[Talk-us] Arm chair mapping challenges

Tod Fitch tod at fitchdesign.com
Tue Aug 18 14:27:15 UTC 2015


I live a few miles from the new Apple campus that is currently under construction, so I see change sets for that area in my Who Did It RSS feed.

The site is fenced off and the satellite imagery available for OSM is out of date so I can’t say exactly what the status is other than some of the new “spaceship” building is starting to appear over the top of the fence.

Some other mapper has updated the area to remove the old buildings and streets and marked the area as under construction. All of that seems correct from what I’ve read in the paper and what little I can see on the ground.

But it means the area differs from the Tiger data for the area.

And now I am seeing multiple change sets from mappers I don’t recognize as local re-instating the now missing features. For example: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/366208964#map=15/37.3338/-122.0097

A number of the “fixes” have a mention of http://osmlab.github.io/to-fix/?error=tigerdelta-named#/task/tigerdelta in their change set comments.

I don’t have a good solution to this. But it does indicate to me that automated challenges can actually make the map worse in areas where local mappers have correctly accounted for recent changes. At the very least, their ought to be a big click through dialog box on any challenge stating that satellite imagery may be out of date and if there are newer local changes, especially ones marking the area as under construction that the individual task/challenge should not be implemented.

On the other hand, if you are adding a road back and it is going through a building=construction maybe you are clueless enough that a big click-through warning would not help.

Cheers,
Tod





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