US city to start giant 'mapathon'

[Alex]

US city to start giant 'mapathon'

The Atlanta mapathon will take place this weekend, with around 200 volunteers armed with global positioning devices mapping the city.

"The way to think about it is as a really big mapping party," said OSM founder Steve Coast.

"We will have about 15-20 mapping stations throughout Atlanta and start by noting all the freeways and motorways, then the main roads, smaller roads and eventually go right down to the footpaths, bars and restaurants."

...One of the big attractions for Atlanta getting involved is the fact the data gathered for OpenStreetMap is free and open for users to edit and mash up any way they like.

[corco]

I would worry a little bit about data quality...

[Scott5114]

I've messed around a bit with OSM and it generally has much better data for Europe and the UK than the US. In Europe and the UK, all data is created by OSM users that trace out the road's path in their GPS, usually by bike. Then they upload the GPS waypoints to the map. In the US, the data was imported wholesale from some USGS or DOT (TIGER?) dataset. Thus it is very complete but also very blocky and lacks things such as correct road names and road type classifications. Also, the site is more set up towards the European alphanumeric road schemes, not shield-based schemes, so one has to go through the awkward situation of having roads bearing boxes reading "US-63" or whatever.