There are communities of people who are engaged in improving online cards, making amendments to them and finishing empty areas. Operation Cowboy is a cartographic marathon organized by enthusiasts that lasts a night.
Operation Cowboy is a global event that has been held on the night of November 23 to 25. Cartographs from different countries gathered together in communities in their cities and edited the OpenStreetmap card all night. A similar marathon - Night of the Living Maps - took place on February 7 last year, but this time the participants focused in the remote territories of the United States.
OpenStreetmap is a non-profit web-cartographic project to create a detailed free and free geographical map of the world. In OpenStreetMap, the principle of wiki is used to create a card - each registered user can make changes to the card. To create cards, data from personal GPS trackers , aerial photography , videos, satellite images and simply knowledge of the person drawing the card are used. The project is supported by the non -profit organization OpenStreetmap Foundation, existing due to donations.
In January, when a catastrophic earthquake in Haiti occurred, thousands of participants rushed to compose a Haiti map and mark the destroyed buildings. This raised the popularity of OpenStreetmap to a new level: the term “ Crisis Mapping ” was introduced widely, many new people learned about the project, and American rescuers began to use data with the Haiti card. In summer, during fires in Russia, participants introduced burned forests to the database.
The project, created in 2004, by December 2005 totaled 1,000 participants, and in the first half of May 2011, the number of participants reached 400,000 thousand.
Goals
The main goal of the Operation COWBOY is to help people learn more about editing OpenStreetmap. Beginners who do not even have experience can come to the event and get acquainted with the community. All that is needed for this is to come to the meeting and bring a laptop and a mouse with you (editing a card using a touchpad is very inconvenient).
The Operation COWBOY marathon is “remote mapping” ( Armchair Mapping ), which means participation in editing without leaving its chair. Remote cartographers do not take part in the research phase, which includes visiting the territories that are edited on the map. Instead, they work with such data as aerial photographs and analog maps.
Types of remote mapping proposed for the marathon:
Tiger (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing) - a set of data on all roads in the United States. Data has different quality depending on the territory - in some places the correspondence is very close, and new residential complexes are often absent on the map. The main problems of data that were not edited:
Entire roads that no longer exist or have never been nursed;
The road with one -sided traffic is represented as a bilateral road;
Incorrect classification of roads;
Bridges and tunnels are not indicated.
Maproulette is a tool that sends the user to a random problem on the map, but at the same time often in the area with low quality data Tiger, so in addition to correcting a specific problem, you can also start editing the whole area.
NHD (National Hydrography Dataset) - problems and limiting hydrographic data. It is not difficult to find areas on the map where there are no large rivers, or they are incorrectly displayed as a result of data errors, especially near settlements.
GNIS - imported data on schools, hospitals, parks, lakes, etc. Basically, the data is quite accurate, but there are cases of importing non -existent or closed objects.
Areas
The areas were divided into sites - each participant could choose a site for work.
