A MapMetrics tile in France showing the location of a trainline in July 2021 (left) and after it has been removed in August (right)
If you look at the image above, on the left you can see a good example: a trainline showing up in red as the MapMetrics system tries to take GPS traces from people on trains and route a car against it. This of course doesn’t work and shows up as red tiles.
On the right of the same image, you can see the result of removing the train GPS traces. We built a train routing engine to test traces. If a trace routes well against train tracks, then it’s probably a train, and so we remove it.
Due to removing trains and filtering out places like airports the quality of MapMetrics data is now substantially better and there are far fewer errant red tiles. You can see this in MapMetrics from the August dataset and later months, and this should save everyone time looking for places to fix in OSM.
Downloadable Data
All the tile data is now available for download, from the “Download Dataset” button at the top of the
MapMetricsWorld website. This is organized per-month in a zip file and contains CSV data with all the metrics we have. This data can be used to prioritize edits or analyze quality on a large scale.
API
We’ve shipped an API for getting the data behind the MapMetrics visualizations. You can read the technical documentation
here. You can now access the tile-level data on-demand as well as what countries and datasets are available through the API. The API can be used by map editors like iD and JOSM to highlight areas to edit for end users.
Fin
We hope you find all these updates useful in our joint quest for higher map quality with OSM. Feedback is most welcome, please email us
here.