English version:

Amazon has been an active contributor to OpenStreetMap (OSM) in Germany for over a year now. The drivers of our delivery service providers at times encounter problems where OSM data is not matching with on-ground reality (e.g., where the map suggests a left turn, but the left turn is legally restricted as per the street signs). These discrepancies are reported by the drivers, but due to absence of ground truth (street images), we are unable to investigate and rectify the map defect in OSM. These defects risk the safety of not just drivers of our delivery service providers, but all users who might be using OSM as a base map for navigation purposes. In order to overcome the lack of ground truth in Germany, Amazon has signed up for a short term contract with CycloMedia Technology B.V., a private street imagery provider. Details about CycloMedia can be found here.

How are we going to utilize the data?

Amazon will investigate the locations of feedback shared by drivers spread across Germany using CycloMedia street images on CycloMedia’s web-access portal. The images will be mainly used to add restrictions related to turns, access, directions, weight, and height to improve OSM map data. When making these edits on OSM, we will attribute the anonymized source of the image along with its date of capture. Additionally, staying true to maintain the quality of data in OSM, Amazon will contribute edits to OSM directly only when we have a street image of 2019 (or more recent). However, when we find images of 2018 or older (which reinforce the feedback from the driver), Amazon will share notes or create map roulette tasks. In these situations, we request support from the German OSM community to confirm the ground reality before making an edit. Furthermore, any comments on these changesets from the community members will be taken up on priority and responded to at the earliest.

What images are we using?

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Dear OSM Community,

At Amazon, we have observed that ~94% of gates mapped in OSM do not have access information updated (based on study in Florida). This poor coverage of gates lead to routing issues such as allowing general public to restricted areas; specially to gated communities (find the below example for reference). We plan to take up the task of updating the access information for gates in the US. OSM link: osm.org/#map=16/27.3912/-82.4276

In the above example highlighted polygon contains a gated community with 3 gates situated at three different places. Red points indicate restricted access (residents only) and green point indicates access allowed for general public/ deliveries along with the local residents.

How will we get the access information about gates and add it to OSM?

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Dear OSM Community,

At Amazon we are coming across a situation where unmaintained track roads have no access tags. We would like to know your suggestions/feedback on how to tag these roads.

Track Roads:

By definition track roads implies traversal of motor vehicles and are mostly used for agricultural use. We have private GPS traces showing where delivery vehicles go, and when we match them against OSM data, we see they’re going along highway=track ways. We want to add appropriate access tags so that routers can route correctly along the data in the future.

The driver trace is on-the-ground evidence that the road can be used by motor vehicles for deliveries, but we have no evidence either way that the road can be used for general traffic.

There are four different ways we’ve come up to tag this information:

1. motor_vehicle = yes

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