Instead of creating an extensive report of the Ortigas-Mandaluyong Mapping Party like what I did with the Marikina Mapping Party, I decided to just show the actual fruits of our labor, namely before and after looks of the map. If you want a narrative, Ian Lopez has helpfully blogged about the event from his perspective.

The reason why we selected Ortigas Center and parts of Mandaluyong is because Ortigas Center is lacking in details and parts of Mandaluyong still don’t have roads. Compared to the Makati Central Business District, Ortigas Center was quite blank and this doesn’t befit the country’s second most important business district. As for parts of Mandaluyong, there was extensive cloud cover in Yahoo!’s satellite imagery so OpenStreetMappers couldn’t trace roads. Thus, GPS tracks needed to be collected for these areas.

Just like with other Mapping Parties, we “sliced the cake” and originally came up with five slices. But during the morning meet-up at Starbucks Metrowalk, we decided to divide slice #5 into two. The final six slices and the assigned people were:

• Northern Ortigas Center - me

• Southern Ortigas Center - Rally and Ian (with his mom)

• Metrowalk and Ortigas Home Depot - Marloue

• Greenfield and Pioneer - Jayzee (with his wife)

• Northwestern Highway Hills - Maning

• Northeast of Boni - Bart (and Rica)

Now for the goods! The maps below show how OpenStreetMap looked like (left side) before and (right side) after the Mapping Party in selected areas.

Yahoo! had the pre-Metrowalk imagery so this relatively new commercial area east of Ortigas Center was a blank canvas ripe for the picking. Now it looks at par with most maps of Metro Manila.

Aside from several buildings to the north near Robinsons Galleria, the portion of Ortigas Center north of Julia Vargas lacked building outlines. After the Mapping Party, that is now rectified. Who would’ve thought that this part of Ortigas Center had tons of parking lots?

Southern Ortigas Center had several buildings already so the trick is to complete them. In addition, the Shangri-La Complex had some loving and refining from its previous crude depiction on the map.

The area surrounding Pioneer is in the midst of many real estate constructions (such as SM’s Light Residences) and these were now properly added to the map.

Clouds thwarted the tracing efforts of OpenStreetMappers so some on-the-ground inspection with GPS loggers was in order. Now the road network in this part of Mandaluyong is looking pretty complete now.