1ste Gimnechiske Compagnie

The Brazilian OpenStreetMap community are constantly looking for ways to attract new mappers, and the latest attempt have been accomplished with some external help.As suggesting from the title, a program for lending GPS units have started. A set of criteria have to be met, but it is not hard to come within the minimum criteria. Since the web page of the project is in Portuguese, I’ll give you a brief translation here:

• Be registered at OSM for at least 3 months
• Been contributing to OSM for at least 2 months
• Send an e-mail to osm-gps@yahoogrupos.com.br
• Inform your OSM username, wiki username (optional), a summary of your contributions, and how you think the lending GPS will help you in the project

Various parts of the Brazilian community are already deep down in improving the map, the group in São Paulo manages to have meeting (they are enough people to actually meet some place), people do tracings of Yahoo! images, collect GPS tracks, prepare and conduct data imports, and much more. But there are loads of data, Brazil is one of the largest countries in the world (5th largest according to Wikipedia), Yahoo! coverage is limited, and we are not that many yet.

As the mapping progress of Brazil goes steadily towards a better map, and some areas are well under way, interstate mapping have been attempted. I wrote earlier about Brazil 250 Cities, that have as a goal to make a routable map between the 250 most important cities of Brazil, and have now more than 60% succeeded this goal.

A little time ago I also came across a page for extreme routes on the OpenStreetMap wiki. By extreme routes I really mean Extreme, as they tests long distance routing capabilities, such as Cabo Finisterre in Portugal to Vladivostok in eastern Russia, and compare it with various online map and routing services (Cloudmade representing Routing in OpenStreetMap), such as Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and ViaMichellin (I know that somebody have mentioned Bing maps, but there are no comparison there yet).

As the Brazilian part of OpenStreetMap are getting more usable for every day, one of the Brazilian community members have started a service where you can download up-to-date maps of Brazil for your Garmin device.

Enjoy the map!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 23:39 and is filed under Computer, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.