BuildingRoadIntersection Instructions

Apple’s data team created a MapRoulette challenge for Building-Road Intersections. Here's more about what the checks look for and how to fix the issues.

We created the checks using Atlas, a tool we developed that anyone can use to query and find potential issues in OpenStreetMap data. After making the checks with Atlas we added them to MapRoulette as challenges.

BuildingRoadIntersectionCheck challenge

For BuildingRoadIntersectionCheck (code here), editors should look at imagery to make sure the buildings and roads align to ground truth and edit as needed to correct the geometry. In some cases, the road may be snapped (attached) to the building, and in some cases there may just be overlap.

To work this challenge, you will need to be familiar with four OSM Keys:

• Highway: If one of the intersecting features is not a road/path/trail, then the highway tag needs to be removed to fix the task. (ex. highway=track on a river feature)
• Building: All buildings flagged in this challenge should be tagged with building=yes. If one of the intersecting features is not in fact a building, then the building tag needs to be removed to fix the task. (ex. a building=yes on a farm field area)
• Covered: Sometimes roads do pass under structures in reality. Examples of this would be the canopy above a gas station or toll booth, or even a road that goes through or under a large building in an urban area. In these cases, the section of road beneath the structure needs to be split into its own way and tagged with covered=yes. This will prevent the task from flagging again.
• Layer: Another possibility is that the building and road should be on different layers (ex. a road is on a bridge) so that you would need to adjust either the road or building's layer= tag to match reality. layer=0 is assumed, so a road one level up would be layer=1