OpenStreetMap

Hi! Thanks for your work. However, there has some suspicion been aroused because of the following issues:

1. Very unusual ways of tagging. May I ask why you didn’t stick to the accepted keys given in the wiki? For instance, it’s ele=*, not Ground_Elv=*. This will make any processing of your data somewhat difficult.

2. Where did you get the information from? In the changeset comment, you declared "knowledge". It’s a bit hard to believe you know all dimensions of all those buildings to 10 nanometers of accuracy (which is pointless anyway).

May I kindly ask you to rework your changes according to OSM standards, so your work is really useful for the community? Thanks.

--ks

Good morning,

Thank you for reaching out to me about my prior work. As a basis, I am the Program Manager at the Center for Interdisciplinary Geospatial Information Technologies at Delta State University in Cleveland, MS - the area I am working on.

1. I have not personally tagged anything with elevation data in my contributions, and I looked for those specified keys in the data I have been working on but I could not find "Ground_Elv." I will continue looking and I will correct it as I wish to follow the accepted keys as outlined in the OSM standards.

2. The data for the building footprints was digitized from LAS files in ArcGIS here at the Center with the purpose of uploading to OSM. I know they are not completely perfect for a few buildings, but I plan on correcting that. Overall, importing the footprints layer drastically saved me time and effort in individually digitizing all the building footprints around Cleveland, MS.

I will continue to strive to maintain OSM standards, and I expected something would come up afoul after I uploaded that data even though I committed a lot of effort in reviewing the data prior to uploading it to the OSM server.

If you have any further issues, I will be glad to assist as I plan on working on the Cleveland, MS area extensively with the hopes of keeping it within the OSM standards.

Thank you and have a great day!

-Chris

Hi Chris,

I have had a look at your import and I am pleasantly surprised. From time to time a building import in the US gets discussed at the German OpenStreetMap Forum. There is also a discussion about this import (in German). https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=57218 I don't expect you to participate there (and I don't expect that you read it because it is in German). Imports which get discussed there are usually of low quality: too many nodes per building, wrong tagging, unclear license status, huge changesets, no community involvement etc.

I am happy that your did not just bulk-import a shapefile of the city government (the usual way building imports work). You are also editing other features like landuse. That's great.

Unfortunately, the tagging is not the only problem of this changeset. There are more.

1. Data you want to import must be corrected before you upload it to OpenStreetMap, not afterwards.

2. Buildings in OSM should be represent buildings which in exist in reality. This building and its surrounding buildings don't. https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/465051012#map=19/33.73868/-90.74696

3. Buildings should be rectangular if they are rectangular in reality. https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/471264469#map=19/33.74659/-90.73032

4. Buildings should share nodes if they are terraced. Bing imagery looks as if this building is terraced. https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/471264469#map=19/33.74659/-90.73032

5. If multiple people map together, every user should use his/her own OSM account. We are a community project and might have the need to ask questions regarding the data. (If you are a group with a leader, e.g. a university course or a group of employees, we would also like to know who is responsible for their work)

6. If available, additional sources (license must be compatible) should be use to verify. Bing is a great resource in Cleveland to check the geometry of buildings.

Unfortunately, the legal status of the LiDaR data is unknown. I neither know who the data owner is nor I know if you have the permission to upload the digitized features to OpenStreetMap. The legal status of a source is something which you will be asked in an import discussion.

It wasn't easy to decide wether I should revert this changeset or not because it is a bit better than all those other building import attempts all over the US. At the end, I decided to revert it because imports have a large impact due to their size and history teaches us that bad imports usually do not get repaired within a reasonable time.

You will receive notifications via email (and changeset comment) after the revert has been finished. Due to the size of this changeset, it might take about an hour or two.

Best regards

Michael

@everyone else: I also commented on https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/45784922 which contains a link to the Import Guidelines.

This changeset has been reverted fully or in part by changesets 45796297, 45793826, 45795852, 45794620, 45795178 where the changeset comment is: Revert import of buildings traced from LAS files (chageset 45727520). See changeset discussion for more information.