Data Improvements in South Africa

[awisemanapple]

Task Description

This task outlines work to improve the map data in South Africa. We plan to focus on improvements to the road network first, and later we may do some edits to other feature types if necessary, such as buildings, addresses, water, and land use and other related polygonal features. We will message the local community and get feedback and suggestions for this project.

Improvements that will be addressed include the following:

• Correcting road connectivity and alignment issues and adding missing roads
• Improving road classification consistency according to local and OSM guidelines
• Correcting coastline and water features
• Adding addresses
• Adding missing buildings and land use
• Other one-off fixes

Mapping Guidelines

The team will follow OSM and local policy, along with any other guidelines as appropriate.

For water and coastlines, the team will follow OSM coastline guidelines, waterways policy such as water and natural=water and local policy along with any other policy as appropriate.

Some coastlines are connected to administrative boundaries, in which case we will adjust both if appropriate.

Where we see them, we will remove the source=PGS tag, which was from an earlier coastline import that needs to be cleaned up. We received a message on the India coastlines project requesting this, and it is commonly done in other coastline improvement edits.

The team will use imagery and data sources below as needed. When in doubt, the team will use the existing tags and data which are used locally. The history in JOSM (ctrl-H) identifies what previous mappers added and their notes and/or explanations regarding changes made. This history can also show if a previous mapper has visited that area or has expert knowledge or sources.

We have also messaged talk-za and the OSM Forum for South Africa to get feedback and suggestions about the project.

Our team uses the hashtag #adt (for Apple Data Team) for our edits.

Area of Focus

Throughout the country.

Tools

The team will use JOSM for completing the task. JOSM has validation warnings for road networks and other possible issues that are important to prevent improper changes.

Sources

• Maxar/DigitalGlobe Standard/Premium
• Bing imagery
• Mapbox imagery
• ESRI imagery
• HOT task imagery, if any
• Mapillary
• OpenStreetCam
• Pic4Carto
• Telenav's MissingRoads plugin and ImproveOSM
• Strava and OSM GPS traces

The team will apply image offsets as needed.

Changeset Comments

The team will provide changeset comments that are in compliance with OSM changeset guidelines.

Error Detection

The team will check for errors visually and using JOSM validation warnings prior to committing the changeset.

In addition, the team will review its work in accordance with validation guidelines such as the OSM Wiki and LearnOSM validation guidelines

Things you can do

If you'd like to help, here are a few ideas:

• Add missing road names that you know. Here is a tool to identify them
• Fix issues using OSM Inspector
• Let us know in the comments if there are areas with new construction or other issues

Contributors

• Data Team

MapRoulette

We have also posted MapRoulette challenges related to the road network: https://maproulette.org/browse/projects/39168

For more information

Our community lead is Teddy Ahlvin and our editing leads are Jon Westlake and Erica Olson.
To get in touch with Teddy, you can email or contact him via OSM.

All of our leads can be reached via email.

OSM Wiki