I don’t remember whether I shared this before or elsewhere, but here’s some “food for thought” with respect to partial mapping.
Let’s say we have a situation on-the-ground like this:
To start, we only have the houses mapped:
With this data, a router can only make routes “as the crow flies” - not perfect, but functional and reasonably accurate:
Now, let’s say someone comes in and adds only these roads, which are in fact present on-the-ground, but the mapping is incomplete:
Our router’s output, now, is technically valid (it’s doing the best it can) but produces worse results than the no-street-mapping case we saw earlier:
Of course, were the roads fully mapped, we’d get the most-correct route:
So, the question is: Should the snake-like road mapping be deleted because its accurate-but-incomplete mapping results in worse routing?