For the last 3 years I have a daily postgis script running to identify highways in the Netherlands that could/should be combined. For various reasons these have never been combined or were split and later on got the same tags. For the past 3 years some mappers have started manualy combining these but the sheer number of ways to combine is so large that I am looking for a better (semi automated?) way to do this.
Why this script? In general in OSM data cleansing is not a top priority of mappers. And even if it was then it would be hard to do so because you had to manualy compare highway tags/relations. There are some advantages when these ways are combined/merged. Performance/smaller database is one but also searching highways in tools like nominatim would give you a lot less hits to pick from.
So what is the challenge? In this example there is a highway that is split somewhere in the middle. Both highways have the same tags and if they are part of a relation they also share the same relations.
Current workflow is to find these ways on a Map/WMS like this one and then load the ways in JOSM. Select the 2 ways and than press C to combine/merge them and so on but this is a lot of work.
I have a large list of highway_id’s that can be combined. Here is a subset of 100 pairs in overpass-turbo to give you an idea. overpass turbo
Does anyone have an idea to (semi) automate this proces?
One way would be to take those sets of ways, append the nodes in one way to the start/end of the other (whichever is appropriate), delete the way which was copied from, and upload.
It seems to me that loading /selecting ways in JOSM and the pressing C is eassier but still a lot of work with the number of ways to combine.
I am aware of this. I should have made this clear in the opening post but it is good that you mention this.
I know I could try maproulette but this still requires a lot of effort from other mappers which I think is a shame if it can be done in a better ((semi- ) automated) way.
Yes this is one of the many issues I had to solve in the script. If you want to look back more of these issues I suggest you read this thread but it will take you a lot of time In the map you will not find these situations.
In the