OpenStreetMap
When writing this I am on the airport waiting to board my flight to Buenos Aires where I will take the Boquebus to Uruguay, where a job awaits me in Nueva Palmira. The town of Nueva Palmira have no POIs mapped as far as I could see, so there will for sure be added a hotel and maybe some restaurants, banks, and whatever I manages during my off hours. I still do not know for how long I will stay there.
I have during the last couple of weeks been testing routing integrity in OSM, mainly in Brazil, with both short distance routing and long distance routing.
I download the maps from Garmin.Openstreetmap.Nl, and install them into my BaseCamp for Mac.
Except for a few cities that are notoriously difficult to route, short distance routing goes easily, while long distance routings was somewhat trickier. After moving around with the routing modes I created 4 different modes I use. Shortest and Fastest for short distance routing, and No Toll and OSM Test for long distance.
After testing with versions 01-10-2014 and 30-10-2014 I had serious problems getting out of Belo Horizonte/MG in directions east and northeast, all routing from BH to state capitals between (and including) Vitoria and Fortaleza went via Rio de Janeiro (actually Magé/RJ). Just now got the latest map downloaded (03-12-2014) and it seems like BH have been fixed, though I am getting a few other errors. It is too early to say yet if that is based on bad data or something else.
Discussion
Comment from joost schouppe on 8 December 2014 at 21:31
I’ve been navigating for 25000km through South America, using Osmand. In general, quality is definitely good enough, though making notes of all the errors made me a top 50 note maker worldwide :)
Comment from Skippern on 8 December 2014 at 21:40
At least I noticed that from 30-10-2014 to 03-12-2014 some critical routing errors around Belo Horizonte have been fixed, though it seems like we have a few other instead. Route testing like I do is a very useful addition to #osmose and other QA tools, but often might require on the ground checking.
Notes would work great if only people learn to give enough information. I have seen many notes of type “There is an error here”, that doesn’t help much, not even if you go to the place to fix it. How would you know if you have fixed what he saw?
Also bugs from #osmose and notes are easy to trace to a location and see if you can do something with. Routing bugs, specially on long routes is harder to find because the detour might completely avoid the problematic area.