What has already been done?

Newbie here…

Map Making Overview Wiki topic links to the main map to “see what’s already done around your area.” When I look at Raleigh, North Carolina in the US, I see a complete set of streets rendered like GMaps or Yahoo Maps, but some streets look like someone dragged a highlighter marker over them. It is not at all clear to me what has already been done and what remains to be mapped.

Judging by the irregular line jogs, the “highlighted” streets look like overlays generated from GPS data. Does that mean that OSM needs GPS data for streets that look like they’ve been rendered by GMaps or Yahoo Maps? Could someone clue me in?

[Edit] Saw on the Wiki that what I referred to as “GMaps or Yahoo Maps rendered data” is actually import of the US Census TIGER data. My question still stands.

-stopgap

P.S.: Apologies if this is a repost. I couldn’t find this info using search.

The highlighed streets and POIs are areas which aren’t available in our mapping style database, this is an error in the map data or in the openstreetmap mapping style database… Use you local knowledge to control data and add footpaths and cycleways, it’s very hard to see that data is missing until you try to add your own data. So try to controll the area were you live.

You are in the US, and the imported Tiger isn’t that accurate, so you basically should go around all streets and controll that they are ok. But then again I have no idea how that works, perhaps someone form the US can answer more about that.

What you are calling highlighted streets appearse to be two different ways in the database for the same road. It looks like some one was doing work to add this area to OpenStreetMaps before the Tiger import was done for this area. Since it was not feasable to remove streets from the Tiger data that have all ready been created in OpenStreetMaps before the import, in some areas of the US we ended up with some duplicate data. Take for example Varsity Drive in the area you linked to. if you zoom in closely with the potlatch editor online, you can select the two different collored lines since they are two different ways laying on top of each other. it looks like some one created a way and Tagged it as highway = secondary. Than the Tiger import created another way for Varsity Drive and tagged it highway = residential. The residential tagged way gets rendered as a white colored road and the secondary tagged way gets rendered as an orange colored road. This is why it kind of looks like Varsity Drive is highlighted. It also looks like some GPS traces have been uploaded for this area. You can view the gps traces with the potlatch editor online by pressing the g key to show the gps traces for the area you are viewing. The thing to for this area would be to determine which ways to keep when there are duplicates. Read up on the use of proper taging and tag the ways with the proper highway tags. Make sure things are in the right place. I have found in most places I have looked the Tiger data contains almost all the streets for an area. I have only had to add ways for very new streets. The Tiger data does require a lot of cleanup effort.

John

emj, John, thanks for you responses!

I am trying to figure out how to contribute in my local area. Can anyone point out a priority for this area?

There are only two ways I can think of contributing:

1: Seems like street mapping is the primary activity of other parts of the world, but my area seems to be well covered by TIGER data. John mentioned that TIGER data needs a lot of cleanup… What kind of cleanup?

2: There are a lot of parks and trails here. I would be glad to map and add trails to OSM.

What else?

BTW, should I move this thread to the US forum?

  • Connect unconected waysegments like here
  • Check if the classification of the roads is correct