Started 2019-10 and ended 2020-04
I can remember clearly that I was sitting in the hotel room before TRB 2018, with Jeff, and checking OpenStreetMap for something or other (a restaurant to go to? the conference hotel?) and the map opened on Toronto, the last place I’d opened it. I was shocked! Where before there were no buildings at all, nunc, factum est buildings. Thousands of them – zooming out – tens, hundreds of thousands of them! How can this have happened? I live in Toronto! I’m subscribed to the imports mailing list! I fire up the editor and look a bit closer. The data is garbage – poorly imported, uncleaned, overnoded, overlapping garbage. After years of careful editing in the area, I’m pissed.
I fire off an email to the imports mailing list. This has to be stopped, reverted! I am engaged for the rest of the conference, for the rest of the year, really, in a set of squabbles bordering on discussions about what is to be done and how this can be fixed.
It becomes clear that I, the one asking for better quality data am the one to provide it and in the name of preventing someone sloppier from finishing the import I largely design, discuss, code, and carry out the rest of the pressed-upon-me Toronto import myself.
Then, the next phase, of cleaning up to the degree possible for one person, the tremendous dump of sloppy data within the city of Toronto. The flurry of semi-automated activity bumped me up to the #2 editor in Canada for close to a month.
It was thankless work, and I have no particular interest in building footprints. BUT I can say now that the data is better on the whole than it otherwise would have been.
Component of: OpenStreetMap