Roland Olbricht

Sparse Editing

Editing Large-Scale Objects

Abstract

While OpenStreetMap has an impressive data quality on small scale objects, large scale objects are often only mapped in low quality. One example is the often discussed subject of mapping public transport services, and indeed these are far from complete or consistent.

The deeper reason for this is that editing large scale objects is exceptionally hard: This results from the fact that the larger an object is, the more spatial dependencies it is involved in. For example, a public transport relation can be damaged by each and every roundabout or lane mapping attempt.

In this talk we will analyse which typical kinds of dependencies exist and discuss various approaches like route suggestion by involving a route engine or mapping on a filtered subset of data. As a hands-on example it is shown how to efficiently recover a lost name tag on the river Rhine by editing an area of more than a hundred kilometers extent in JOSM.

About the author

Roland has been a mapper since. He started Overpass API in to make OSM data more accessible. He has a PhD in pure mathematics, a strong background in computer science, and a passion for high performance algorithms and transport networks. Currently he works as a computer scienst at Fraunhofer SCAI in Bonn.

Media

Video/Audio recording: mp3 mp4