town displayed but cannot be found

Hi,

I installed OFM EU2014_Wv0604 (open fiets map western europe) in base camp.
Question: some city names are displayed in BaseCamp (e.g. Maillen, in Belgium, N 50° 22.654’ E4° 58.209’), exist, can be found in Google, but impossible to find this town name nor in basecamp nor in e-trex30.
Any hint? If map is not enough accurate, where can I find/download one with all town names?

Regards.

It is not impossible to find Maillen, I can find the place with Basecamp and OFM EU2014_Wv0604 so it is not a map issue.
I agree searching for places in Basecamp is not very convenient, you need to specify in the menu “Find → Find options” Points of interest and then in “more options” Cities and only after this you can find it. Mapsource works much easier.

Sorry, but according to me it IS a map issue: in the GPS, you don’t have this option, and you can’t ask the gps to guide you to an address in Maillen.
And in a trek, I don’t have my pc.

I must admit that it could be a map issue on your gps, because Garmin’s software is closed source and our maps are generated by reverse engineering to make it somehow work on your Garmin. So the search engine is working but far from optimal, thats the price of open source and free maps. If you dont find it acceptable, you can always buy an official Garmin city Navigator (and you’ll find out that it sometimes doesnt work too, because of bugs in the device).

I hope that you understand, that for Garmin GPS these are 2 different problems?

If you’d like to find a town, then use menu “where to” → “cities” and then menu button and “spell search”.
If you’d like to find address, then use “where to” → “address”. If GPS can’t find Maillen in this menu, then use “search all” instead of declaring city.

Streets in Maillen seems to be assigned to Assesse. I can’t tell if this is a problem in OSM data or in data processing.

The OFM map looks at the administrative boundaries on OSM to assign the streets to a place:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Belgium/Boundaries#Namur
First it looks in level 8 (municipality of Assese) and if available, it looks deeper at a section (sub municipality) admin_level=9. I dont know if this is the case in Maillen.
If there exists such a section of level 9, it must be entered in OSM. If there is no section, streets could be tagged with is_in
If those sections are not specified, the map cannot find a street in Maillen so you must either enter Assesse or try another OSM map (no guarantee it work either) or a commercial map.

In Google Maps it is right.

Right, if I could earn billions of dollars with my OFM I would make it work too.

Albourg wanted to post this, but hit the report button instead:

… which is fine ofourse. You don’t need to use Ligfietser’s OFM or our Garmin maps, we live in a free world. I you think you can get other maps which are better suited to your needs, go get it.

But seriously, if you want ofm to be usable (especially for cyclists that will take 30 minutes to make 10 kilometers), the municiaplity name has to be searchable.
It would be nice if ofm could take the municipality name (level 9) into account.

I agree, but thats not my responsibility, it is up to the OSM (Belgium) community to fix this on Openstreetmap. You can participate in this, by leaving a note on the osm.org map or mail the issue to the Belgium mailing list (the Belgium forum section is too quiet here). BTW, OFM is already taking admin_level=9 into account but if it is not mapped on OSM, OFM is getting lost there too.

I use my GPS with OFM on my bike. Before the ride I plan my route in BaseCamp and send it to my GPS. That way it uses the roads I would like it to. I’m not about to let a Garmin or any other GPS decide the roads for me to ride on. This is even more true if I’m riding to a different town so I don’t need to search by town.

The OFM map works better on the bike then the Garmin map I paid for. If I find a problem with the map like missing or wrong roads or trails etc. I can fix them and get an updated map fast and free. In the past when I found problems with the Garmin maps and told them about the problem it would take several months for it to be fixed. I would then need to buy a new map if I wanted the update.

Please also remember the maps are being made for free and no one is paying Ligfietser to make them.