At the weekend I visited the last street in West Lothian that wasn’t on OpenStreetMap. There are many quality control applications or websites where you can check for errors in the OpenStreetMap data. In the UK, ITO have a site where they use the open data from the Ordnance Survey to show the discrepancies. Usually these are because of new residential streets where new houses have been built. This is what it showed for my missing street.

The building work was not quite complete, but most of the houses were finished and occupied. One crucial item that has still to be installed is the sign to tell you the name of the street. As I walked around the street with my GPS, I noticed the postman was just starting his deliveries here. I asked him if it was “Plessey Terrace” and he confirmed that it was, admitting “it’s my first time here, too”.

It may take a few days for the ITO site to show my addition, but then it will be at 100% (well, at least for a while).

I have also been experimenting with Mapillary. It is a crowd-sourced version of Google’s Streetview and you can use the images for mapping, unlike Google’s which are copyright. I bought a windscreen mount for my iPhone so that I could use it for navigation, but it works well for capturing images (after I took a hacksaw to the corner that was blocking the camera). It was a bright sunny morning with a frost on the ground, so I made sure I was driving with the sun behind me and captured the new street here.

This looks like it could be a useful mapping tool in the future.