I’m just starting to find my way about Open Streetmap. Having seen the tutorial and read the instructions and the FAQs I decided to put a toe in the water and uploaded two tracks which I recorded in the West of Ireland. I received messages confirming that the uploads were successful and waited for the weekly update for the tracks to appear on the map. It’s around 10 days since the uploads and the tracks are not visible on the map. I’ve gone back to the FAQs and cannot see what I have done wrong.
Do you mean with tracks, that you uploaded gps data? If you would like to see ways and such on a map you also have to create ways, with potlatch or josm. http://www.openstreetmap.org/edit?lat=52.9885&lon=-8.8573&zoom=14 , now press G and you tracks will appear. Create the mouse by clicking above the blue line. Make sure that both end of the ways are connected to the older ways, if they exist. There is a practice mode, if you would like to practice first. Here is a beginner guide http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Beginners%27_Guide.
Thanks for these rapid replies. I’m now two steps forward and accelerating.
Yes, by ‘tracks’ I mean the data that my Garmin records as I move along and which it calls ‘tracks’. Maybe OSM uses a different terminology, I don’t know.
I think it’s clear now, but just for the record: Those GPX tracks you’ve uploaded are not automatically converted to items on the maps. You will have to add ways to the map based upon the GPX tracks (or the provided aerial imagery) manually using one of the editors as described above and in the beginners guide.
Got it now. Thanks very much. I’m currently working on the tracks I uploaded and everything seems to be working out (except that one of the ways I laboriously traced suddenly resolved into a long line of separate individual points that I then had to laboriously delete - aaargh !). And I can’t find the point preset for a railway station (maybe I’ll use the point preset for a church and enter ‘no religion’ .:-)))
Later in the week, after the weekly update of the map, I’ll finally see whether I was successful.
You also keep an eye open for http://informationfreeway.org. They have an infrastructure where you can request a certain area to be re-rendered (look at the bottom of the page), the T@H clients will then process your request a quickly as possible (usually within an hour or so…
I went to http://informationfreeway.org and requested a rendering and around 1 hour later the roads I had traced were there on the map but a church and adjacent school which I had entered with Potlatch and which are still there at Lat 52.9902 / Lon -8.8944 didn’t appear on the informationfreeway map version.
Can I assume that the church and school are still there on the server waiting to be rendered later this week and haven’t been lost somewhere ? Put another way, does informationfreeway intentionally leave out churches, schools, etc when rendering ?
Rembember that each map has a selection of keys and values (map features) that they will show. Showing everything would lead to a map that is so crowded that it won’t be of any use, so every map maker has to carefully balance what to show on each zoom level. So it is well possible that IFW does’t render churces and schools if the newly added ways are shown but those POI not. Ofcourse there’s also the possibility that you’ve tagged those POI wrongly, but if you followed the map_features page then that does not seem likely.
