[OSM-newbies] Neighborhood detail

[Steve Bennett]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 4:36 AM, Stephen Johnson <earthstephen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I thought it would be a good start in OSM to improve the mapping of my own
> neighborhood. I have worked on the road alighnmets, adding bridges etc. I
> also started adding addresses. I am pretty sure these are all good things to
> do. One thing I have started that I am not sure of is adding building
> outlines for all the houses for which that is possible based on the Bing
> Satellite images. I have looked around in some larger cities (not an
> extensive search though) and haven't seen any buildings outlined in
> residential neighborhood only in more commercial districts. Is there some
> reason I should not do this? Maybe it hasn't been done because it doesn't
> add much useful information but is labor intensive? It is a bit tedious but
> I figured if everyone just did their own neighborhood, large areas could be
> done. Any thoughts?

Hi Stephen,
  You'll find there are plenty of cities around the world that do have
every building mapped - especially say France and Germany.

A few suggestions to yield a useful map which is not misleading:
- start with the city centre, then major commercial or industrial
areas, leave residential areas last
- start with bigger or more prominent buildings, work down to minor buildings
- if you're going to map any houses in an area, map *every* house in
the area. (Don't single individual houses out)

I feel that building outlines are a bit of a special case, where a
little data can be almost worse than none. It's ok to trace a few
streets and leave others out - but it's weird, misleading, and perhaps
worse to map certain buildings and leave others out.

Steve