India/Getting started

Advice for new users in India

If you are a new Indian mapper, please check out the following places:

1. Add yourself to Category:Users in India
2. Put your name in the WikiProject_India#Primary_contributors table
3. Subscribe to the India-talk mailing list
4. Take part in the discussion to form tagging guidelines for the country Talk:WikiProject_India
5. Tagging Roads in India and boundary values for India
6. The OSM Beginners' Guide and Getting Involved page. Other extremely helpful resources are guides from MapQuest and the OSM help portal
7. List of apporved map features and tag values can be found here Map Features. This is your reference for tagging ways and points.
8. Potlatch online map editor and useful keyboard shortcuts Potlatch/Keyboard shortcuts
9. JOSM heavy duty offline editor JOSM
10. If you have a question, you can post it to the india-talk mailing list(see above) or post it in the FAQ section where you can browse through commonly asked questions.
11. Check the India/Meets page to see if there any user meets or mapping parties in your city. or why not start one?

Instant armchair Mapping

Want to jump straight to the mapping without getting up from your chair? follow these steps:

1. Sign up and Login
2. Click on the map link for any of these cities that have detailed Yahoo imagery. If your area does not have high resolution imagery, you will have to move out of your chair and map your area by riding around with a gps. See more about this over here: Beginners' Guide. Or you could still help out mapping other places that have imagery.
3. Zoom in to your area of interest
4. Click the edit tab at the top to switch to the online Potlatch map editor
5. Decide whether you want all your changes to be saved automatically as you go along, or stored up until you click save.
6. If you don't see the yahoo aerial imagery in the background, you need to set it from the options. If you still dont see it, you could try zooming out, otherwise you might be out of the coverage zone.
7. Start tracing over the imagery by drawing lines and polygons
8. See the Potlatch online map editor and useful keyboard shortcuts Potlatch/Keyboard shortcuts for help with the mapping
9. For your objects to render on the map, the points and paths must be tagged appropriately. See Map Features for tagging details. Incorrectly tagged objects will not show up on the map.
10. Done. Happy Mapping :D

You can also do armchair mapping by helping to work on tracks of blind mappers.

Note: Mappers are encouraged to use the JOSM offline editor once you are familiar with the basics and want to map large areas in much more detail. The WMSPlugin allows access to Yahoo Aerial Imagery in JOSM. This is a little tricky to set up, but worth the effort

Viewing your changes

OSM is viewable on two different rendering layers on http://www.osm.org :

• Mapnik: This is the default layer and is updated in a few minutes according to activity
• Osmarender: Part of the Tiles@home distributed rendering program. Usually updated daily, depending on mapping activity. A rerender of a particular tile can be manually requested and the map tile would be updated within a few hours.

The OSM data can also be viewed on various other sites that have their own custom styling:

• http://open.mapquest.in/ The open mapquest India site updates the tiles within a few hours of the edit. POI rendering is not as extensive as the default mapnik style
• Cloudmade Services such as user defined style sheets are offered by cloudmade to view the map data. Rendering of a tile is based on number of requests to view the tile

Potential

India is a fast growing country, with cities that are changing rapidly. It is also poorly served by most online mapping solutions. In theory, there should be great potential for OpenStreetMap to produce useful and useable mapping data.