TIGER data quality

This overpass query works to find all the untouched tiger imports. In areas that have not seen much improvements this works.

// gather all Dave Hansen TIGER import edits in an area
[out:json][timeout:25];
// gather results
(
  way(user:"DaveHansenTiger")({{bbox}});
);
out body;
>;
out skel qt;
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Seems as if MS has released new ‘road detections’ GitHub - microsoft/RoadDetections: Road detections from Microsoft Maps aerial imagery this would be completly unremarkable, except that they found ~800’000km of ‘missing’ roads in the US*. Now while there is likely to be lots of ‘not actually a road’ in that data, it still would indicate that they found lots of segments that didn’t match up with the existing data. My hypothesis is that might be due to TIGER derived OSM data with geometry issues that didn’t allow matching and that the MS data might allow pinpointing that.

Can’t test that right now as I’m on the road, but maybe it is worth looking in to.

* conventional wisdom is that OSM already has more roads than actually exist thanks to TIGER.

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Some of the chat on OSMUS’ Slack about this has been along the lines of “oh no, not again”, from people who’ve had to tidy up after building imports based on MS’ “building detections”. As with buildings, the risk here is that some people will think that “Microsoft thinks it is a road, therefore it must be”, even though a glance at the imagery with open eyes would show that it obviously isn’t.

This development instance can handle larger ones: overpass turbo

3 Likes

Just the usual PSA: importing ODbL licensed data has always been and continues to be a tremendously bad idea.

Using it for QA is naturally perfectly fine.

1 Like

Really nice work (that OT is beautiful) and truly true things said here just now. I, for one, do appreciate these things. I’m clapping my hands, here.