Australia/Archive/Starting with a Blank Map in Australia

This page describes a historic artifact in the history of OpenStreetMap. It does not reflect the current situation, but instead documents the historical concepts, issues, or ideas.

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Part of the Tips especially for Aussies this page gives some tips on starting with a Blank Map in Australia

• For rural areas which have big areas of blank map priorities are to see the major roads to each town, so that it can be used for finding a way there, and the names of the towns.
  • City - Capital cities and large regional centres. Wikipedia has a full list.
  • Town - Place with plenty of shops and providing services to the district.
  • Village - Place with a few shops, but limited services, maybe a pub and a general store.
  • Hamlet - Very limited to no services. For example, no pub and no store.
  • Locality - place of interest but no-one lives there eg lookout or old rural name
• Mark a separate node at the Post Office place=town to put the town on the map. If there isn't a post office use the pub or a community building to place the extra node.

• Useful tags on maps
  • Petrol Stations
  • ATMs
  • Public Toilets
  • Boat Ramps
  • Parks
  • Playgrounds
  • Picnic Areas

• A rough guideline, from a GPS logging perspective, of order of importance
  • major roads
  • then town streets
  • minor out lying roads, rivers/streams, railways
  • street names
  • points of interest
  • place naming (eg type of shop)
  • street numbering

• Also when making roads this is a useful quick and dirty way of doing things.
  • The end points of a road are the most important, since you want to get from point a to b :)
  • The next important piece of information is intersections.
  • Finally once you have all that you can refine the information, things like wiggly bits and curving roads between intersections.