[OSM-dev] Import a huge amount of GPS data

Serge Wroclawski emacsen at gmail.com
Thu May 23 16:08:56 UTC 2013


On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 8:48 AM, Jingmin Chen <jingmin.chen at epfl.ch> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I currently have access to 2 years, 20,000 taxi vehicles GPS trace (30sec
> interval) of a large city in China. The OSM data quality of that city is
> really bad.

> But uploading the raw GPS trace might have legal issues. Is it
> possible to process the data  to roads before I upload to OSM? Thank you
> very much for any suggestion.

As Martin and other have brought up, there are multiple issues about
this. With such a large (30 second) interval, you don't capture a lot
of information about traffic patterns or speed, but as you say, with
sufficient density, you would gain a lot of street centerline data,
which can be extremely useful in an area where we don't have much
data.

Since there are concerns about the data itself, may I'd like to
suggest an entirely different approach than using the GPX data as GPX
data, one that should achieve the same result.

Take the GPX data and render them simply as points on a map (a
slippymap). You could use something like TileMill and even a large
city would be fairly easy to do. Then, you don't have to worry about
stripping anonymizing the data. From there, people can make simple
traces in the same way they'd do from josm. The nice part in making
imagery is that then people could use that imagery from other tools
like Potlatch or iD very easily.

- Serge



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