User:Swissoptimist

Hello,

I am a former civil-engineer (as far as you can be a former engineer), that says a lot about my fascination for technical drawing and mapping. Former does not mean retired but gone to the management floor. An as all of those managers, my new mobile phone has a GPS inside. So back to the roots, my first company was about CAD and GIS, lets map.

After a few weeks testing how to get the best fix and therefore GPX data, reading Wiki about the goals of the project, I finally downloaded JOSM. It took another few days until I downloaded all plugins that are necessary to work efficiently.

My work flow is now following:

• Recording the tracks on my Nokia N95, using sportstracker (a freeware from Nokia itself). There are two ice options showing the "GPS inf" and "fix quality". with the 8GB, no fear about number of points, the battery life is much more an issue.
• saving as GPX and transferring to my Mac.
• loading the GPX, zooming on the data and then to the detail area where I want to work. I set the preferences to display the points as vectors. That helps a lot.
• the "openvisible" plugin is really helpful here (kudos), because it allows to load the element from the OSM server that should be visible in the current area
• draw the vectors and tag them
• delete unnecessary nodes (in the "utilsplugin" I think)
• validate (with the "validator" plugin). I have noticed that other users might produce better data using this validator too;-)
• upload to OSM

I am still quite new to the project, please feel free to comment or share your recipes.