New MapRoulette Challenge: United Kingdom - Missing Buildings

[pzachee]

Hi everyone,

I’m Priscilla (OSM username: pzachee) from TomTom’s OSM team, and I’d like to share a new MapRoulette challenge: MapRoulette - 215 tasks.

This challenge highlights locations where buildings may be missing from OSM and where local knowledge and ground-truth confirmation would be valuable to help determine whether buildings actually exist at the suggested location. Sources and imagery could be conflicting so additional verification would be valuable.

Anyone who is interested in participating, or simply having a look and sharing feedback, is very welcome.

You’ll find further instructions within the challenge description and the task instructions.

This project is part of our organised editing activities documented under the Wiki and our Github page.

Thanks,

Priscilla - TomTom

[LordGarySugar]

Hi,

Would it be possible to ensure that UK-specific guidance is present on the maproulette page? I assume that this task will be completed by mappers of different nationalities, so they may not be familiar with UK common practice. The two key bits of information that I think should be on there are A) To use the OSMUK Cadastral Parcels overlay which highlights property boundaries & helps align imagery and B) To make sure to split semidetached and terraced houses according to their property boundaries. There was a previous maproulette challenge to map buildings in Scotland that did not provide this advice and resulted in a lot of incorrect buildings being mapped.

Thank you for considering this.

[ceirios]

Agreed, it’s important to focus on quality over quantity here, as explained in this thread about the use of Microsoft’s AI buildings.

Adding good quality buildings would go a long way for sure.

Poor quality imports of microsoft AI buildings

Hello OSM UK community, I am writing this post to express my concern about the current additions of microsoft/BuildingFootprints data to OSM, as well as the large amount of these buildings already present in the database. These buildings, particularly unsplit (blobbed) semidetached houses and terraced houses cause significant problems for other editors trying to improve the map, especially StreetComplete users, while only offering an illusion of quality building coverage. According to taginfo,…

[Wynndale]

Another point: at least in southwest London ESRI imagery is the most up to date.

[pzachee]

Thanks everyone for the helpful feedback, I completely agree that highlighting UK-specific mapping practices more clearly is important for achieving consistent, high-quality edits.

I’ve now updated both the challenge description and the task instructions to incorporate the suggestions raised here.

Many thanks for taking the time to review the challenge and share your expertise. If there are any other improvements that would be helpful, I’m all ears and happy to continue refining the challenge.