Hello All.
I am a newcomer to OpenStreetMap but have been busily updating the map of my local area. There is a large mobile home park on the outskirts of the village and half of it has been beautifully mapped, presumably automatically from an aerial picture. The other half is completely blank on the map.
How often do these automatic updates happen? Can I request that one gets done of a specific area?
Thanks!
Hi, welcome to OpenStreetMap.
If you link to the area, people might be able to give you more specific details about whether there was really any automated mapping (by looking at the change history of the relevant objects). It’s possible that there was no automation and somebody carefully traced the aerial images.
You may also be able to get an idea yourself by using the Query tool on the main website, choosing one of the objects you are interested in, and clicking through to the history.
There is no global process of automatically importing data in OSM. Some local areas may have an import process, if there is suitably licensed official data available. Sometimes that is a one-time process, other times there may be a way of updating the data (but you may be expected to follow the import process yourself if you want to update something - the people doing the importing are likely to be volunteer mappers like yourself). But again, it’s hard to say if that is relevant without knowing your locality.
The area I am talking about is at 50.731129, -1.611484. I can’t find anything in the history.
I assume we are talking about Shorefield Country Park:
I suppose you are mainly referring to the mapping of buildings. Picking a building at random, we can see from the history that it was mapped in November 2024, using AI-generated building footprints from Microsoft:
Clicking on the Changeset, we can see that this was part of a very large changeset:
Note this wouldn’t be fully automated, the mapper would, at least in principle, have had to confirm the suggested buildings generated by AI.
There is nothing specific to mobile home parks here, the data set is for buildings generally and they have been mapped as generic building=yes.
There is some information about this source of data on the wiki, but it is at a global level. I don’t know if there is any UK-specific documentation.
I’m not familiar with mapping in the UK generally, and especially not with how Microsoft AI footprints are used in the UK, so that’s probably about as far as I can help.
Hi Alan
That’s v helpful. Thanks.
J
And this is not a caravan_site.
mobile homes are not caravans.