tomtom-international
Austria | Data Improvements
Project description
Goal
To improve the map quality in Austria, we propose to make data improvements by sharing challenges that can help fix data errors and improve the road network.
When appropriate, our team will also work on these challenges. If a challenge is more suitable to be solved without organised help, we will leave it for local users interested in completing the tasks. Challenges like this will be indicated as such in the overview below.
Additionally, we conduct edits based on map feedback.
How to participate
Anyone is welcome to contribute to this project by participating in our MapRoulette challenges. Here is the extended documentation for using MR. Note that sometimes additional instructions are provided within the challenges.
Here is the current set of challenges.
Challenges
Active challenges
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Austria - Disconnected Barriers from Nearby Roads This challenge is designed to address potential mapping issues where barriers are located near highways but are not properly connected. Fixing these ensures that navigation and routing services provide accurate access information and prevent misleading directions. Tasks were generated by filtering OSM data for non-excluded barriers, bollard, block, flowerpot, crash_attenuator, kerb, log, and rock located on or within five meters of highway=* that are not connected.
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Austria - Intersecting and Spiky Buildings This challenge targets buildings (in Vienna) that overlap or have sharp, or suspicious/ messy shapes. Fixing these helps make the map cleaner and easier to use for everyone.
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Austria - Inconsistent Layer Tagging on Highways This challenge is dedicated to improving layer information (
layer=*tags) on highway features, primarily focusing on bridges and tunnels.
Inactive challenges
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Austria - Intersecting Landuse This challenge focuses on identifying and resolving cases where landuse features in OSM intersect with each other, which can sometimes lead to incorrect visualization on the map. Reviewing and resolving may improve the map visualization, and navigation.
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Österreich - Spitze Winkel auf Straßen | Austria - Sharp Angles on Highways Correct roads with unrealistically and odd sharp angles (less than 45 degrees).
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Österreich - Behebung von sich Kreuzenden Gebäuden | Austria - Fix Intersecting Buildings Buildings overlapping each other on the same layer can create a cluttered and confusing map. These visual inconsistencies make it harder to understand the actual layout of our towns and cities. By fixing these intersections, the Austria OSM map can improve the experience and usability for everyone.
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Austria - Fix Spiky Buildings This collaborative effort requires a review and possible geometry correction, as the challenge identifies buildings with potential issues due to their unusual shape.
Identify and fix, if needed, situations where a building intersects with another building on the same level.
Identify and fix, if needed, cases where a way with tag highway=* intersects with a building.
Identify and fix cases where two or more highways are connected to the same node on a roundabout.
Identify and add if needed, one or more missing ways.
Identify and fix if needed, cases where highway junctions are incorrectly or imprecisely mapped.
Identify and fix cases where the bridge or tunnel has an incorrect tag.
Ways with tag highway=* must be connected to the rest of the road network to ensure its continuity, e.g. for route planning. When such a way is not connected to another way with tag highway=*, an error is logged.
The area=yes tag is required for some closed ways when used to define a polygon. For closed ways with other tags, there is an assumption that the way defines an area. In some circumstances, a closed way may define both a closed polyline and an area. When tag area=yes is used, it is expected that one of the necessary accompanying tags is also found.
In general, roads intended for vehicles should be built to maintain proper angles which ensure maneuvers and fluent traffic. Extreme, too sharp angles applied to a way may indicate errors in the road geometry.
Mini-roundabouts are a special kind of roundabout with the same rules as other roundabouts, but present as painted circles rather than physical circles. There might also be a low, fully traversable dome or island that vehicles can drive across. Road traffic flows in one direction around a point in the middle, and the traffic in the roundabout has right-of-way. A mini-roundabout is recorded using the tag highway=mini_roundabout.
The necessary edits will be made to fix cases where the tag on a way indicates that the object is a polygon feature, but the way does not meet the definition of a closed way because it is self-intersecting, or ways in a relation with the same role form a self-intersecting polygon
Simple areas are mapped in OSM by creating a closed way and tagging it as an area object rather than a line. Relations of the type multipolygon are used to represent complex areas with holes inside or consisting of multiple disjoint areas. A multipolygon relation can have any number of ways in the role outer (the outline) and any number of ways in the role inner (the holes), and these must form valid rings to build a multipolygon. When a relation of the type multipolygon consists of only one member, which is a simple area, an error is logged.
Buildings with extremely sharp angles will be identified and corrected if needed.
Features intended to be a polygon should be correctly tagged. When the tag indicates that the object should be a polygon, but the geometry is built out of a NON-closed way, an error is logged.
- Add Highways (full-country challenge, Tirol, Salzburg)
Identify and add if needed, one or more missing ways.
Identify and connect if needed cases where the end of the way with tag highway=* is not connected to the rest of the road network.
Edits based on map feedback
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We make improvements to OSM based on user feedback submitted for the TomTom map after comparing and ensuring that it is also valid for OSM.
