I am attempting to create a visualization of about two dozen villages in Sierra Leone. I’m finding a lot of tutorials on how to add data to the map, but none on how to create a map myself, for a report I’m creating.
The villages are across three districts in Sierra Leone. I would like to highlight the districts, so that they each appear a different color on the final map. Ideally, the villages would then show up as dots, each labeled with its name.
About half of the villages do not appear to be on OSM right now (though this might be a spelling issue that I will need to confirm), so I also may need to add data.
I am brand new at OSM, any suggestions on how to do this?
Unfortunately it looks likely that you’ll run into some data deficiency issues.
Although all provinces in Sierra Leone are mapped, lower administrative areas are not, and some of these have a single mapped village. I suspect that many areas are well mapped in terms of buildings and built-up areas because such information was important during the Ebola epidemic, but many of these are not named.
If villages are not named and you are able to name them this would benefit everyone.
@Mateusz_Konieczny’s suggestion of Umap is probably a reasonable place to start. Specific data can be extracted from OSM (using the Overpass tool, see linked query above) and added as layers to Umap. This is suitable for web display, but for a report you may need different output. The same data can be mainpulated in something like QGIS to that end, but it is a longer learning curve. So certainly invest time in extracting data using Overpass in the first instance as this is a common building block (there are some good tutorials and examples in various places to help).