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Most cellphone GPS traces will pollute OSM

Posted by jidanni on 14 September 2021 in English.

Here we see that most of today’s cellphones’ GPS traces are “all over the parking lot,” thus will degrade the quality of OSM when making a map from them, https://medium.com/@importanttech/we-tested-mobile-gps-gnss-accuracy-and-found-some-surprising-results-b9ec35873e2e

But yes, you could say having a path on the map is better than no path.

See also https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0263224121001858 .

Discussion

Comment from andy mackey on 18 September 2021 at 20:43

I have seen a few very poor quality traces, it is good idea to inspect them before uploading to OSM. GPS Prune is a good open source ( no ads and free) tiny, java based PC app that will display a GPX over OSM . You can then decide if it will add anything useful to OSM. It also makes it easy to trim, or prune, any rouge points or private info in the trace. The time of each point can be geolocated and matched to a sound recording or a Jpeg, just set the time on the camera first ideally, although it is possible to adjust and correct afterwards. see https://activityworkshop.net/software/gpsprune/

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