[talk-au] BP service station import

[El Segundo Can't win]

About 12-18 months ago  created a petrol station layer for work (for one state), starting with many of these BP, Shell datasets amongst others, as well as white pages data. The spatial accuracy was in many cases shocking, often being kilometres out. I think the worst was 30km. I aimed to get down to parcel level accuracy, and it took a long time, and I had a resources OSM can't use, such as the Geocoded National Address File (GNAF) and Google aerials and Streetview.

I was shocked that these large corporations didn't spend the money (not much in the scheme of things) to provide accurate datasets to the public. I got in touch with the provider who did the geocoding for BP, and fed my corrections back to them and with any luck they are incorporated. (Ha!)


The provider knew the geocoding was poor, partly because BP wouldn't spend the money to do it right, but even when they had street number and name, the licence for the GNAF wouldn't allow them to use it for geocoding in this instance. I forget why, it had been a recent change in the licence conditions.

In any case I endorse leaving this until after the licence change.



________________________________
 From: Nick Hocking <nick.hocking at gmail.com>
To: talk-au at openstreetmap.org 
Sent: Tuesday, 17 January 2012 11:09 AM
Subject: Re: [talk-au] BP service station import
 

My thoughts on petrol stations imports.
The first import had some really dodgy data. The first one I checked,
in my home town, was so far off from the actual position that you would
have run out of petrol just trying to find it.

What I'd really like to see is BP, Caltex, Shell etc take some
responsibility for their own data and manually check it and put in into
OSM themselves. This way they can keep it up to date and put in all the 
information that they feel may give them a competitive advantage over the others.
In turn they would probably request the station owners/operators to 
keep the OSM data up to date for them. This would be ideal.
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