OpenStreetMap
I am new to OSM. I stand on the cliff wondering to take the dive into editing. I spend much of the last 2 years editing Google Maps for the county I live in northern Minnesota. I am a 9-1-1 dispatcher for my county sheriff’s office. At least once a month, we would get calls from concerned citizens wondering if we would be able to find them in an emergency. I assured them that yes, we would find them as we use a map maintained by our GIS office which has every address in the county. The biggest complaint was GPS devices were barely accurate in my county. We readdressed and renamed roads at the same time the first TIGER surveys came through in 2000. Needless to say ever since, our roads were a jumbled mess of names and roads that did not exist. Sending law enforcement out to find hapless motorists who were hopelessly lost and off the cellphone network was nearly a monthly exercise for us. It was then I discovered that online maps could be edited by people who know the area. 2 years later, Google Maps is done, the complains have vanished and suddenly many websites start changing to this “new” thing called Open Street Map. (Obviously not new but just to me) I started studying the map and saw many flaws but in this case not just limited to my county but also all of northern Minnesota. Many of the mainline highways are not even tagged to the specifications set in the help and wikis. I reached out to a few editors and appreciate the advise but wow, where to begin. I see evidence of editing in the history but not to the roads so much. So I need to make a choice, limit myself to my home county or start with the mainline roads over the entire region and work down. Either way a big project.
Discussion
Comment from Stalfur on 8 October 2014 at 13:18
Welcome.
These are good questions. I’ve taken two different approaches in two different areas. In Iceland I first focused on my home town (pop 30.000) and got that up to scratch before taking a bigger picture (which was fairly good).
In Botswana I went to other way, I focused first on mainline roads and names of towns and villages before now delving into single areas.
In this case I would probably start by making sure the mainline roads are present and correctly named, then focus on a narrower area such as your home county.
Comment from CountryLoon on 8 October 2014 at 13:29
Thanks for the comment, I am leaning toward the big picture first simply because it has the most immediate benefit for the most people. Much of my area is being worked on for trails and features but the road network seems to be neglected, probably because it is a huge job. It is tough when I see some standards for tagging roads but little agreement. The types of road vary greatly and can be tough to pigeonhole. In Minnesota, a marked county road could be anything from a road built to Interstate/Motorway standards to nothing more than two dirt trails with grass in the middle. Hopefully I don’t step on anyone’s toes.
Comment from jumbanho on 8 October 2014 at 13:49
Don’t worry about stepping on toes, just make sure you accurately map your area. OSM is also a social effort, so continue reaching out to other mappers for help and clarification on your and their work.
One thing that would probably make your efforts much easier would be to recruit other folks in your area to help map. It can be hard to find them, but even if you find 2 or 3 other mappers, that reduces your effort many times.
Comment from Vincent de Phily on 8 October 2014 at 13:53
Welcome :)
It can be disheartening to redo a lot of work that you already did for Google, but on the other hand, your edits are much more likely to eventually reach stanavs (even if that likelyhood is still small) and varied usecases.
The inside-out vs outside-in question is a classic one with not definite answer, but since you already have GIS experience and are interested in the whole county, I suggest starting with the big picture before moving to smaller roads.
Comment from Sanderd17 on 8 October 2014 at 16:03
In the US, it’s known that OSM doesn’t have the best quality.
The US data dates mostly from a Tiger import. So you will see the same problems as with the old Tiger data. In retrospect, that Tiger import was a mistake. In places where no free data was available (like Germany or Great Britain), a community was formed that could handle and update the data.
While in places where data was imported, people were not so eager to edit, as the map already looked “good enough” on first sight.
That said, our data, as opposed to Google’s data, is freely available for any purpose (offline navigation devices, displaying on websites, …). So Vincent is right that OSM data has a bigger chance to end up in satnavs (in Germany, there are already multiple satnavs using only OSM data due to the very good quality).
So I hope you start editing, and start improving the map. There are just more mappers needed to fix those things and bring the data to the ultimate quality.
Comment from Richard on 8 October 2014 at 16:34
Would be great to have you along, and congratulations on your edits so far. Do post updates on what you’re doing on the diary - other people can help and offer advice. And you never know, if there are tiresome improvement jobs that can equally be done from the aerial imagery, you might be able to get remote assistance for your task.
Comment from robert on 8 October 2014 at 18:28
No harm in starting small.
Don’t worry too much about the “specifications” on the wiki - a lot of the time that stuff is wishful thinking by a bunch of anally retentive wikifiddlers.
Comment from CountryLoon on 8 October 2014 at 18:58
I have been very aware of the shortcomings of the TIGER project. My understanding is it was more of a proof of concept project than expected to be released to the public without more verification but the federal government expected the private sector to pick up where the government left off. I have talked over the year with reps from Navteq and Garmin and they admit they don’t have the resources to work much outside population centers and here we are.
