User:Spancilhill
Background
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I always liked hoovering over maps of foreign places and dreaming of the landscape. I had a pretty good visual memory for maps and usually still could tell where I am when I was in the middle of nowhere.
I'm a mapper since around 2009 when I started recording GPS traces using my then Samsung H1 smartphone and a rather awkward software called "honeylocation", tracing backroads mainly in the hinterland of County Clare. One day, somebody pointed me to a Java tool called GPSMID which directly produces GPX files - much easier to handle! Mind you, the H1 existed before the Android era and had a proprietary OS without much of an app store ... Since then I moved to an Android phone but my mapping fever waned ...
But always, I had to be reminded: "Don't tag for the renderer ...!" :)
Then Clare Co.Co. decided to erect signs for some L roads and I did some tagging of close-by L roads by taking GPS-enabled photos of those L-signs to tag the appropriate roads via Potlatch, yet not wholeheartedly ...
So it was not before the dawn of Bing imagery that I started to get OSeM-xcited again! I started to map everything (well nearly) of:
Ennis and the 'bog' around R352 towards Clooney
First, I started by mapping some of the high voltage power lines in County Clare. Actually some of my first edits were back in 2009, when I added some of the HV power lines in the fields around my home! Check the history if you don't believe it! ;-)
Currently, I'm working on residential areas and buildings in Ennis - see wiki project Ennis.
I have seen most of the places I mapped along the Tulla Road and in Ennis on the ground, so I usually add "Bing, survey" as the source for my edits for those places.
Credit to various users like boggedy, mackerski or IrlJidel, who helped me along with some good advice (even without knowing). Keep it coming. I'm always open to learn.
Editing Tools and Styles
It was and still is a long learning process to find the best way to edit data in OSM. With the current versions of Potlatch and JOSM, I'm actually sharing the work between the two - simply put, I use Potlatch to create areas and JOSM for buildings. The buildings plug-in together with various keyboard shortcuts is such an accelerator for that task! If only the house numbers weren't such a pain in the ... dark place.
I'm still flabbergasted by the problem to properly distinguish a "hedge" from a line (or more) of trees. Also, when using "barrier=hedge", should I directly latch the adjoining field to it or keep some distance to cater for the width of the hedge? Or is that too much detail? In zoom-level 12 and lower, you won't see a difference anyway ...