Road network improvements

Hello,

My name is Andrew Wiseman, I work for Apple on the maps team. My team is interested in doing some work on the road network in Macedonia on OpenStreetMap, things like adding missing roads, making sure roads connect properly, fixing incorrect alignments with GPS traces, ensuring road classifications are consistent, and other similar issues.

Are there places you know of that need improvement or types of problems you see frequently? And are there any imagery sources you’d recommend, any specific highway classification guidelines you recommend, or anything else that might help? I’ve seen https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mk:WikiProject_Macedonia/Macedonian_roads_tagging and https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Macedonia and wanted to see if those are commonly used or if there are other suggestions you have.

We have a Github page here about the project: https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/issues/138

Thank you,

Andrew

Apple, Inc.

Hi Andrew,

welcome. Nice to see some signs of life in the Openstreetmap Forum of Macedonia.

Whenever I map Macedonia I use JOSM with the Bing imagery. It has a fair amount of details on many regions (I saw you listed it already on Github), but in same cases it might need some re-alignment.

Though it’s not my mapping focus, I have never come across any main road/highway that was not already mapped or wihtout a reference code/name. I have used openstreetmap data to go around in Macedonia in the past and I also have not faced any major problem. Mainly what I see missing or without names are residential/secondary roads (plenty of them). I don’t know any other wikis related to the mapping of roads, but other users might give you more accurate info…

The cadastre of Macedonia (http://www.katastar.gov.mk) has online information that could be very useful to openstreetmaps, e.g.: parcels definition, more detailed imagery, street names, addresses, etc. (https://ossp.katastar.gov.mk/OSSP/) I have asked them a couple of years ago if they were interested in supporting the openstreetmap projects, but they answered “the Agency still does not have a regulation that regulates Open data policy”. Maybe we can send a request again, if it comes from Apple it might have a different effect.

Cheers,
Javier

Hello Javier,

Thanks for this information, it’s really helpful! That’s good to know about those data sources too, we’ll look into them.

Thank you,

Andrew

Hello all,

This is Andrew again with Apple. In addition to the road network improvements I messaged about before, we are planning to work on some limited data corrections and improvements to OSM in North Macedonia around coastal and water features and land use and land cover polygons, such as parks, university and hospital campuses, airports and similar features.

For example, sometimes coastlines and national parks are missing a correct tag, or are digitized inaccurately (maybe due to old low resolution imagery). We will make sure to follow the appropriate OSM and local guidelines. We have been doing a similar project around Africa and in other regions for some time.

I wanted to get your feedback and see if you had any suggestions or data resources we could use.

Also, thanks to those who contributed to the MapRoulette challenges I posted earlier! I have posted them all here: https://maproulette.org/browse/projects/40680

There’s more information on our Github page: https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/issues/138

Thank you,

Andrew