Tag: camping

Mapping a campground that doesn’t exist: a before and after view of OpenStreetMap

December 27, 2013 / / 8 Comments

Pretty soon there will be a campground shown in OpenStreetMap, and added to its geocoding database, when I’m done adding it.

I temporarily become addicted to mapping places on OpenStreetMap. In my quest to find and map all campgrounds in Chicagoland – in order to publish them in the Chicago Bike Guide – I came across a campground that was constructed this year and opened in August 2013. This is the story of figuring out how to map the Big Rock Forest Preserve campground in Big Rock, Illinois.

I found on the Kane County Forest Preserve District website that the organization operated a campground at Big Rock Forest Preserve. I couldn’t locate the campground in Google Maps by the address the website gave. I couldn’t find it in OpenStreetMap, either, because no one had mapped it, but it’s there now.

When I searched for the park by name, Google Maps zoomed me to the main entrance of the park, but I still couldn’t see a campground. I downloaded the forest preserve district’s park map (always as a PDF) and followed the roads in Google Maps until I came across the campgrounds approximate position. There was a new road here so I followed that to find a campground under construction.

Google Maps shows the campground and artificial lake under construction.

Google’s imagery of the under-construction campground was taken on May 23, 2013 (get the date from Google Earth). This was great because now I could open JOSM, a powerful desktop OpenStreetMap editor, and locate the site, load Bing’s imagery and start tracing the campground to upload to OSM.

Bing’s imagery in JOSM, the OpenStreetMap-editing app, doesn’t show the campground.

The problem was that Bing’s imagery – and this is typical – was outdated. I could easily compare the imagery side-by-side and based on other landscape features (like the forest edge) guess where to trace the campground, but OSM needs better quality data. Enter MapWarper.

Read the rest of this post on Web Map Academy.

Compiling and mapping Chicago-area campgrounds

December 26, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I’m adding Chicago-area campgrounds to the Chicago Bike Guide to entice new users and to espouse the enjoyment of medium-distance bike camping (which I’ve now done officially once, earlier this year).

<The Chicago Bike Guide is available for Android and iOS.>

I’m taking a systematic approach to finding all the publicly-owned campgrounds in the area by looking at primary sources.

First, though, I’ve used Overpass Turbo to create a list of all existing campgrounds in OpenStreetMap. You can see a gist of these places.

Camp sites at Greene Valley forest preserve I mapped.

Camp sites at Greene Valley forest preserve I mapped.

The next method is to find out which campgrounds are operated by the county forest preserves, which are usually well-documented on their respective websites. Then I will look at state parks in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, operated by states’ respective Departments of Natural Resources (DNR). Next I will look at national parks and finally commercial campgrounds.

The app will display campground information such as alcohol rules, if cabins or lodging is available, and how you can get there (which trails or train lines).

I’ve so far mapped the campgrounds in two ways, as nodes and as areas. At the Greene Valley forest preserve in DuPage County, for example, I’ve mapped the 11 individual camp sites (see map), but at Blackwell forest preserve in the same county, I’ve mapped the area as the camp site (see map).

Blackwell has over 50 sites in a discrete area and it’s more efficient to map them as a single node, while Greene Valley had far fewer sites but scattered over a couple areas.

Cross-posted to Web Map Academy.