Armchair mapping with Landsat imagery

In this post I want to show step by step how I extracted hydro power reservoirs and lakes in Laos from up-to-date Landsat imagery for further use in OpenStreetMap. The extraction is done straightforward with common GIS tools but without sophisticated and/or proprietary remote-sensing software.
As an example I take the Nam Leuk hydro power reservoir in Laos. This reservoir needs to be remapped, since the origin user declined the upcoming license change. Currently the reservoir is rather roughly generalized.

Two years of mapping in Laos

After more than two years of OpenStreetMapping in Laos I want to look back and give a short review. Two years ago the OpenStreetMap in Vientiane but also in whole Laos was quite empty, as I illustrated in a previous post.
I started mapping Vientiane downtown rather unsystematic till I met another mapper and we decided to initiate the probably first mapping party in Vientiane end of October 2009!

Save As SLD 0.3.0 released

When I developed the Save As SLD QGIS plugin some months ago, I did it for my own purpose to publish simple choropleth maps with GeoServer and I implemented solely renderers and styling options I needed (and a little bit more). That's the reason why this plugin still lacks a lot of features.

Vientiane downtown and Lonely Planet update

When I arrived in Vientiane in August 2009 the OpenStreetMap was quite empty, there were only some unconnected roads traced from Yahoo imagery and a few points of interest. It was my second or third weekend when I took my GPS, a pencil and a sketchbook and started mapping the downtown.

Find your way with openstreetmap.la

I'm really happy to announce the latest update on openstreetmap.la: Routing has been integrated to the main page.

As illustrated in a previous post I evaluated the capabilities of the Open Source Routing Machine amongst other routing engines. The speed and the web-oriented architecture of the Open Source Routing Machine convinced me to use it as a backend to implement routing on openstreetmap.la.

Rivers and lakes downloads available on openstreetmap.la

During my two-week trip through Laos I collected some tracks and points of interest, of course ;). Last week I started to add them to OpenStreetMap when I realized that there are still a lot of rivers missing. I traced (rather randomly) some parts of rivers from Landsat or where available Bing imagery.

Google Fusion Tables in QGIS

Since version 1.9 (currently still in trunk) OGR supports Google Fusion Tables. There are instructions online available that show how to upload Shapefiles to Google Fusion Tables using OGR e.g. a video from the Google I/O conference (starting at 26:30 with an introduction to GDAL/OGR).