This project has been a success, and we are preparing to expand the effort to European countries, including Belgium. We’re sharing notice here to ensure that OSM community of Belgium has adequate notice, consistent with the Organised Editing Guidelines.
We also have our own road completion project based on government data so normally there shouldn’t be too many missing. But on the other hand we’re a very densely built country, especially in the north. So I’ll be curious if you will notice any difference with other countries!
I do have some questions already:
What are “on the ground test drivers” exactly?
How do you determine surface when there is no street-level imagery and no “on the ground test drivers” knowledge?
In the ticket you mention the US highway classification guidance, I sure hope you won’t be using that in Belgium, and that you will investigate the Belgian tagging conventions and train the mappers accordingly?
Hello, M_dgard! Thank you for your questions and comments.
By saying “on the ground test drivers” we mean the employees of our company who do test drives and who can drive along a specified route and provide useful information for mapping.
According to our announcement, we will be also using Mapbox telemetry data and GPS traces in cases when there is limited evidence. If the information from the telemetry is not enough and there is no other evidence (no street-level imagery, no “on the ground test drivers” knowledge), we will avoid mapping such areas unless evidence appears.
Before starting to map missing roads in Belgium (as well as other European countries), we will investigate the appropriate tagging and provide the information to our mappers. Thank you for the notice!
We will share the results of our Mapping activity in the mapping repository.
