locations, and*my parents house.
Littleton Regional Hospital
Adding Commercial Buildings, Including Jack’s Lazer Car Wash
When I got the “important” features completed, I spent most of my time focusing on the downtown area. Littleton is a central town to the larger region, so I figured focusing on the central business district would have the biggest impact on future users. *As I mentioned, some of this area was already digitized before I started my project from some work I did a few years ago, and by other contributors. *I cleaned-up existing features and added new ones. I plan on going back and adding more businesses and landmarks when time allows.
Fun fact: *Littleton is home to the world’s longest candy counter, located in Chutters General Store.
Second Fun Fact! *Littleton was home to Eleanor H. Potter, the author of the Pollyanna books. There is a statue of Pollyanna on the front lawn of Littleton’s Public Library, which is included in OpenStreetMap.
Pollyanna Statue at the Littleton Public Library
Challenges and Lessons Learned
I am a professional geographer. *There was one time in my career when I was paid to do this type of digitization, so I had an idea of what I was getting myself into when I started this project. *I knew I was going to have some issues with accurate digitization using an older low resolution Bing dataset. *If you compare my building footprints to what CAI*has done there are differences. *I expect that, and most geo-professionals would. *For the most part, the features I updated and added are pretty good. *They will work wonderfully in OpenStreetMap for years to come. But, if you want official building footprints, give the Town of Littleton a call.
I used iD as my primary data editing tool. Working with iD is*awesome. *The usability of the tool is incredible. *If you have used desktop GIS to mass edit geo-features and then have used iD for OpenStreetMap projects, you’ll never want to go back to those desktop programs. *It is such a fluid tool, from drawing to attributing. From*tool options appearing when hovering over features in the map to type-ahead aiding the Search option, iD gets a lot of things write when it comes to geospatial data editing. *I love it. *Mapbox has done a lot of amazing stuff over the past few years and iD is way up on*my list of Mapbox awesome.
There is a lot left to do in this project. * Even though the blog is done, the mapping is not. *I will continue contributing on a regular basis until I am done. I took on this project because I wanted to challenge myself and to get back into contributing to OpenStreetMap more regularly. *I think I met both of those objectives. I hope the results benefit the OpenStreetMap community and the community of Littleton!
I encourage you to check out your hometown in OpenStreetMap. *If looks a little empty, maybe you should start to map it.
http://www.addtoany.com/add_to/facebook?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gisdoctor.com%2Fsite%2F2016%2F02%2F04%2Fopenstreetmap-me-mapping-everyday-january-almost%2F&linkname=OpenStreetMap%20and%20Me%3A%20Mapping%20Everyday%20of%20January%20%28almost%29http://www.addtoany.com/add_to/twitter?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gisdoctor.com%2Fsite%2F2016%2F02%2F04%2Fopenstreetmap-me-mapping-everyday-january-almost%2F&linkname=OpenStreetMap%20and%20Me%3A%20Mapping%20Everyday%20of%20January%20%28almost%29http://www.addtoany.com/add_to/google_plus?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gisdoctor.com%2Fsite%2F2016%2F02%2F04%2Fopenstreetmap-me-mapping-everyday-january-almost%2F&linkname=OpenStreetMap%20and%20Me%3A%20Mapping%20Everyday%20of%20January%20%28almost%29https://www.addtoany.com/share_save#url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gisdoctor.com%2Fsite%2F2016%2F02%2F04%2Fopenstreetmap-me-mapping-everyday-january-almost%2F&title=OpenStreetMap%20and%20Me%3A%20Mapping%20Everyday%20of%20January%20%28almost%29
أكثر...
I needed a goal. I couldn’t just map all willy-nilly. *I first thought of mapping where I currently live in metro Boston, but most of the area has been fully mapped for a long time. So, I shifted my focus north, to map out my hometown, Littleton, New Hampshire. It’s a small town in the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire. *Littleton has*recently become*“cool” and has a burgeoning art scene. It’s a nice small town and it needed to be mapped.
The Plan
I started with pretty much a clean slate. *Beyond what I would call the base layers (some cleaned TIGER roads, GNIS features, national forests, etc), there were only a few buildings and place markers in the town, some of which I added a while back. *I figured if I mapped 15-30 minutes a night and a little longer on the weekends, I could get a big chunk of the mapping done by the end of the month.
I decided I was going to digitize buildings and improve as many other features as I could. My plan was to first focus on the features along the main roads in the densest parts of town, and then work into the neighborhoods. I also wanted to be consistent in my digitizing and attributing. That meant I used the same imagery, building type categories, and addressing schemes throughout the project. Consistency was key.
