[OSM-talk] What's the policy on unsurveyed roads from imagery?

[John Smith]

2009/12/27 Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com>:
> I gather the convention is to mark any unsurveyed road which one has some
> information as simply "highway=road", on the basis that you know nothing
> else about it. But what about when the information comes from high quality
> imagery (like nearmap in australia)? I've been mapping these as
> "highway=residential" etc, although of course I don't know the name.

I tend to mark these as I think they should, if it looks like
residential then I mark it that way, I don't see much point in marking
it as a road unless you are unsure of what type of road it is and need
someone to check on the ground. I always try to tag the source
properly too, if I tag it as source=nearmap then it's obvious that I
didn't survey it.

> My question arises from CloudMade highlighting "highway=road" ways in their
> OSM downloads, as though that was the definitive way of indicating an
> incompletely surveyed road.

Same could be said for anything other than roads tagged as
source=survey, once you have roads mapped out from imagery you can use
the validator plugin in JOSM to display unnamed roads, you can do the
same with the maplint feature on the main OSM map page.

Any tools such as the one you point out cloudmade have produced isn't
gospel, just look at all the people that disagree with the "errors"
keep right claims to exist, when it's just a difference of how
something should be mapped and not an error at all.