Errors in Google, Bing, Esri, etc Basemaps

[ErinLesh1]

I'm looking to hear thoughts and experiences regarding updates to incorrect data in popular basemaps like Google, Bing, Esri, etc.  Has anyone had success getting a company to update incorrect data in a timely manner?  Should government agencies create competing products that are based on authoritative data? 

Transportation

[Anonymous User]

Esri provides a mechanism to submit updates to basemaps here: http://communitymaps.arcgis.com/. There are several tools depending on what you want to provide and the basemap that you want to see updated. 

[AndrewVitale3]

What about the other way around?

Has anyone thought much about leveraging these products to identify locations in your LRS that need to be updated? I think OpenStreetMap would be the best candidate for something like that.

[NicoleHanson1]

We use basemaps to fill in our LRS. There’s still quite a bit of the public rural roads we don’t have – and didn’t get the first time around with the ARNOLD request.

[AndrewVitale3]

What's the workflow look like? Is it fix it as needed while panning the map with a basemap turned on, or do you guys have a systematic way to go about it?

I would like to figure out if it's feasible to leverage OpenStreetMap data to generate a report showing where OSM changed,and which ROUTE_IDs may need to change with it.

[NicoleHanson1]

Andrew-

It’s fix as needed as we pan around/doing other event edits. We utilize the redline feature from R&H so that any of the business units who enter event data can redline a road that should be on the system but isn’t currently. We have about 5 or so different business units editing in RCE so they each have the potential for finding roads that we might not have grabbed in the first go around.

Also, the office of highway safety uses basemaps to verify crash locations and run into roads that should be on the network, or should be one way but is digitized another. They send us a snapshot of that location and the LRS team fixes it. They are not using the redline feature.

And we’re using basemaps to fill in data for the road names – as not every local agency sent us that data.

[AndrewVitale3]

Thanks for the info, Nicole.

It's great that you guys are getting buy-in with the redline feature. Do you find that the edits coming in through red lines are easier to manage than the screenshot via email? I'd like to see us get a similar process in place.

[NicoleHanson1]

Andrew-

YES!! The redlines is SOOO much easier than the screenshot/email process. When I bring up R&H, I can turn on the redlines to see if there’s any that need to be added/extended/deleted/etc. With a screenshot, I have to fudge around a little bit until I find the right place – the screenshot may not always have some other identifying features.

[ErinLesh1]

Kyle shared https://www.geofabrik.de where you can download OSM data for your state and then you could run change detection to find where roads have been modified from an earlier download.

[AndrewVitale3]

Thanks, Erin. I actually stumbled onto that site as well. It's no small task to ingest New York state into ArcGIS. It took about 12 hours using a tool called arcgis-osm-editor from Esri.

[ScottFierro2]

Like this direction but my immediate frustration would go back to some of the update workflows. I almost foresee some fun ML/AI workflow run routinely to calc differences where you look for change (date myself with imagery analysis here but red = fled and blue = new) between LRS and the various sources then submit updates for both new and retired data. The inverse could be done at various upper echelons to assist say State identifying new/retired county, township, etc. routes based off what's found in an OpenStreetMap, etc. and not yet pushed up or been digitized into state's data.