Updates to ImproveOSM JOSM plugin for better usability

The team has been working on some nice updates to the ImproveOSM JOSM plugin. I have been taking the new version for a spin and wanted to report back.

In case you need a refresher: ImproveOSM is a suite of tools (currently a website and a JOSM plugin) that takes the results of a massive data analysis comparing billions of GPS data points with existing OSM data and displays them in a way that makes it easy for any mapper to improve OSM with missing roads, turn restrictions, and one-way tags.

The improvements are fairly small but gave me a noticeably nicer workflow, so I thought it would be worth sharing.

The first improvement is that you can now right-click on any of the ImproveOSM layers in the layer panel to access the data filtering options for that layer.

The data filters let you see part of the data for that layer based on various criteria, such as the number of trips, confidence level, status, and others. The criteria available vary by layer. Here is the filter window for Missing Roads, for example:

The filters themselves are not new, but you needed to go to the ImproveOSM panel to access them before. I think this is way quicker.

Another thing I really like is the improved visualization for the turn restrictions. The team made it much easier to see the from-via-to flow of the suggested restriction. The from-segment is now green and the to-segment is red. When selected, the info panel will also display more useful information than before:

The detailed info panel was improved for the other categories (missing roads and one-ways) as well.

Finally, when you are done mapping an ImproveOSM thing, you can now quickly mark the thing as invalid or solved, without having to enter a comment. We realized that this was not a very efficient workflow. You can still add a comment upon closing the issue, but now it’s easy to do it without, by right-clicking on the ‘solve’ or ‘invalidate’ buttons and selecting the appropriate action.

These small but meaningful improvements made my work with ImproveOSM in JOSM much more efficient. We are always looking for more ways to make ImproveOSM better. If you have used ImproveOSM and you have a few minutes to spare, I would appreciate it if you filled out this survey. Thanks a lot!