Geocaching Australia

The Spindoctors wrote:Worth checking this out. http://rebuild.poole.ch/

It's part of an effort to redraw the data. I've rebuilt St Clair and Erskine Park (roughly)

Thanks for the link!

For SA users of OSM:

We seem to be the hardest-hit out of the states - I estimate probably 60% of Adelaide is still there, much lower for some rural areas. The Yorke is looking pretty good (although it's always been rough due to lack of imagery). I've spent the last couple of months redrawing or clean-tagging data that was going to be deleted but just couldn't quite do them all

I'm currently making an effort to get all the numbered routes back up and running using this site as a guide: http://www.ozroads.com.au/SA/New/new.htm. So far I'm down to B35 - all numbers before that are now useable. At least if the main roads are complete, we should be able to get something a bit more usable, at least for basic routing.

I agree with the subject line - OSM is useless for now and no doubt will be for a while. When the licence changed over around July 14 I was strongly tempted to go straight back to FOSM, having spent a few months on it earlier in the year. Sadly, nothing's changed - it's still experimental, they don't have a centralised GPS track database and all efforts are being made by a small handful of dedicated individuals. You can't get data extracts or pre-made maps without specialised knowledge - this is the point that turned me away (again). Unless the project becomes a bit more user-friendly, don't even bother...good data, but you can't use it!

All I can say is, just keep up the contribution to OSM. It WILL get better, no matter how bad it is now. Remember that only about two years ago they were practically unusable and up until the redaction OSM was one of the best maps you could get.

If anyone's interested, I downloaded an Australia source extract on July 3 and have made a Garmin routable map out of it - haven't uploaded this to Dropbox as yet but if anyone's interested I'll put it up.

I just had a look at the areas near me that were ruined, and the area pictured above near Hobart, and the damage seems
to have been largely restored now.
What do people think about the areas they are familiar with?
Are we getting back to a much better position with this?

Most of Adelaide has now been restored with the exception of street names. Some of it needs a bit of a cleanup but it's generally good. Country SA still has a long way to go, but the major routes are mostly complete. I'm surprised it only took a couple of months; might actually be able to generate a usable map soon!

A lot of work has gone into rebuilding the map. A lot of it through http://rebuild.poole.ch/

Unfortunately, the detailed stuff (street names for example) will take some time. If you use OSM I suggest you take a bit of time to get your hands dirty and contribute. Any amount of help is useful.

I suspect it will be 'back to normal' by mid next year.