We're now one month in to the current Quarterly Project, which aims to use some official Post Office Ltd. branch data released under the OGL to help improve the mapping of Post Offices in OpenStreetMap.
As you can see from the graph at http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/postoffice/#history there has been a slow but steady increase in the total number of matched branches (blue) and a decrease in the number of closed branches removed (red). There's also been a good start on adding reference numbers to the existing branches (green) to help verify matches and keep things in sync with the official data. There's still a lot to do though. In particular, there are around 3800 branches in the official list that are not currently mapped in OSM, and around 1000 amenity=post_office objects that correspond to branches that are probably now closed. How may of these can we survey and fix in the next two months? To make life easier, there's a comparison tool at http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/postoffice/progress/ which is currently updated more-or-less daily. Click through to your postcode area to see a map showing the discrepancies between OSM and the official list. Detailed suggestions for mapping actions based on these maps can be found at http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/postoffice/mapping-notes.html . One issue that was raised earlier was that since the official branch data is only updated annually, it will become out of date as branches open and close. It would therefore be useful to have a way of suppressing these false positives in the tool. I think the best way to handle this would be to maintain an "updates" list of newly opened and recently closed branches, that can be fed in to the tool. I'll have a look at setting something up shortly. Best wishes, Robert. -- Robert Whittaker _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
