User:Grouper
Hi, I am Grouper - I am a map nerd. My real name is Brian May. I am actively mapping in several parts of Florida, mainly SE FL. Mostly TIGER streets re-alignment. My thinking is that cleaning up junky streets paves the way for others to add more detail. People seem reluctant to dive into moving lots of streets around, but people need to realize the original TIGER is sometimes plain junk when it comes to spatial accuracy. Having said that, the street naming is much better, even where the spatial accuracy is terrible. And they tended to get the overall relationships between streets correct, even if it looks distorted in some way. As long as you have high-res/recent/spatially accurate aerials, some reference streets (newer TIGER is usually good enough), and you're not trashing someone's local knowledge, people should aggressively be updating the old TIGER.
I've recently converted to JOSM for editing. I finally figured out a few keys to using it and now I am much more productive with it. Several major keys to JOSM being more productive than Potlatch:
- Quickly zoom in and out with the mouse scroll wheel
- Easily select multiple nodes and/or ways and move them as a group
- Download a chunk of data and not wait for the server to feed you data bits at a time
- Built-in building tool - quickly generate a rectangle and its automatically tagged as a building
- Validation tools built-in
BING imagery notes:
- can be awesome, where its updated.
- I've seen them blend two different years of imagery and to get the latest/greatest, you need to zoom in really far.
Check out my company website: http://www.mapwise.com
The free version of the MapWise interactive map viewer for Florida provides a lot of useful info for arm-chair mapping in Florida.