… is what I am doing these days.

I’ve installed Terracer in JOSM software and I am learning JOSM along the way a bit. I also got Every Door on my mobile. It is much more versatile for correcting information about amenities than StreetComplete and at the same time still quite convenient to use.

Most of my tags still come from StreetComplete though. I find it particularly rewarding to answer questions for disabled or visually impaired people. I regularly see two elderly people on my local high-street and I see two kids, boy and a girl walking with sticks and I do hope that maybe one day the detail that people are putting into OSM will make some viable navigation apps for them. I also learnt about traffic lights with vibration mechanism underneath.

The difficulty is arbitrariness in tagging buildings. On the estate I live there’s a very old house which my wife describes as a “farm house”, but there’s no farm here any more and the building is used for residential purposes. I also learnt a very reasonable distinction between house, terraced or semi-detached house. I’d like to follow the tagging “building=house” “house=semidetached” or other to be more specific.

And how difficult must be to be a postman! Corner houses are particularly tricky. I came across semi-detached corner houses which seem to belong to different streets. There’s also lots of houses with names and no numbers and I think quite a few new blocks which do not exist on OSM. Will need to review with aerial imagery. I know of the offsets, but the GPS on my mobile is very unreliable so haven’t figured out yet how to correct it yet.

I guess this is the strength of Google car. Hardware on the car and some algorithmic heuristics can probably capture a lot of that detail in a completely automated manner. I checked hardware guide for OSM and maybe I will consider some bluetooth GPS device as my mobile is not very reliable. If there was a software we could install for a dashcam of our cars, but I guess it would be incredible hard to write considering all the privacy concerns.

I started exploring using Land Registry data to help with this process, but it will take time as I’ve never worked with GIS before.