Data Sources
I used the Bing imagery available in the iD editor*for digitizing features. *For addressing and feature naming I used the Town of Littleton’s tax maps powered by Littleton based*geo-consultants, CAI Technologies. *Most probably wouldn’t professionally digitize using older leaf-on Bing imagery, but I used what was available. *If was editing OpenStreetMap in QGIS or ArcMap I could have pulled in better*imagery, but I wanted to use iD. To improve my accuracy, I would frequently cross reference with the tax data and Google images. I also used the Mapbox imagery*to spot check locations as necessary.
Time Commitment
I planned for 15-30 minutes a night, and on the weekends I*was able to commit to some longer time frames. On average*my working sessions would last a little longer than 30 minutes.
The Results!
I mapped from January 11 until February*3- technically not a full month, nor all in January. *I got a late start because I was too busy not starting other New Year’s resolutions. *I also missed one Friday night and kept mapping into February because I didn’t realize it wasn’t January. My Changesets are visualized below. *A couple times I did venture outside the borders of Littleton, mainly to add school building footprints.
I didn’t get nearly as much done as I wanted to.* *I greatly over estimated how much I could get done each night. *I thought I would be able to get a majority of the buildings digitized and addressed*in the downtown area and along the main roadways. *I was able to get the main buildings completed along the core roadways, but I didn’t even touch many of the side streets and smaller neighborhoods. * I was able to clean-up and update a number of existing features, including many of the points of interest*that were already there.
When I realized that I wasn’t going to meet my goal I switched gears. I started to add and update*as many “important” features into OpenStreetMap. *That included the local hospital, schools, parks, important businesses, tourist locations, and*my parents house.
When I got the “important” features completed, I spent most of my time focusing on the downtown area. Littleton is a central town to the larger region, so I figured focusing on the central business district would have the biggest impact on future users. *As I mentioned, some of this area was already digitized before I started my project from some work I did a few years ago, and by other contributors. *I cleaned-up existing features and added new ones. I plan on going back and adding more businesses and landmarks when time allows.
Fun fact: *Littleton is home to the world’s longest candy counter, located in Chutters General Store.
Second Fun Fact! *Littleton was home to Eleanor H. Potter, the author of the Pollyanna books. There is a statue of Pollyanna on the front lawn of Littleton’s Public Library, which is included in OpenStreetMap.
Challenges and Lessons Learned
I am a professional geographer. *There was one time in my career when I was paid to do this type of digitization, so I had an idea of what I was getting myself into when I started this project. *I knew I was going to have some issues with accurate digitization using an older low resolution Bing dataset. *If you compare my building footprints to what CAI*has done there are differences. *I expect that, and most geo-professionals would. *For the most part, the features I updated and added are pretty good. *They will work wonderfully in OpenStreetMap for years to come. But, if you want official building footprints, give the Town of Littleton a call.
I used iD as my primary data editing tool. Working with iD is*awesome. *The usability of the tool is incredible. *If you have used desktop GIS to mass edit geo-features and then have used iD for OpenStreetMap projects, you’ll never want to go back to those desktop programs. *It is such a fluid tool, from drawing to attributing. From*tool options appearing when hovering over features in the map to type-ahead aiding the Search option, iD gets a lot of things write when it comes to geospatial data editing. *I love it. *Mapbox has done a lot of amazing stuff over the past few years and iD is way up on*my list of Mapbox awesome.
There is a lot left to do in this project. * Even though the blog is done, the mapping is not. *I will continue contributing on a regular basis until I am done. I took on this project because I wanted to challenge myself and to get back into contributing to OpenStreetMap more regularly. *I think I met both of those objectives. I hope the results benefit the OpenStreetMap community and the community of Littleton!
I encourage you to check out your hometown in OpenStreetMap. *If looks a little empty, maybe you should start to map it.
http://www.addtoany.com/add_to/facebook?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gisdoctor.com%2Fsite%2F2016%2F02%2F04%2Fopenstreetmap-me-mapping-everyday-january-almost%2F&linkname=OpenStreetMap%20and%20Me%3A%20Mapping%20Everyday%20of%20January%20%28almost%29http://www.addtoany.com/add_to/twitter?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gisdoctor.com%2Fsite%2F2016%2F02%2F04%2Fopenstreetmap-me-mapping-everyday-january-almost%2F&linkname=OpenStreetMap%20and%20Me%3A%20Mapping%20Everyday%20of%20January%20%28almost%29http://www.addtoany.com/add_to/google_plus?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gisdoctor.com%2Fsite%2F2016%2F02%2F04%2Fopenstreetmap-me-mapping-everyday-january-almost%2F&linkname=OpenStreetMap%20and%20Me%3A%20Mapping%20Everyday%20of%20January%20%28almost%29https://www.addtoany.com/share_save#url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gisdoctor.com%2Fsite%2F2016%2F02%2F04%2Fopenstreetmap-me-mapping-everyday-january-almost%2F&title=OpenStreetMap%20and%20Me%3A%20Mapping%20Everyday%20of%20January%20%28almost%29
أكثر...