User:Motomarc

Who is Motomarc?

Well, I had to pick a nickname and since I like driving a motorbike it was easily decided. Besides riding a Honda Pan European 1100 ST from '92, I'm also an avid open source user/tinkerer. A while ago I bought a Neo1973. It's a phone with a GPS chip incorporated. And since I'm going to use Openstreetmap for my bike routes, I also want to give something in return.

I live in Rijmenam, a small village somewhere in the neighbourhood of Mechelen.

Intentions

In no particular order I want to help in mapping:

• my region
• Ardennes (wherever I ride)
• Montenau and surroundings

Occasionally I'll try to join a mapping party because they seem like fun ...

Since I'm supposed to be a professional computer user, I'm also willing to lend others a hand if they're in trouble.

Mapping Party Lier

The mapping Party in Lier was interesting for me. I learned a lot of the pratical stuff.

How to go about when mapping:

• make sure that the GPS and the camera are set to the same date/time. In practice you'll always have to tweak a bit afterwards to have an exact match.
• make sure that your GPS logging is on (very basic)
• take pics of things you want to map later on (for more info on what to map, see Points_of_interest):
  • streetnames
  • city borders
  • parking lot
  • town hall
  • churches
  • musea
  • post offices

The list can go on and on. Remember that the pictures are of no other use then knowing where the POI are. They can't be uploaded to openstreetmap.org. In case you really want, you can however upload them to e.g. flickr and set an annotation in your waypoints that refers to that picture.

• walk/ride/map/have fun

How to go about when editing/creating a map:

• use JOSM
• download an area from JOSM that you're going to edit.
• load your track into JOSM as a layer (see right hand side)
• once loaded, right click on the track and select 'Import Images'
• your pics will be put alongside the track
• create streets and give them the 'right' properties (one way/residential/...)
• using the pics, it's easy to find the street name
• create POI from pics that were not street names