User:Ewmjc/About Me

The real stuff:

The Boy Scouts taught me about maps and even today I can get almost as much enjoyment looking at a map as visiting a place. In a past life I used to be a geophysicist which gives me just enough knowledge about surveying and cartography to be dangerous. My interest in OSM started with some research into the field of geo-referenced information and, well, it just sucked me in.

I map on foot, bicycle and car though find cycling the easiest to cover areas in detail. A few trips on cross-country ski and snowmobile have also been great fun.

I now map mostly with the camera on my mobile phone and then examine aerial imagery using Potlatch when I get back home. I always collect a GPS track from a dedicated logger (Canway) - very accurate - or my Garmin Forerunner 235 - reasonably accurate - but find myself referring to it less and less. I religiously upload my tracks to OSM, usually editting out bad bits where I have stopped using a C# application I wrote for Windows or GPSPrune when on a Mac.

I now spend time and map in Sweden, the Málaga province of Spain and Melbourne. I also periodically visit my home town of Otley, Yorkshire and am slowly making an ultra-detailed walking map of the river valley of Wharfedale showing all the walls and historical detail with a focus on field names and old mining.

• 2005-2006. I used to be based in Sydney, Australia and did the majority of initial mapping of that city, along the NSW coast, Toowoomba in Queensland and made a start on Brisbane. You can see general Australia east coast progress here.

• 2006 - 2007 Philippines. I also spend time in Manila and started mapping there and the Clark Special Economic Zone. Uploaded coastline for the entire country. I believe I've mapped OSM's first tropical island - Borocay - tough going on all those beaches, but someone had to do it. I've also done a wee bit of mapping of Marina del Rey, Los Angeles from Yahoo images and local knowledge.

• Summer 2007 UK. Mapped my home town area, Otley, Yorkshire, UK and surrounding villages in detail and have put in defining roads and features for Wharfedale from source to the River Ouse. Made a start on the town of Skipton and also the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. I'll am back there off and on.
• May 2007: Moved to Stockholm and concentrated on mapping the island of Lidingö and the nearby mainland and cleaning up and completing the entire Baltic coastline. I also made a start on Vilnius, Lithuania and added to the centre of Tallinn, Estonia.

• Oct 2007 Sweden: Västerås OSM Mapping party and mapped cycle routes to Stockholm and Enköping.

• Dec 2007: Completed Baltic main coastline.

• Dec 2007: Digitised Russian Arctic coastline.

• Feb - June 2008: Motivated by Andy Allan's great Cycle Map, I've been out mapping the national and regional cycle routes that criss-cross the Stockholm area.

• June 2008: Some more work on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal.

• June - Sept 2008: Focused on mapping a corridor along the E4 from Stockholm outskirts to Upplands Väsby by varying my cycle ride to work.

• Sept 2008 - Mar 2009: A spell of illness kept me off the bike and most field-mapping. So I've been working on getting state and county tags for a number of countries, digitising large rivers Russia, Asia, Africa and South America, adding volcano locations. Great fun.

• April 2009: Wrote a Perl program to convert and bulk-import Malsing Map data for the eastern peninsular provinces of Malaysia kindly donated by Anthony Yong.

• April 2009: Finally back on the bike and pushing to finish Lidingö a Swedish kommun (municipality) and island of 40,000 on in the northern Stockholm area.

• October 2009: Otley is now 100% road complete, most if not all the foot routes are in and all the landmarks are done.
• Oct 2012 - Dec 2017: Moved to Brottby, 35km north of Stockholm and switched mapping efforts to Vallentuna and Norrtälje kommuns. Lot's of forest tracks that can be cycled on a regular road bike so have spent time making a routable network of the whole area.
• Summer 2017: Traced the lines of all the old timber railways radiating out of Rimbo by bicycle and updated the map for precise location and whether accessible tracks and paths exist along them.
• Oct 2018: My wife and I have bought a place on the Costa del Sol / Málaga province. The urban areas are generally extremely mapped so I will focus on shops/eating places as well as tourist sights. Rural areas are not really mapped beyond the basic road map so I have made a start on mapping land cover/user plus finding and surveying all the off-road bicycle and walking ways.
• Feb 2018: Just taken over as CIO of an Australian company based in the Melbourne suburbs and will be spending a few months there every year. Melbourne is extremely well mapped, so focusing on shops/eating places and visiting all the tourism=attraction sites and adding details for tourist orientation.

I look forward to hearing from any one else mapping in these areas.