[OSM-newbies] gps noise in osm database

[Andre Engels]

On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 11:57 AM, Jonathan Bennett
<openstreetmap at jonno.cix.co.uk> wrote:
> On 03/03/2010 07:52, Jonas Stein wrote:
>> On some places are clouds of gps points. (recording reciever indoors)
>> These clouds and very bad track data make good tracks invisible.
>
> If want to see only your own tracks, press Shift+G in Potlatch, or load
> the files from a local disk in Merkaartor or JOSM. That way you won't
> see the "noisy" tracks.
>
>> Are there plans to tidy up?
>
> No. GPS traces are just evidence, or a guide, and shouldn't be
> interpreted literally. If they look messy, it's OK, since they're only
> used for tracing. The amount of work needed to clean up the traces would
> be massive (it would need to be done by hand), and we'd gain very little
> -- it doesn't generally affect the accuracy of mapping.
>
> Some people do clean up their own traces before uploading them, but that
> is based on their personal knowledge of which bits of the track are
> accurate, and which aren't. It's not something another mapper could do
> easily.

I think the tidying up that Jonas means is not tidying up of traces,
but tidying up of trace collections. That is, the possibility to not
show _all_ traces in an area, but only those that one is interested
in. I think that would be an excellent addition. Best would be to have
a list of all traces, on which one could select which ones to include
and which ones not, but it would also be a great improvement to be
able to only see traces from a certain time frame.



-- 
André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com