So as you know from my first two posts I have Microsoft building foot prints and county address data, two good sources of data. Both worth a import on there own. However we want to make the most efficient use of our mapping time so Mike came up with a way to conflate the data sources. And save a lot of time! Importing data into OSM has a good bit of overhead (still worth it). As I’ve talked about before you have to go get the data, figure out how to process the data with a procedure for Tracking, coordinating, and QA. Then once you figured out all of that you have to have local community buy in and go through the mailing list where your proposal will be vetted in a public way. So where it makes sense, it is worth thinking about using your available data sources in conjunction with each other to minimize going through that over and over. Now it does come with some additional risk, your proposal will face more scrutiny the more complex it is. And simpler single imports might lend them self’s to more mappers helping you with it. That’s a judgment call you will have to make. Im going to stay fairly high level in this post if you want to know the nuts and bolts of everything there is great documentation that Mike wrote on the GitHub https://github.com/OpenStreetMapSC/MergeAddressesAndBuildings and osm.wiki/Spartanburg_County_Address_And_Building_Import

And here is a screenshot of where we are at right now with the work to give you a idea of how it looks while in progress.

Here is a section of map before the building import

And after

As you can see adding in this data instantly makes the map more useful to most people. When I first show someone OSM they always want to see where they live first, and now we can show them there address. The second thing people always want to see is where they work but ill cover adding POI’s in a future post. Another benefit of covering the map in this way is that we are constantly running validation on the area we are working on for each import. So even if im not looking for a certain issue it will be seen during the QA process so you end up fixing a lot of existing issues with the map that are non import related. All and all we are making the map more useful to more people by adding data and improving the quality of existing data. By defining a area to work in, and finding all the available and applicable data sources we are organizing to Make OSM to be as useful to as many people as possible with the time available to us as local mappers, and we are making measurable progress :-)