As my first diary entry, I'm not sure what I should write about. I first fiddled with OSM several years ago, but haven't seriously gotten involved until recently. I'm at the point right now where I'm interested in so many facets of OSM, I don't know where to spend my time.

One definite goal of mine is to create a comprehensive map of Burke Centre, population 17,326, located in Fairfax County, Virginia. I've recently been getting more involved in my community, including volunteering with the home owners association. We have a trail map, but it is simply a low resolution raster map created years ago, with little detail and of course all the other benefits OSM offers. I've been experimenting in my neighborhood, and I'll probably post on this specifically in the future.

I'm also very interested in micromapping, that is mapping small features which most don't spend the time to care about. As part of mapping Burke Centre I'm experimenting with mapping every house (including their entrances), sidewalks, driveways, waste baskets, benches, and more. I've found that current tagging schemes often don't work well with micromapping, and renderers thus tend to produce overcrowded layouts, not to mention completely ignoring some of the less frequently used features. Again, I'm sure I'll have more to say about this in the future, but I have created a micromapping stub on the wiki.

I've found JOSM is the best tool for editing OSM, and I have been fiddling with the code as I go along. One thing I've done is patched the PDF Import plugin to support setting projection preferences, though it seems few people even use that plugin, perhaps because the documentation is lacking. To support my work in Fairfax County, I also created a new JOSM plugin which uses the Proj4J library to provide a large number of projections. It works well for my purpose of using the PDF Import plugin to use Fairfax County cadastral maps, however it certainly needs additional testing.

I have other interests such as pedestrian routing and tile rendering, however I'll get to those in a future post. There's just so much to do!