Talk:United Arab Emirates

General talk

Mordred, hello! I was going to tell you about OpenStreetMap, but it seems you beat me to it! I'd like to buy a GPS unit and start mapping soon... -Ali

Hey Ali ! I am now actively mapping in the UAE again, thanks to my new HTC PDA :-D You got a unit yet? -Mordred

Hi, i've just come back from an Open Street Map intro in Beirut. I am based in Dubai. I now intend to contribute to Open Street Map Dubai. Any advice? I've started with the Burj Dubai area. It would also be great to meet you to start a community or build on the existing one. -joumana

Default naming

Hi ! Are you going to use arabic language for the name section ? --Metehyi 15:46, 10 August 2007 (BST)

You should use name= for English or Arabic if only one of the names is known and if both names are used Arabic and English name:en= and name=ar --Skywave 17:53, 2 November 2007 CET

For the simple reason of more people being able to interpret the English names for the cities/areas/places in the UAE I suggest using the English names as the default names, name=Dubai. But still, both English and Arabic names should be entered in the city nodes giving the following output: name=Dubai, name:en=Dubai, name:ar=دبي --Tommy 11:27, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Highway types

I've added a guide to how to tag different roads in the UAE. This is a starting point, not a definitive answer, as anyone who lives here knows that there is anything but an official categorisation of highways here. csdf 08:35, 12 July 2011 (BST)

natural landscape, forestry, agricultural and other green areas

Hey everyone, I've been working in Dubai for the past couple weeks and added quite a lot of agricultural and other green areas and I have encountered a couple of problems doing so.

First of all there is no background available in the UAE, basically nothing is mapped, you can't tell which areas are sandy desert, which are gravel plains or solid mountains or costal areas like sakhbas. Should the background be mapped like it is the case for example in Israel? Personally I would appreciate this kind of distinction of the natural environment but I dont know what would be the right way to approach that task, so I would appreciate any help available.

Secondly I have a feeling that some of those landuse tags are not very suitable for desert areas, they seem to work well in Europe for example but they seem kind of unsuitable for the desert environment. There are lots of fenced areas in the desert that are used to keep camels and other animals, but they are not green areas like a meadow in europe is. They are just fenced fragments of the desert where fooder and water for these animals is provided, so meadow would be inappropriate as it is rendered green. On the other hand there is also a lot of farmland (not talking about orchards here) that are green all year round, usually used to grow grass and other weeds as animal fodder, which should be rendered as a green area, but not as a yellowish farmland.

Therefor I would like to propose the following uniform method for mapping agricultural and other green areas in the UAE

Fenced areas including a shelter and/or amenities for feeding animals like camels and goats should be tagged landuse=farmland and surface=sand, the tag landuse=animal_keeping is not rendered right now as it seems therefor I don't see a point in adding it

farmland that is green all year round should be tagged as landuse=meadow, farmland with a crop cycle should be landuse=farmland though to achieve the correct rendering results.

Date palm (and other) orchards can be mapped as landuse=orchard and trees=date_palms could be added, even though it doesn't have any effect on the rendering result

The UAE has quite an impressive forestry program and these afforestation areas can be found along highways and in desert areas, especially in Abu Dhabi, landuse=forest seems to be the right tag for these areas, even though these forest don't look like forest one would picture from other climatic areas.

natural=wood can be used for natural wooden areas (usually small groups of several trees, forming a somehow closed canopy)

plant nurseries could be mapped as landuse=orchard or landuse=meadow depending on what is being grown, the tag landuse=plant_nursery is not being mapped right now unfortunately

Any thoughts on these ideas?

It would be great to agree to a uniformal way of mapping desert greenery in the UAE to avoid further confusion and ease the process of mapping! --Almani (talk) 13:42, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Makani Addresses

Would like to discuss and agree tagging for adding Makani addresses to POIs in Dubai. Presently there is no example that I could find.

JOSM Arabic translation

Arabic is currently only #6 on our list of potential future JOSM translations despite the large number of countries speaking it. 2000 core strings must be translated for a new language to be added. We'd love to see the UAE community help to complete the translation so we could add this new language to JOSM. See JOSM wiki for details and Launchpad to translate more strings. --Don-vip (talk) 01:50, 12 May 2018 (UTC)

MapRoulette challenges for UAE

Hello,

I've posted a number of MapRoulette challenges for the road network in the UAE. MapRoulette is a tool that lets you go through potential issues one by one and either correct them or indicate they are not a problem. I wanted to let you know they are available in case others wanted to try fixing some of them — I also plan to go through some of them myself.

All the challenges are in this project, including things like overlapping roads, roads that aren't connected to other roads, roads that cross without a connection, and similar issues. https://maproulette.org/browse/projects/40685

In MapRoulette you can either pick a random task to fix or click on a specific one. If you want to do tasks around a certain location, such as somewhere you are familiar with, you can click on one from the map view, and then click Next task: Nearby when you finish it.

--Awiseman (talk) 23:48, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

MapRoulette challenges for UAE (21 July 2022)

Hello,

I've posted a couple of MapRoulette challenges in the UAE that I would like to share with you. These challenges can help you fix different types of data issues in The United Arab Emirates. All of them are grouped in a single Project.

The challenges in this project are including Impossible angle in a highway, Spiky buildings, multipolygon is a simple polygon, Tag area=yes on object without feature type, Not connected highway, Invalid Mini-Roundabout and Polygon has self intersection.

You can go through the challenges one task at a time, assess the data and correct quality errors where needed, feel free to try out these challenges.

Salim, TomTom 13:52, 21 July 2022 (GST)