[Talk-at] Road Network Improvements in Austria

[Robert Kaiser]

Hi Murad,

> We are going to start improving the road network in the Austria. Project
> details can be found here:
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Organised_Editing/Activites/Bolt. We
> would like to get familiar with local mapping guidelines if there are any.

First of all, thanks for helping the community, contribution to OSM is 
always appreciated, esp. when you have actual on-the-ground data to help 
with that, as you seem to have.

Note that we don't have official "leadership" of the community in 
Austria, so you get a collection of opinions of interested mappers like 
myself, but usually, if there's no (heavy) opposition, that's good news 
in any case. ;-)
Another slight note: The wiki page above doesn't yet state that you 
contacted us, I expect that's coming soon. :)

Some other people have already commented on some specifics, in general, 
you'll find that a lot of places in Austria are in a good shape, cities 
better than some rural areas.
Aerial imagery from government side (usually under the name of 
"basemap.at Orthofoto", "Vienna Orthofoto" or similar) is pretty good 
and usable license-wise for OSM contributions, available in JSOM, and 
alignment is usually pretty good on those as well.

On road classifications, as long as it doesn't end up re-classifying 
everything everywhere, you are probably good (but you know how to work 
in other countries as well already) - we may have some places where 
classifications may have intentionally been set higher for preferred 
roads and lower for roads that have officially been downgraded because 
of bypasses or things like that, I'm sure you have seen those things in 
other countries as well and I'm sure your mappers are trained to respect 
those things already (I suspect your GPS traces will follow the bypasses 
more than the intentionally-downgraded roads that sometimes may look 
like "shortcuts").

You probably also know that in some cases, errors and warning are bugs 
of the "validators" and not of the data (like sometimes a way is 
actually ending close to another way and actually not connected even in 
reality, say a footpath going up to just outside of a fence or stuff 
like that), that's also not specific to Austria but may appear more 
often in areas mapped with high density like some of our cities.

Otherwise, we appreciate to hear from you and/or your mappers on places 
where issues arise and and are happy to help to resolve those! Also, as 
has been mentioned here already, if you can provide a summary update 
every now and then of what has been done, that also would be very much 
appreciated - even if just because it feels good for everyone to see 
that things are moving!

> Please, also, let me know if you have preferred contact channels other than
> this talk-list.

I think the list is the primary contact channel, Matrix/IRC (see 
Stefan's message) often helps to get a quick answer from someone as well.

I hope we'll see some good data improvements from your work!

Cheers,
KaiRo