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Comment by JustSomeNobody | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if you would know how to do this. I'm in the states and I would like to improve my local maps. I'm a complete newb to mapping and OSM. What I'd like to know is, what's the best way to link addresses and coordinates? Are there public databases? There are new office building and subdivisions that are not yet in OSM and I'd like to help do that. I just don't have time to enter all of them manually, so if there's a way to automate that...

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The best way for a "complete newb" to improve OpenStreetMap is to just find the place that you are interested in and click on "Edit" and start drawing the missing features.

There are public datasets and imports that happen sometimes, but these are done by people who have experience in it, and usually in cooperation with the local government GIS that controls the dataset.

Going outside and recording what you see is still the gold standard for collecting data. Don't feel like you have to fix everything in your city - if you can write down a little bit every time you go out and then come back home and enter it in using the map editor, that's very valuable.

I have some friends who do this as a hobby. They meet the strangest people. Very entertaining.

I did this the other day. A stream nearby has been given a new meandering path. I went out with a phone and some GPS tracking software, traced it and then mapped it.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=59.4867&mlon=17.8986#map=...

What you're talking about is "imports". OSMers are wary of them. It's possible for someone to mess up existing data, to add bad data, damage the local community etc. Most of the map in the USA was imported in late 2007 ( http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER ). The map looks done, but the data quality is pretty poor.

People are happy if you manually enter them.

Hi, you should also look into checking to see if there is a MapTime http://maptime.io/ near you. MapTimes have sprung up all over the world and are a great way to learn about mapping and OSM.

If you're specifically interested in adding data about addresses, you may want to look into http://openaddresses.io/

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