Road network improvements in Malaysia

Hello, this is Andrew again from the Apple Maps team. My team is interested in doing some work on the road network in Malaysia on OpenStreetMap, things like adding missing roads, making sure roads connect properly, fixing incorrect alignments, ensuring road classifications are consistent, and other similar issues. We may also do some improvements to other data such as coastlines, water, and others if we find issues, but the main focus to start is roads.

Are there places you know of that need improvement or types of problems you see frequently? Also I saw these guidelines about road classifications, are they the most recent classifications used by the community, or are there any others we should be aware of? https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Malaysian_Roads_Tagging. We are also aware of the other organized projects in the area.

We have a Github page here about the project: https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/issues/150

Please let me know if you have any suggestions or feedback.

Thank you,
Andrew
Apple, Inc.

Quite a few places probably gonna need a highway reclassification (downgrade) since many used primary as the tag. Local mappers have the tendency to equate primary as the busy/big road where they live instead of following the intent of of the classification. Happens even in big cities such as Shah Alam which have a lot of primary classifications. However, nobody has the courage (yet!) to correct them, in addition to the large area involved.

Wish you all the best.

Take care of special settlements/neighborhoods which are surrounded by a wall: often there seem to be many connections to nearby roads, but actually there’s a single entrance only.

Thanks both, this is really helpful feedback.

Hi all, wanted to update that we are planning on getting started shortly. If you have any other suggestions or feedback let me know. I also saw the HOT Indonesia project, that’s exciting. Thanks.

Hello all,

This is Andrew again with Apple. In addition to the road network improvements I messaged about before, we are planning to work on some limited data corrections and improvements to OSM in Malaysia around coastal and water features and land use and land cover polygons, such as parks, university and hospital campuses, airports and similar features.

For example, sometimes coastlines and national parks are missing a correct tag, or are digitized inaccurately (maybe due to old low resolution imagery). We will make sure to follow the appropriate OSM and local guidelines. We have been doing a similar project around India, Africa and in other regions for some time.

I wanted to get your feedback and see if you had any suggestions or data resources we could use.

There’s more information on our Github page: https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/issues/150

Also, thanks to those who contributed to the MapRoulette challenges I posted earlier! I have posted them all here: https://maproulette.org/browse/projects/39169

Thank you,

Andrew

Any update regarding this ?

Hi angys, we have not started yet, and I was hoping to get some feedback or suggestions from the forum.

1 Like

I am totally agree with this, most of the editors do not touch for landuse, so it is indeed some good acts to add/refine landuse e.g. for forest.

1 Like

Maybe your team can try to do some test run, buildings around Jenjarom are totally messy.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/4881064921

Hi everyone, I’m Mike from the Apple team, I work with Andrew who posted earlier. Our team is going to continue some improvements to the road network in major cities around Malaysia, doing things like adding missing roads, fixing routing and connectivity problems, and adding barriers and access restrictions based on ground-level imagery and signs. I wanted to see if you had any suggestions such as good imagery to use. As always we follow the community’s highway classification system and will ask if we have any major doubts.

Hi!

Personally I think this a bit controversial, from experience. If Apple Data Team have access to an almost cloud-free imagery (or any fresher ones), to be safe, try to map these “missing roads” slightly on the lower classification than (the remote mapper’s) perception. However, feel free to open another thread in this forum to discuss likely cases.

In addition, I think Maxar Premium Imagery is more likely to be the freshest available imagery across the country. Some are (at the time of writing) from March 2021. It doesn’t hurt to compare it with other (maybe, stale) imageries (though likely these would be the exactly identical with Maxar Premium Imagery).

Please, simply inform us in this forum!