[OSM-talk] dangers of automatically creating ways from tracklogs

[Simon Hewison]

This morning, I took at look at some of the road segments in my local 
area, and found that someone had created notes, segments and a very very 
long way, without reference to what was in that area already.

The way is named "24-DEC-05", id 30914, and runs from central London up 
the A41, then onto the M1, M6 to a place near Lancaster

There's then a return path with a way ID=30915, name of "28-DEC-05", 
terminating somewhere near Llanfairfechan on the North Wales coast.

The nodes and segments are quite coarse, and cut many corners from the 
actual roads that area already down that it follows.

If nobody objects, I shall knock up a script to remove the way, all the 
segments within that way with no labels, and all the nodes within that 
way that have no useful labels on them.

There is just a small area near Lancaster that appears to be brand new 
segments, and some of the track through Wales is new territory.

It was all created_by=JOSM.

We probably could do with some sort of process to 'weed' or 'thin' such 
tracks that are following very close to other known roads and to adjust 
the defined way to use segments on the adjacent roads. This would 
especially be useful after the TIGER import has happened in the USA.

-- 
Simon Hewison