User:Adam Martin
Personal Information
I'm an accountant by training and an auditor by trade. I was born and have lived my entire life in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador.
- OSM Account: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Adam%20Martin
- E-mail: S (dot) Adam (dot) Martin (at) gmail (dot) com
Major Mapping Projects
Paradise
The Town of Paradise here in Newfoundland and Labrador is fourth largest community in the Province. Since April 2009, I've called this community home. Prior to finding OSM, I regularly used Google Maps to locate businesses and services within the town, but found the data to be inaccurate in many cases. Efforts to adjust that data were met with apathy from the Google Maps community. Upon finding OSM, I found that not only was the map way more transparent in terms of user input, it was also hungry for people to add to the quality of the maps. The ease of use of the mapping tools (particularly the ID editor) sold me on the project and I've been mapping ever since.
Paradise is my pet project of sorts. My work was broken down into a number of phases.
Phase 1: Completed
Adjust the Town Boundary according to the Legislation that continues the incorporation of the township. This is actually fairly easily done - the Provincial Government provides all Acts and Regulations free to citizens (and everyone else for that matter). The Administrative Boundaries are retained from older descriptions which predate the use of latitude / longitude and GPS. As such, they are composed of simple geographic geographic descriptions - for example, follow a particular river for 1500 meters more or less westerly until it reaches a named pond and then ... Etc.
Phase 2: Completed
Re-adjust the shape and position of all roads within the municipal boundary. This is done as much of the CANVEC data is off by certain amounts and is in relatively low fidelity. The data itself was confirmed as accurate when compared to traces and to the satellite data, it just needed heavy refinement.
This is not a criticism of the CANVEC data itself - the Government of Canada is generous enough to release this data free over the internet for general use. Importation of that data requires a lot of preparation and great care. The fact remains that the data itself was acquired for use in maps at scales below that of OSM. On a 1:100,000 map, it looks fine. As one zooms in, the lack of fidelity can be seen. But the important thing is that most things you expect to find on a map of a given area are present. They just need refinement for inaccuracies and for any gaps in the data (which can happen when the information is as much as 30+ year's old.
Phase 3: Completed
This is a considerably more time consuming project - tagging the land use for all areas within the town boundary (and outside depending on the particular feature). All municipalities within the Province - cities and towns alike - lack practically any land use designations. My efforts are mostly focused on the major use of land in the town - residential. Land was designated based on the satellite data for the area.
Phase 4: Completed
Correct the shapes of all lakes within the municipal land boundary. The current shapes are the result of importation from the CANVEC data set and are in relatively low fidelity and simple in detail. These are corrected as the land use is added nearby. The goal is to make the lakes accurate while keeping the overall number of points low.
Phase 5: Not Started
Add all current businesses within the town to the map with all identifying information necessary for map users to locate and utilize that service.
Phase 6: Completed
This step involves correcting the shape of the coastal boundary of the northwestern portion of Paradise. The shores around the Island portion of the Province are inaccurate - from what i gather, this is a known issue in OSM in general, one that it is expected that the users will correct over time. In this case, a simple series of corrections based on the satellite data has vastly improved the shape and accuracy of the coastline.
Meadow Lake
Meadow Lake is a small city (~5,000 residents) situated in the north-western portion of the Province of Saskatchewan. I landed on correcting the information in this area when I used OSM to view the area several weeks ago. I am not certain why, but the roads that were added to the area were extremely fragmented - that is, intersection and even segments of roads were not directly connected to each other. Other roads were misshaped or missing. The names were mostly correct, so my conclusion is that the data importation failed at some level and the information was truncated.
Phase 1: Completed
The first step was to attempt to fix the roads that were already in place. This proved to be extremely difficult considering the level of fragmentation. So I decided to delete all the roads within the city and redraw them.
Phase 2: Completed
When viewing my corrections to the roads, I noticed that the actual local geographic feature the city is named for - that being Meadow Lake itself - was absent from the map. This was added using the satellite data as reference material.
Phase 3: In Progress
Similar to my work in Paradise, I've begin adding the land use designations to the area. It's a little easier in Meadow Lake as the city is rather tiny and laid out in a grid format.
Minor Map Corrections
Signal Hill National Historical Site
I made a visit to the site and decided to check the location within OSM. The boundary for the site appeared to be incorrect so I searched the Government historical website and compared the official boundary to the one in the map, making corrections as needed. This information is for public consumption and was used only as corrective material.
Ferry Terminal in Portugal Cove - St. Philips
I corrected the shape of the shoreline and the ferries feeder road to better match the area (roads were in the correct position, but were not in sufficient detail - such that portions of the road were shown to be in the harbor itself. The shoreline in this area was also corrected to match the details of the satellite data.
Water Categorization in the North-Eastern Avalon
According to the consensus of the OSM community, a pond is a body of water that is man-made whereas a lake is a natural body of water. Regardless of their names and their sizes, all water bodies in this province would fall into the category of a lake. A large portion of the lakes in my address were categorized as lakes.
Chelsea, Iowa
Corrected the shape of several of the roads in the area. The data was originally imported for the US geographical survey and had the usual problem with low resolution.
Anglican Church in Portugal Cove - St. Philips
Added the church building and corrected the local roads.
Lawn, Newfoundland
Corrected the shape of the shoreline of the Great Lawn Harbour, updated the municipal boundary according to the provincial legislation, corrected the shape of the local roads, and fixed the error in the data related to the local river.
Lake in Northern Ontario
Added a random lake to Ontario that was missing according to local making information.
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Minor corrections across the city including local roads, land designations, and the addition of missing data.