Overdoing it with too much detail?

Hi all: I’m trying to understand a proper balance between making a database comprehensive, but without going overboard.

My “testbed” for learning Open Street Map is the condo complex where I live, and I’ve been adding all the details I can find, currently looking like:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/33.68247/-117.65185

I added all the individual parking spots, but it just looks terrible while rendered, with “P” all over the place; this makes me wonder if I’m overdoing it here. But I also understand that i shouldn’t worry too much about the renderer, these change.

Is this too much detail? How about if each individual space were marked? Do I need to take a chill pill?

Steve – trying to get the proper “vibe” for OSM

It actually looks pretty good to me.

However, if you are looking for places that might be more productive of your effort and useful to others, you might consider adding address information. U.S. address information is sorely lacking in OSM. That means that routing software needs to rely on other sources to determine where your end point(s) before using OSM data to compute the actual route.

And in California and much of the U.S. maxspeed tagging on roads is lacking too. Looking at the area you pointed to I see a number of streets missing speed information.

As OSM based routing gets better is it starting to use lane information to help on guidance and I see that lane information in your area is either missing or suspect (is Rue de Valore really one lane wide? It looks to be 4 lanes on the satellite image.).

This is helpful, thank you.

I understand that hyper-detailed parking space definitions are not widely useful, but I’m using my own apartment complex as a kind of sandbox to experiment with this stuff. I certainly won’t be doing this kind of detail anywhere else.

Thanks for the pointer about getting the street widths going: I’ll start looking into that as well, though it does look like I have some learning to do.

Steve

Marking parking spaces is useful for those who want to find a parking space, for example someone wants to check wherever there are parking spaces available near the destination.

Overall, consider that the storage is practically free, so there is nothing wrong with adding details that might be useful to someone. Keep up good work!

I have been working on a tool to show a great number of useful POIs (Points Of Interest) on the map.
Here you see the area that you have been working on:
http://openpoimap.org/?map=amenity&zoom=16&lat=33.68089&lon=-117.65663&layers=B00FFFFFFFTFFFFFFFFF

The tool is called OpenPoiMap and is located at openpoimap.org
You can also use it to check the area around you for missing shops, restaurants etc.
And also if there is something to fix:
http://openpoimap.org/?map=various&zoom=15&lat=33.67771&lon=-117.66249&layers=B00FFFFFFFFFTFFFFFF

From the tool you have the option to jump to various editors.
Read the wiki!