[OSM-talk] QA tool for finding nameless highways that are armchair-fixable

[stevea]

Without wishing to "diss" (disparage) Lukas's tool (I haven't evaluated it), I would also urge caution here, for exactly the reasons DaveF outlines.  I'm also a partly-armchair mapper, but not (usually, if ever) using Python tools, rather knowing that my "armchair-ing" is going to be of high quality because I well-understand (and have many years of practice) with OSM's tenets of "on the ground verifiability" and such.  I'm also a "real world" mapper (where I "get out into the real world" and use a GPS and a notepad/pencil...), which I believe should be a prerequisite for being an armchair mapper:  that's how you learn and get good at knowing how to armchair-map with high quality and without guesswork that can (and usually does) lead to errors being entered.

Especially with going from "no name" to setting a name=* tag to "something" (authoritative), this can be a very ticklish undertaking, I've experienced the difficulty in doing this first-hand, and I usually "duck out" (end the endeavor) as "too likely to introduce specious errors into our map data."

High quality armchair mapping (which does not introduce errors) is not easy:  it takes practice, knowing what you are doing, likely some deeper knowledge of the geographic area, "how things are done (and/or mapped) around there" and probably something like "I know quite well how to map bike routes (train routes, landuse, forest boundaries..., or whatever you might be mapping)."  If you meet all of those "high bar" quality standards, AND you understand what Lukas' Python / pyosmium software does / will do, you might want to check it out and see if it can be a "power tool" for your armchair mapping.  I've set high-quality standards for myself (really, I wouldn't map in OSM if I did not), perhaps you should, too.  And then, and only then, maybe use power tools to help you, going slow at first, with caution and evaluating your own feedback from the map.

I'll be curious to hear feedback from this, too.  Thanks for your efforts, Lukas:  I genuinely hope they help our map!


> On Nov 27, 2022, at 3:43 PM, Dave F via talk <talk at openstreetmap.org> wrote:
> 
> Most roads don't have names.
> 
> Any comparison has to be done against an authoritative database or on ground surveying, for the area in which you're searching.
> 
> "where the name can be interpolated from neighbouring ways. This allows to detect and armchair-fix a (small) subset of these cases with high confidence. "
> 
> I have a "high confidence" interpolation, from an armchair or anywhere, will lead to inaccurate data being added to the OSM database.
> 
> Cheers
> DaveF
> 
> 
> On 27/11/2022 20:16, Lukas Toggenburger via talk wrote:
>> Hi all
>> 
>> As you might know, OSM data contains a lot of highway=* without name=*. Check your region using the following query:
>> 
>> https://overpass-turbo.eu/?Q=way%0A%20%20%5Bhighway%5D%5B!name%5D%0A%20%20(%7B%7Bbbox%7D%7D)%3B%0Aout%20body%3B%0A%3E%3B%0Aout%20skel%20qt%3B
>> 
>> I wrote a Python tool (using Sarah Hoffmann's pyosmium) at https://gitlab.com/ltog/ohni that is able to detect such highways in a planet (extract) file and report the ones, where the name can be interpolated from neighbouring ways. This allows to detect and armchair-fix a (small) subset of these cases with high confidence. The tool is tailored to minimize false-positives.
>> 
>> Please check it out and give feedback.
>> 
>> Best regards
>> 
>> Lukas
>> 
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