OSM Recap
What an awesome weekend. There was a good turnout for the Phoenix OSM mapping party, put on by CloudMade and hosted locally by Gangplank. On both days we saw a mixture of GIS professionals and Open Source users come out to support the project. A new neologism to add to the list also came out of the event, 'crowdsourcing'. The work of many locals who have an inherent expert knowledge of their surrounding environment replacing the work of what would otherwise be performed by a few skilled professionals.
Here is the result of our work:
[caption id="attachment_199" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Above: ASU Mapping Party"]
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In any event, we decided to focus our efforts on ASU's campus for the weekend. Before we went out with GPS units, an OSM'er named 'jfuredy' had actually taken a stab at some rooftop digitization of buildings along campus. I've already noticed that there are inherent conflicts that occur by digitizing from rooftops. Tall buildings of course, will appear oblique, with their roofs offset from their actual footprints. This creates scenarios in which buildings (created from oblique angled rooftops) are overlapping walkways.
[caption id="attachment_200" align="alignnone" width="215" caption="Above: Digitization Conflict"]
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I'm excited to continue working on the OSM project, and hope to see more mapping parties in the future. Speaking with Brandon, our contact at CloudMade, I mentioned that the end of January could be a potential date. This would be the first week of the new semester for MAS-GIS, and hopefully more of the students will come out and support the project!