OpenStreetMap
I was positively surprised a little time ago when I opened my JOSM, and discovered that Bing! coverage had been greatly extended. I looked around Espírito Santo and saw that much of what I had been missing have been included, though there are still many areas of interest to me that are not yet included.
A mapping frenzie ensued from this discovery, and much have already been added to the map. I have come to a point where I soon cannot add much very useful information in my short edits anymore, but think I will look into polishing adjoining information as well as information within Espírito Santo (such as improving boundary relations around Brazil, such as municipalities in Rio de Janeiro state, and State and Federal highways in Espírito Santo.
It is desirable to see even further extension of Bing coverage, and guess that might be acomplished again next year (don't hand out too much candy at one time I guess). The map is slowly but surely improving, and already many places OSM shows much better map data then some comersial maps, and google.
Now, with the last improvement in coverage and resulting edit frenzie, the Brazil map is getting so big in OSMAND and other navigator software that maybe it is due time to cut it into state size portions. I browsed Geofabrik and CloudMade and noticed CloudMade already offer Brazilian states for Garmin and TomTom as well as state poli, shapefiles and osm extracts. OSMAND seems to base its chunks on Geofabrik who still only offer entire Brazil. Geofabrik seems to have daily updates while the last update of CloudMade seems to be 13th of December 2011, almost 3 months ago.
Discussion
Comment from Wynndale on 5 March 2012 at 12:44
Do you think the people complaining to Foursquare about poor OSM coverage of Brazil have a point? Can we as a community keep them happy?
Comment from Skippern on 6 March 2012 at 00:59
I absolutely see their point, I too use foursquare, and have been a little annoyed they used Google maps, but for Brazil maybe the change to OSM was a little premature. Anyway the extended Bing! coverage have resulted in a nation wide mapping frenzy, so day-by-day the foursquare users should be more satisfied. Anyway they can join our movement too and improve where they are in particular unsatisfied. Hope even further Bing coverage comes while we still have momentum on the current coding frenzy.
Comment from liftarn on 6 March 2012 at 08:57
History has showed that once we get decent aerial photos mapping can be done very quickly. At least for what can be seen from above. We will still need people on the ground for street names, POIs and such.
Comment from Skippern on 6 March 2012 at 23:11
I think maybe it is easier to reqruite new mappers in areas where some data already exists as it is easier to fill in missing streetnames in existing streets than it is to draw the street in the first place, specially when the entire project is not so familiar and maybe a little difficult to understand how GPX tracks from cell phones. I guess people more familiar with the project quicker start looking for the certain tools while newbies need something simpler before they are able to get the right tools in place.