[Talk-ca] Hiking trails - Is bad data better than no data?

Darryl Shpak darryl at shpak.ca
Mon Jul 26 03:57:09 BST 2010


Hey all,

A quick question here, since I'm somewhat out-of-touch with OSM best 
practices right now. Last week I hiked a couple of trails in a local 
provincial park, and collected traces with intent to map them. However, 
I know the data is of questionable quality...on the first trail, I 
walked one segment twice and there's a significant disparity between the 
two gps tracks, and on the second trail, my GPS was reporting 20-30m 
position error at times.

Neither of these trails existed in OSM at all (no GPS tracks, no ways). 
I've uploaded my GPS traces and I'm mapping my trails on the assumption 
that an inaccurate trace is better than no data at all, but wanted to 
check with the wider community to see what the general consensus was on 
this. Is there anything special I should tag the trace or way with to 
indicate that I know the tracks are a little flaky?

Sample trail:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=49.69252&lon=-95.33649&zoom=16&layers=M

- Darryl





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