[Talk-us] What to do about horrifically bad TIGER data

[Chris Lawrence]

The existing data in OSM (imported from TIGER) for Webb County, Texas
is really, really awful - if you want to see for yourself, visit
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=27.553&lon=-99.476&zoom=12&layers=B00FTF.
 Centerlines of streets are off by dozens of meters, bits and pieces
of streets are missing, etc. (And that ignores the fact that all three
borders - US, Texas, or Webb County - are misaligned with each other
and none of them is actually right.)

Ideally it seems to me the best solution would just be to blow away
the import and replace it with data from the TIGER Accuracy
Improvement Project, but that hasn't reached Webb County yet in the
public data.  The TIGER 2007 shapefiles seem to be somewhat better
than what's in OSM now, but still not as accurate as the existing
commercial coverage and possibly still offset from reality - I haven't
tried an overlay of the 2007 data with GPS tracks yet, but my guess is
that it's not much better aligned.

So the question is: should I (we?) just hold off on trying to fix
things until the AIP data is available, and then just blow away the
data and replace it?  I know the TIGER import was a "one-off" but I'd
imagine there are a lot of places like Webb County where nobody's
touched the local data yet and the AIP data will be a much better
baseline for future work (and also allow us to pull in the address
data for geocoding, municipal boundaries, water features, etc. which
didn't come in before).


Chris