Israel August 2012

The Israeli Openstreetmap community is happy to announce that we have successfully changed the whole street classification in Israel. Some months we realized that the current classification inside of Israel is giving too much space for interpretation. Our rules we defined in the beginning of Openstreetmap in Israel where simply not covering everything. The idea was good, but we had more and more discussions on the right classification.

We had to deal with several problems:

1. We had no rule when a highway is a motorway and when its not. It was based on the personal feeling of the person if this got defined this or that way. This got even more complicated as no trunk definitions where used in Israel. In Israel a motorway can have 1 , 2 or even 3 digits.

2. All 4 digit roads in Israel where defined a tertiary roads and where not highlighted enough.

3. It was against the rule to define very big urban roads as secondary as it was reserved for 3 digit roads. But sometimes this was important for a good routing through the city.

As a result of a long discussion in the OSM Board (http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=17256) and a lot of research we agreed on the following new rule that was successfully adapted in the last two weeks:

Primary the road definition in Israel is not based anymore on the amount of digits but on the sign and color of the sign. Every street number (ref) is written on a sign that has a color.

• Blue is motorway (normally 1 to 3 digits)
• Red is trunk (normally 1 to 2 digits)
• Green is Primary (normally 3 digits)
• Secondary is brown (normally 4 digits)

Because we would like to highlight big and fast urban street it is now also allowed to define those roads as secondary even if doesn’t have a digit. Check it out: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=32.07&lon=34.879&zoom=9&layers=M

I realized that the area around Bet Shean in Israel is mapped not detailed enough. Seems like nobody after the publishing of the BING satimages has tagged this area.

I have fixed several main "fixme" streets and added as much as I could see with the help of Bing to OSM.

The focus was on the water basins and the farmlands in this area.
Now it looks more "green" and "blue".

I also removed several forests in that area that are mapped more detailed with the KKL Import.

The Israeli Openstreetmap (OSM) community worked ½ year with the Israel officials to get some kind of official license free data from the Government that can be imported to OSM without restriction.
Today we achieved the first goal and got the first official recourse.

The Israel Ministry of Interior provided an up-to-date (August 2010) rasterized image of the current administrative boundaries of the Israeli country. This is the first official data without restrictions that is provided to the OSM project from the State of Israel.

The high resolution image includes important data about the administrative borders and the districts, so it should be easy to trace the borders within the OSM tools. OSM Israel is currently evaluating a way to import / trace those data into OSM.

Members of the OSM Israel community will also present Openstreetmap to the government GIS forum in Israel expecting even more support by Israel’s officials in the future.

About Openstreetmaps in Israel:
Starting 2008 OSM in Israel included only some streets around Tel Aviv and some highways.
Starting 2009 you could already use Openstreetmap for orientation around the country.
In 2010 you could finally use Openstreetmap for navigation as all important connections between the cities where available.
Especially the Bing sat-images helped to push the amount of streets to a higher level and provided even more mappers that helped.

As Im driving around alot I keep colleting data for this openstreet project.
So I collected alot of data for Netanya, Hadera, Naariya and alot of other streets and areas (Dead sea, Kinereth, highways and so on.)

I looked yesterday on the Israeli Map and found out that there are not even all highways shown on the map.

So I started editing the map including the ways of gps logs of others.
I also changed the city Netanya to the right place.

Hope that I can get my GPS to log my driven ways to give more informations.