United States | Data Improvements

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Goal

To improve the map quality in the United States, TomTom will to make data improvements in multiple ways. One method is through sharing MapRoulette challenges, sharing source material, and other types of activities, including sponsorships, or supporting local chapters.

We will be sharing challenges to capture missing features and fix potential data errors. All challenges available for the United States are listed on this page.

Over time, we will also be making one-off edits if we see that a specific feature or group of features is missing or incorrect. These edits will be incidental and may impact: POIs, address information, land use, buildings, and tag consistency.

How to participate

Anyone is welcome to contribute to this project by participating in our MapRoulette challenges. Here is the extended documentation for using MapRoulette. Note that sometimes additional instructions are provided within the challenges.

Here is the current set of challenges.

More Information about the Challenges

Active Challenges

• United States - Fix Building Incorrect Highway Junctions
  Identify and fix if needed, cases where highway junctions are incorrectly or imprecisely mapped.

• United States - Fix Building & Highway Intersect
  Identify and fix, if needed, cases where a way with tag highway=* intersects with a building. Tasks are generated based on a spatial comparison of highways and buildings available in the OSM data.

Inactive Challenges

• Add Surface to Highway - January 2023 - California
  Use the appropriate aerial imagery, street level imagery service, and local knowledge to investigate the situation and assign the most appropriate value to the surface key.

Challenge was retired after concerns from the community were considered.

• Invalid Lane Tag

The tag lanes=* on ways with tag highway=* indicates the amount of lanes on the road at hand. The value for the lanes tag should be only one of the following numbers: 1, 1.5, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Any other value is incorrect and should be fixed.

• Not connected highway

Ways with tag highway=* must be connected to the rest of the road network to ensure its continuity, e.g. for route planning. When such a way is not connected to another way with tag highway=*, an error is logged.

• Tag area=yes on object without feature type

The area=yes tag is required for some closed ways when used to define a polygon. For closed ways with other tags, there is an assumption that the way defines an area. In some circumstances, a closed way may define both a closed polyline and an area. When tag area=yes is used, it is expected that one of the necessary accompanying tags is also found.

• Impossible angle in a highway

In general, roads intended for vehicles should be built to maintain proper angles which ensure maneuvers and fluent traffic. Extreme, too sharp angles applied to a way may indicate errors in the road geometry.

• Invalid Turn Restriction

This check identifies invalid turn restrictions. Invalid turn restrictions occur in a variety of ways, from invalid members to edge geometry issues to not being routable to wrong topology. Relations, ways and nodes in relations as well as turn restrictions are checked. A relation needs to have exactly one way with role 'from' and exactly one way with role 'to'. These ways should be linked together by at least one way with role 'via' OR with exactly one node with role 'via' (no more and no less).

• Invalid Mini-Roundabout

Mini-roundabouts are a special kind of roundabout with the same rules as other roundabouts, but present as painted circles rather than physical circles. There might also be a low, fully traversable dome or island that vehicles can drive across. Road traffic flows in one direction around a point in the middle, and the traffic in the roundabout has right-of-way. A mini-roundabout is recorded using the tag highway=mini_roundabout.

• Polygon is not closed

Features intended to be a polygon should be correctly tagged. When the tag indicates that the object should be a polygon, but the geometry is built out of a NON-closed way, an error is logged.

• Polygon has self-intersection
  The necessary edits will be made to fix cases where the tag on a way indicates that the object is a polygon feature, but the way does not meet the definition of a closed way because it is self-intersecting, or ways in a relation with the same role form a self-intersecting polygon

• United States - Connect Isolated Highways
  Leads are generated based on analysis of highway classifications and their connection to the rest of the road network, you can Identify and connect if needed cases where the end of the way with tag highway=* is not connected to the rest of the road network.

• United States - Duplicate Nodes
  Help the improve overall OpenStreetMap (OSM) highway network by merging nearby nodes, realigning nodes or ways, or by removing duplicate geometry.

Edits based on User Feedback

We will make improvements to OSM based on user feedback submitted for the TomTom map after comparing and ensuring that it is also valid for OSM. Edits based on map feedback will also have the hashtag #tt_mapfeedback.

Here is a list of the types of edits to be made, provided they do not conflict with others’ edits and a local source is available:

• Highways

  • Adding or correcting highways

  • Adding or correcting link roads

  • Adding or adjusting bridges, tunnels, layers, or relations

  • Adding or updating lanes and related properties

  • Adding or updating traffic signs

  • Adding or updating access barriers

  • Adding or updating turn restrictions

• Addresses

  • Adding or correcting addresses

  • Updating the position of address nodes, usually when an object has multiple addresses

  • Adding or correcting names of ways

• POIs (Points of Interest)

  • Adding POIs

  • Correcting POI locations

  • Adding or correcting POI information

  • Resolving POI-land use discrepancies

  • Handling POI closures

• Land use

  • Adding land use

  • Modifying existing land use extent

• Buildings

  • Adding buildings

  • Updating building type

  • Adjusting building shape

• Water

  • Adding or realigning rivers, streams, and lakes.

• Railways

  • Adding railway tracks

  • Realigning railway tracks

  • Adding or adjusting railway infrastructure tags such as bridges, tunnels, level crossings

• Ferry lines

  • Adding ferry lines

  • Realigning ferry lines

  • Adding ferry terminals

Geographical scope

Data improvements will be made across the whole country. Occasionally, editing challenges may be targeted for specific states, metropolitan areas, or map features.

Announcements

This project was announced in Talk-us.

TomTom organised editing

We will follow the Organised Editing Guidelines for this project. TomTom will not make any edits until two weeks after the project announcement. Here is our Organised Editing page, including a list of our editors.

How to find TomTom's edits

All edits made by our team have the hashtag #tt or #tomtom.

Edits based on user feedback additionally have the hashtag #tt_mapfeedback.

Changeset Comments

The team will be adding changeset comments that follow OSM changeset guidelines.

Additional collaborations

In March 2022, we performed a mechanical update to fix duplicated inner polygons in the United States.

Sources for editing

• TomTom will follow guidance for the United States using Potential local data sources and United States/Resources
• ESRI imagery
• Bing imagery
• Bing Streetside
• Mapillary

For some OSM map edits TomTom editors will use proprietary sources for support. These will typically be in situations where there is not sufficient evidence using the available sources in OSM editors themselves. The proprietary sources will be ground-level imagery and GPS traces, both collected by TomTom's mobile mapping vans. On occasion, we will also use sources collected from a field survey by one of TomTom's sourcing specialists who have visited the location and collected data to support the required map updates.

Shared Open Data Sources

recreation.gov layers

TomTom is committed to sharing open data sources with the Open Street Map community. As part of our initial activities, we're excited to share two source layers from the recreation.gov API.

Note that this is the raw data and is not modified or normalized for a specific purpose or use case.

• Recreation Areas
• Camp Sites

How to reach out

If you have remarks about a specific edit of ours, please drop a comment in the changeset.

You can also contact us in the following ways:

• send a message to the project lead Mapiate
• join the conversation in Talk-US
• email osm@tomtom.com for general questions about TomTom's activities

[kiranahiretomtom]

The 'Sources for editing' section updated with the below information-

1. Removed Maxar Premium Imagery from the list as it's not available anymore in OSM
2. Added a description of proprietary sources to support editing