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About creating maps

OpenMaps is - or will be, we hope - a dynamically developing system, a kind of Wikiweb for building accurate digital maps expanding day by day. All lines from highways to hiking trails, all areas from forests to man-made-places (such as castles or shopping centers) and all points from border crossings to springs or ATM bankomats are in the range of our interest. But we are slightly hiking-oriented.

Maps of each country in Open Map Projects (OMP) contain two "static" components:

  • land cover polygons (from CLC2000 database) and
  • land contour polylines (generated from public SRTM datas). 3D versions only!

Further elements of maps - roads, streets, tails, areas, interesting points, etc - are being drawn by human map editors with slightly modified version of GPSMapedit software. (The original version can be found at http://geopainting.com)
These elements are being drawn based on GPS tracklogs and waypoints. (See "Help us!" if you don't know what is tracklog.) Map lines could be drawn correctly only if we have two or more correlating good quality tracks of a road or a trail. Therefore the project needs - possibly accurate and up to date - tracklogs from computer-connectible GPS-recievers (GPSr).
Even CLC polygons are modified if necessary.

What we need to make these maps?

  • enthusiastic people to record and upload GPS-datas, tracks
  • mapping programs for drawing and conversions
  • skilled and experienced fellows to handle datas, draw map objects, develop programs
  • a lot of time to do all of this
  • computer hardware
  • donations for getting hardware, software, etc

Map data are converted to several output types:

  • Garmin IMG
    with an installer for MapSource software
  • Russa RUS
    for GisRussa, a great mapping software for PDAs
  • Navitel NTM
    an improved GisRussa by Navitel
  • Magellan format
  • Google Earth (GE) KMZ

Currently some of the above are under development. You can see the actual possibilities under the "Download" section.

Web-based online viewing is planned.

(Making automatic outputs based on shared database is under develpoment.)