GRB import low hanging fruit

The GRB import process currently seems focused on handling merge conflicts and adding as much metadata as possible. I think there are areas where this process is “perfect is the enemy of good”.
Consider a rural area with no buildings mapped. Automatically importing unambiguous data here would immediately provide 80% of the value for casual map consumers. With unambiguous data here I mean most building outlines, addresses, some metadata, everything that doesn’t hit corner cases.

How would this help casual users? For example, when I go for a bike ride, I can chose my route based on how many buildings there aren’t. Better map, better bike ride.

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An import in a greenfield (where there are no previous buildings) is easier to do and there are some tools for this. And yes, this has great value for addresses but it should not be a blind copy-paste (even though I sometimes do this as well).

However, we still have to do some validation, e.g. that roads and paths don’t intersect.

At last, doing an import will always be an armchair mapping endeavor.

Please, join the relevant chat to discuss this.

I get the sentiment, and I wouldn’t mind of someone were to just import all the buildings as building=yes. But that’s not really where most work goes to. Most work goes to dealing with special cases (like the “verdiepingen” in Flanders), fixing landuse and making sure the buildings don’t overlap exisiting features.
Also note that even a slow import on a greenfield is way faster (and more fun!) than updating an already mapped area. So the chance that someone will deal with the 1000s of special cases after you’ve introduced 100.000s of easy cases is very slim indeed. Seems easier and more productive to just do it right from the start.

All that said, I wish there were more automatically conflated OSM datasets around. For example, this project creates an OsmAnd map that completes all the addresses for a given area using open data.

Furthermore, you notice that people who are putting their first steps into the GRB Import tend to choose areas with no or a limited amount of buildings (e.g; @dentonny in the region of Zoutleeuw-Kortenaken-Glabbeek).

This of course is no argument to keep some areas “empty” but these gaps will be filled (more quickly than others). Providing statistics about the fact that a lot of buildings are still missing probably also triggers the community to adress the low hanging fruit without doing automatic imports.

Vroeger tekende ik de huizen bij AEDs niet met het idee dat er wel binnenkort een import zou zijn.
De laatste tijd doe ik dat wel.
Het is anders moeilijk iemand naar een huis te sturen dat niet op de kaart staat.
Indoor en positie zijn dan ook helemaal niet duidelijk.