And so half term begins, a very early middle of a very short term!
That can only mean that exams are here soon!
Anyway, I’m sticking the Roundshaw data into OSM and it’s beginning to look very nice indeed. What amazes me is how old other providers’ data is. It is an absolute mess!
Let’s kill Google’s map reputation first and let’s use their own tools to highlight the issues. This is mostly just a case of old and poor map data. Starting in the northeast, Google has most of the newroad layout correctly in their dataset, but it is still possible to see remnants from the old housing blocks there. One particular example that is easy to pick out is the infamous Instone Close still remains on Google’s version of Roundshaw, even though it was demolished in 2001. Google has an odd contrast of old and new data and slightly newer satellite imagery.
Yahoo is quite a nice contrast, it has up to date map information (excluding the recently demolished), but at the expense of slightly old satellite imagery. I can’t fault them for any obvious data errors.
MS Live Maps (the buggers won’t give me a logical permalink) would appear to use the same map data as Yahoo for this area, and interestingly they have the oldest aerial view of the three providers. The beauty here though is that they also provide ‘Birds Eye’ imagery, which turned out to be of varying age (at the original drafting time of this blog post, mid feb) However, now most appear to be showing the demolition of the current stage of development, and only one tile I could find showed it still in a pre-demolition state.
What I love about the choice of these map services is the (modern) historical information you can glean through comparisons. Its a shame that most of this will be lost to the general public when they decide to do another update of it all. (OTOH, who really cares apart from geographers and map geeks?)
Oh, and the main point of writing this post - my OSM progress. I think we win in Roudshaw by a long way - just look at the depth of detail! I don’t know if there are errors or not, but if there are, it’s all my fault! It matters, but not enough for me to go out today - I have a resurvey planned to remove that ugly brown patch of redevelopment from the map when it is completed on the ground.
And talking of errors, I’ve just spotted one and corercted it (only a minor tagging issue though)