As to sweating the details, well I do lean toward the anal retentive, lol. I also remember the first generation navigation devices that always took you on the shortest path possible and well, it was amusing at first to be told to exit the interstate at nearly every town but quickly became annoying. Road types are an important part of the database and take it from my job, someone who is lost quickly depends on their device a little too much and common sense goes out the door. It is a long night when a semi has to back up 3 miles down a single lane dirt road a GPS with a bad map told him to go down.
Comment from mvexel on 10 October 2014 at 19:59
Let me chime in with a warm welcome to you! Lots of great advice already here. Let me see what I can add. It is easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work to be done, so there is a lot to be said for starting small and bringing the areas you know best up to date first.
There are some tools out there that may be helpful, like the Battle Grid which points out areas where OSM is in poor shape compared to more recent (better quality) TIGER data. Also MapRoulette which gives you random tasks to help fix up the map around the US and beyond.
Also, you are invited to join a Virtual Mappy Hour sometime soon! Virtual Mappy Hours are online events where we talk about OpenStreetMap, answer questions, and welcome newcomers. You can join through Google+ Hangouts. We hold them every other week on Monday. Look at the OpenStreetMap US Google+ page for announcements. I hope to see you there sometime!
Finally, there is also a mailing list specifically for the U.S. OSM community. A great place to introduce yourself, ask questions, make suggestions, etc.
Comment from Hjart on 11 October 2014 at 12:30
Also please be aware that editing OSM isn’t nearly as cumbersome (once you’re fairly familiar with it of course) as editing using Google Mapmaker. A couple years I decided to test out Mapmaker and discovered that they wouldn’t even let me put in some cycleways and a few other features that I had put on OSM already and also that I would’nt ever be able to edit at more than roughly 1/10 the speed at which I was editing OSM (mind you though that I also then was an experienced JOSM user).
Good luck to you
Comment from CountryLoon on 11 October 2014 at 15:00
Thanks for the comments,
I have enjoyed these first few days working on the maps in my state. OSM seems very intuitive and easy to use. I like that the community watches the changes and allows them to go through with out the trust issues that plague Google Maps. I grew frustrated with Google that they would hold certain edits and allow others to go through without reason or worse I would make a large number of changes and an “editor” would follow up behind me and undo the changes in a small segment but could not justify it. Despite that, I continue to work on both platforms.
Comment from Stalfur on 14 October 2014 at 18:43
I looked at Google Map for my town recently to compare it to my summer long project of mapping it last year. There were some glaring errors there and I submitted some fixes (my old home was no longer at a street but a path for example) and a couple of them they let through (after several days) and others they ignored, saying some other mapper had a different opinion (juvenile names given to paths).
I’m not touching the Google stuff again.
Comment from FTA on 31 October 2014 at 02:48
I too switched to OSM a few years ago from GMM. Editing here is so much easier…especially if you download JOSM and edit on your computer. Better than having to wait for the browser to load every time you select a new node or way. I’d continue editing with what keeps you most interested. I bounce around between railroads, golf courses, roads, and random villages in Asia. I think your dispatcher experience will provide unique information and awareness of features in the area. I’m in the Wisconsin area and would be glad to help if you have questions/need advice. Just send me a message!
Comment from Warin61 on 10 December 2014 at 21:29
Welcome.
The advantages of OSM data being freely usable leads to there use for offline maps .. in GPSes, smartphones.. and they can be freely printed out for ‘conventional’ use… and people are using the data to make their own style of maps too. Much more is being done in a practical sense with OSM data than is done with Google.
What to edit… whatever you have local knowledge of is probably best to start with. No one remote form the location can map as well as a local. If you find something in the OSM data that you ‘know’ is not there .. don’t delete it, make a note on it .. if you really need to .. remove the other tags .. but include what you delete in the tags. When I first started I deleted something that I knew was not there… past it every day on the way to work .. not there … later I went to something 20 meters away .. and actually saw that it was really there … so I had to remap it!
What am I doing? There is a local intersection that I’m slowly adding data to, local to me so I know it well. And I see the mistakes non locals make there so I add stuff to help them. Other stuff local to me is good. Except some bicycle related stuff is I think incorrectly mapped, but I need to go there and see. I’m also considering a holiday in India.. so I looked at the OSM data there and found .. lots of roads not connected, missing roads, villages … main roads ‘coarsely’ mapped as fairly straight lines rather than the twists and turns they actually have. I cannot map things like hotels, ATMs etc as I’m not local… but I can map the other things thus any local can come along and add the things I cannot and not use their time to map the stuff I can. So ..I’d encourage a ‘new’ local to map the stuff you cannot get off a satellite image at is local to you. This way if you ‘ware out’ you will have contributed stuff that no armchair mapper could. But it is really up to you - where your interests are.
Good Luck.