[Talk-us] Proposed mechanical edit - New York building footprints

[Kevin Kenny]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 8:17 PM Kevin Kenny <kevin.b.kenny at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 18, 2022 at 11:21 PM Kevin Kenny <kevin.b.kenny at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> (See a more detailed project plan, including scripts developed and used
>> so far,
>> at https://github.com/kennykb/NYbuildings_repair)
>>
>> In the last week or so, I've discovered a somewhat distressing fact about
>> building footprints in New York State. Well over 100,000 of them were
>> created by OSM users 'NYbuildings' and 'AlexCleary', both of which are
>> identified as pseudonyms for 'mileuthi'. The process appears to have been
>> that they were transcribed from Microsoft's AI-generated building
>> footprints, obtainable from
>> https://cugir.library.cornell.edu/?f%5Bcugir_category_sm%5D%5B%5D=structure,
>> together with the Street and Address Map data developed for the E911 system
>> and obtainable from
>> https://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/inventories/details.cfm?DSID=921.
>>
>
> The fix-bot for this problem is getting close to be ready to roll.
>
> I've created a project page at
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mechanical_edits/ke9tv_NYbuildings_repair
> ,
> and uploaded a bunch of randomly-selected changesets that the bot would
> apply into
> https://github.com/kennykb/NYbuildings_repair/tree/main/sample_changesets
> .
>
> Consider this message to be a first request for peer review. If I don't
> hear any shouts of "NO!!!!" in the next week or so, I'll upload a few
> changesets, and post links to them here so that the end product can be
> reviewed.
>

Don't say I didn't warn you.  I've uploaded ten changesets after carefully
hand-scrubbing them.  The only potential issue that I found was that two
housenumbers appeared possibly to have been transposed. Since the two
establishments share a common, named, service way, it's entirely possible
that their house numbers run out of sequence with respect to the main
highway, which appears in the postal address, so this is not a definite
error.

I spotted a couple of misspelt street names in OSM that had arrived from
the TIGER import. Clearly a fix to building addresses won't change these.
I also spotted a block of `addr:place=*` tags that are both incorrect (the
houses in question are not in the named village) and out of keeping with US
practice.  Since the mechanical edit does nothing with `addr:place=*`, I
didn't consider that to be a problem with the edit.  I can fix these
separately under my own user name rather than under the mechanical edit
account.

Descriptions of the changesets appear as an update at the bottom of the
GitHub project page at https://github.com/kennykb/NYbuildings_repair.  You
can also see them under the mechanical edit user
'ke9tv_NYbuildings_repair'
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/ke9tv_NYbuildings_repair/history .

I'll put the project on hold for another week or so, and if I don't hear
anything adverse here or in changeset comments, I'll start moving forward
with the rest of the repair.
-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
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