My Edit on Open Street Map

My hometown is Gaobeidian city, Hebei provice, China, which is a very small city near by Beijing. So there is almost no map exist on Open Street Map.

What did I do?

I added the main roads, the plant garden, some apaerments blocks, farmland, train station and bus stations of the city.

To check the list of my edit, please vist my profile on open street map.

About Openstreetmap

For my point of view, OSM(open street map)is userful, but not indispensable.

Compared with Google map, there are too few founctions on OSM: you cannot use OSM to navigation, cannot use OSM on mobile phone, which is extermely important in the present era, and you cannot make you own map and share it. There are some other services which use OSM data can realize these founctions, but the question is: Why OSM itself cannot do these?

In some area, OSM has more detail data than Google map, but sometimes too many icons on the map makes it hard to read the map, and some data I have to say, is unnecessary be showed on the map.

There are also some mistakes on OSM, this means that it's very hard to guarantee the quality of OSM.

Everyone can contribute to OSM, but I believe only few people will do this base on the GPS traces. Most of people will use satliate images. But in some area, there are not enough satalite images. Take my hometowm as example, you can see that only the right half of the city has clear satellite images, the left part has very low resolution map, and in the middle part, which is the center of the city, there is no satellite image at all. This makes it is very difficult to contribute to OSM for me.

When I will go back to my hometown, MAYBE I will use GPS to map the small roads. But the question is since Google map or other maps already have these data long time ago, why should I do the repeat thing again?