Module 1: The OpenStreetMap Website¶
Learning Objectives
Understand the concept of OpenStreetMap
Understand the definition and objectives of data collection
Understand the composition of a map
Make a hand-drawn sketch of an area
Maps are a good way to convey information. Maps are visual representations of our world. They can often demonstrate an idea better than words. This in turn can also help answer important questions. Where is the closest school or hospital? Who has the least access to these facilities? Where is poverty the most problematic? Questions like these can often best be expressed with maps, and maps can help find solutions to these questions.
Hand-drawn maps¶
As an exercise, get a pen and paper and draw a map of your town or village. What are the most important things to include on the map? What is the most important information? Spend a few minutes making your map, and when you’re finished, think about why the information you included is important, and who it might be important to.
A village in Indonesia (top), and an example of a hand-drawn map (bottom)¶
If your town is like most, you may have drawn some lines to represent roads, possibly a river or stream. Perhaps you added important buildings such as schools and offices, fields, or boundaries. Whatever you drew, you probably used symbols - a line to symbolise a road, a square to symbolise a building, and so on. Your map is a representation of what is on the ground.
Examples of Symbols¶
Your map is informative. You might use a map like this to explain to someone where different places are, where problems are in your community, or merely to help someone find their way around. The use of your map is limited though. There is only one copy of the map and the way you drew it may make sense to you, but perhaps not to someone else who would have drawn their own map in a different way. Because your map is merely on paper, it is difficult to get that information to others. This is why making your map on a computer, in such a way that anyone can access it, can be much more valuable.
Why digital?¶
Map making on computers allows us to collect more useful data than on paper. On paper we might draw a school, and even add it’s name and record some information about the school, but on the computer we can attach an endless amount of data about the school, such as the number of students, number of teachers, size of the building, type of structure, and so on. And more importantly, when we add this school to a digital map, we record it’s precise location (longitude and latitude) on the planet. This is invaluable for our future map making and analysis, and we will look more closely at it later on.
What is OpenStreetMap?¶
OpenStreetMap is a tool for creating and sharing map information. Anyone can contribute to OSM, and thousands of people add to the project every day. Users draw maps on computers, rather than paper, but as we will see in this guide, drawing a map on a computer is not all that different from drawing on paper. We still draw lines to represent roads, fields, and anything else, and we still represent schools and hospitals with symbols. The important thing is that OSM maps are saved on the internet, and anyone can access them at any time, totally free.
Digital Maps with OpenStreetMap¶
OSM is digital, which makes it extremely useful for us, and it is shared, which means that everybody benefits from the work of everybody else.
In this unit, you will learn how to make a digital map. You will learn how to use the OSM platform, and you will make your first edits and additions to the worldwide map.