WikiProject Qatar
 Qatar, Asia
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| Latitude : 25.35, Longitude : 51.25 |
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Qatar is a country in Asia at latitude 25.35, longitude 51.25.
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| OpenStreetMap images (and underlying map data) are freely available under the OpenStreetMap License. |
This is the beginning of the project for Qatar.
Contents |
Things already done
- A fair share of the map had already been done using Yahoo Imagery. However many parts have been changed (as any people living in Qatar would expect, see specificity)
- The municipalities boundaries have been edited as a set of relations. However, their actual position has to be checked, and the new municipality of Umm Said is not present. GIS files exist for these, but there might be license issues (check with Qatar Planning Council/Census Dept, QatarGISNet?)
- A few random corrections, and GPS traces.
Things to do
Basically everything! Suggestion for Doha (including Ar Rayyan city) is to use administrative zones and map rather comprehensively one after the other (zones are small in populated areas). In the absence of a public geographic description of zones, the zone number can be found on each street sign. The corresponding name can be found on various sites such as Qatar Planning Council[1].
Specificities
- Mashreq international roads
- Qatar road network is changing quite fast! Yahoo Imagery must be circa 2004-2005 and large amounts of ways and nodes have been changed : new roads, roundabouts changed into crossroads,...
- Being mostly desert, the road network outside of the city is mostly made of tracks (sometimes hard to discern), and can only be mapped using a 4x4. Most of it does not even have proper tracks.
- Dukhan city may not be easy to map as it is the "property" of Qatar Petroleum, and access to it is not public. What would be the status of someone with a gate pass entering the city for any reason, and then mapping it? would it be of any use anyway? Same goes for the industrial part of Mesaieed (but the city itself is accessible).
- How does one map residential compounds?
Conventions
As this is the beginning, these conventions are likely to be discussed, as they are merely here to establish common ground for starting.
- Highways
- there is no motorway (restricted access)
- the main highways between cities (Doha, Al Shamal, Al Khor, AL Wakrah... should be considered as trunks
- Inside cities, any highway with at least two lanes should be primary (maybe some secondary?)
- Boundaries
- admin_level for municipalities should be 4 (currently) or 6
- admin_level for zones should be 8
- admin_level for census blocks should be 10 (but there is very little practical use of them).
- Naming
- The main name on the street signs is english 'Al Sadd, Salwa...' and the arabic transcript is seen on the side. Thus 'name' should be for the name in english, and 'name:ar' used for arabic. It may be useful to add 'name:en' so that any future change to the preferred language for 'name' does not break everything.
I suggest using arabic names for streets/localities e.g. name=قطر, the reason is simple : most latin transcriptions are not unique or approximate for example qatar can also be transcribed Katar or Quatar etc... which will make searching difficult , or take another example أبو ظبي , one could transcribe it Abu Dhabi or Abu Zabi or Abou Dhabi or Abou Zabii , Abu Zabi, Abu Sabi etc...
There is another issue with this naming convention , because most users of OSM maps in Qatar/Arabic countries will be local arabic speaking residents, they will prefer an unambiguous naming pattern in their native language rather than a variable approximate naming pattern. Hope you agree !
--Metehyi 11:18, 13 August 2008 (UTC)
Agreed on the most, or should I say that I have no preferred option. It makes more sense this way. Maybe one thing, I'm not sure about the native language about the majority of users. I for one, do not speak/write arabic, thus will stick to name:en --MR Claude 09:41, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
