[Talk-us] Streaming JOSM -- suggestions?

[stevea]

Bob, thank you for asking.

Good entry points for the history and what to do with TIGER data are https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/TIGER and https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/TIGER_fixup (respectively).  One of the more important things you CAN do is that if you truly do "fix up" TIGER data to about as good as it can be today (given local knowledge — best — or aerial / satellite data like Esri or Bing) is to remove the tiger_reviewed=no tag.  As the latter wiki says, "the practice to remove this tag varies" but I believe you should feel confident removing it when you are personally proud of the resultant data in OSM being truly reflective of what is in reality as you upload the changeset containing it.  And, it isn't simply "alignment" being accurate, all of the tags on that datum should be snappy, modern and correct, too.  It's not hard, and can even be fun with some practice.

There used to be some excellent tools for visualizing areas where TIGER Review is needed, unfortunately, these are either old, fully deprecated or replaced by less-than-as-useful tools (imo).  It may be that Overpass Turbo (OT) queries suit you, I use them in my large (data, geographically) state of California on TIGER rail data, and the results (while somewhat large) are not overwhelming, either to browsers, editors (like JOSM) where you might edit them (or subsets of them) or humans.  However, for highway=* data, especially in a large (data, geographically) state where little TIGER Review has already completed, you may very well find OT does get overwhelmed.  Try the query I (and others) use for California/Railroads:

http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/PSt

noting that it is easy to change the geocodeArea to your state and "way[railway]" to something like "way[highway=tertiary]"

Of course, you are asking the OT server to digest large amounts of data as you do so, be prepared to (first) increase the timeout value (try one-minute-at-a-time bump-ups, from 180 to 240, from 240 to 300...) and (second) you might need to decrease the geocodeArea to a (unique) county, rather than a whole state-at-a-time.  Good luck, have fun, share with your OSM friends how this can be a fun activity in your local area and let's slay the TIGER dragon!

SteveA