Here is a list of the types of edits to be made, provided they do not conflict with others’ edits and a local source is available:
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Highways
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Adding or correcting highways
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Adding or correcting link roads
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Adding or adjusting bridges, tunnels, layers, or relations
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Adding or updating lanes and related properties
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Adding or updating traffic signs
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Adding or updating access barriers
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Adding or updating turn restrictions
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Addresses
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Adding or correcting addresses
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Updating the position of address nodes, usually when an object has multiple addresses
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Adding or correcting names of ways
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POIs (Points of Interest)
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Adding POIs
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Correcting POI locations
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Adding or correcting POI information
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Resolving POI-land use discrepancies
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Handling POI closures
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Land use
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Adding land use
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Modifying existing land use extent
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Buildings
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Adding buildings
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Updating building type
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Adjusting building shape
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Water
- Adding or realigning rivers, streams, and lakes.
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Railways
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Adding railway tracks
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Realigning railway tracks
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Adding or adjusting railway infrastructure tags such as bridges, tunnels, level crossings
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Ferry lines
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Adding ferry lines
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Realigning ferry lines
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Adding ferry terminals
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These are incidental edits spread over time starting April 27, 2023. We follow local guidelines and, if needed, consult with the community before making an update.
Geographical scope
Data improvements will be made across the whole country.
Announcements
- initial project announcement,
- additional quality check announcement,
- connect isolated highways announcement,
- general thread about TomTom challenges in Austria community forum,
- thread about edits based on map feedback,
- thread about challenge for adding highways,
- thread about challenge for fixing incorrect highway junctions,
- thread about challenge for fixing incorrect junctions on roundabouts,
- thread about challenge for adding and completing crossings between railways and roads,
- thread about challenge for fixing intersecting buildings,
- thread about challenge for fixing inconsistent bridge and tunnel tagging.
- Austria - Fix Spiky Buildings was announced in The OpenStreetMap User Forum on 29th April 2024
- Österreich - Behebung von sich Kreuzenden Gebäuden | Austria - Fix Intersecting Buildings was announced in The OpenStreetMap User Forum on 16th May 2025
- Österreich - Spitze Winkel auf Straßen | Austria - Sharp Angles on Highways was announced in The OpenStreetMap User Forum on 19th June 2025
- Austria - Intersecting Landuse was announced in The OpenStreetMap User Forum on 3rd July 2025
- Austria - Inconsistent Layer Tagging on Highways was announced in The OpenStreetMap User Forum on 9th October 2025
- Austria - Intersecting and Spiky Buildings was announced in The OpenStreetMap User Forum on 27th October 2025
- Austria - Disconnected Barriers from Nearby Roads was announced in The OpenStreetMap User Forum on 24th November 2025
TomTom organised editing
We will follow the Organised Editing Guidelines for this project. TomTom will not make any edits until two weeks after the project announcement. Here is our Organised Editing page, including a list of our editors.
How to find TomTom's edits
All edits made by our team receive the hashtag #tomtom. Edits based on user feedback additionally have the hashtag #tt_mapfeedback. #tt is a hashtag that has been used for TomTom’s edits in the past.
Sources for editing
- Local Imagery
- basemap.at Orthofoto
- Geoimage.at MaxRes
- Steiermark Orthophoto
- VoGIS aerial imagery
- Tiris: orthophoto infrared
- Tiris: orthophoto
- imagico.de: Eastern Alps autumn colors 2019
- Other imagery (used in case up-to-date local imagery is not available)
- ESRI World Clarity (Beta)
- Bing
- Mapbox Imagery
For some OSM map edits TomTom editors will use proprietary sources for support. These will typically be in situations where there is not sufficient evidence using the available sources in OSM editors themselves. The proprietary sources will be ground-level imagery and GPS traces, both collected by TomTom's mobile mapping vans. On occasion, we will also use sources collected from a field survey by one of TomTom's sourcing specialists who have visited the location and collected data to support the required map updates.
How to reach out
If you have remarks about a specific edit of ours, please drop a comment in the changeset, and we will do our best to respond thoughtfully. Or, you can also:
- send a message to the project lead Salim,
- join the conversation in the Austria community forum (see Announcements),
- email [email protected] for general questions about TomTom's activities.
The challenge "Impossible angle in a highway" often raises an issue because of serpentines on a highway=secondary, which are totally normal in austria. Even besides that the rate of false positives is relatively high (edit: for this challenge).
The challenge "Impossible angle in a highway" often raises an issue because of serpentines on a highway=secondary, which are totally normal in austria. Even besides that the rate of false positives is relatively high (edit: for this challenge).
Thanks for your comment, Luzandro! Our team is looking into the thresholds used to detect cases of impossible angles in highways, so we can determine if modifications are needed.
In general, when our editors work on a challenge, they will only make changes if they can verify that these are needed based on the sources available.
"Polygon has self-intersection" doesn't seem to work as expected. There are hundreds of tasks, but I haven't seen a single one yet, where there actually is a self-intersection.
Take for example this polygon: https://maproulette.org/challenge/27500/task/129928699
Why is this considered as self intersecting? Maybe the reason is, that it's part of a multipolygon with touching inner rings, but then it is labeled incorrectly and besides that it is something that is valid in OSM
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relation:multipolygon#Touching_inner_rings
Hi Luzandro, thank you for pointing this out! We're looking into this.
@marjanvandekauter-tomtom Are there any plans to update the data in the challenges? 🙂
@mcliquid Three of the challenges are being refreshed on a daily basis (though we can't say upfront how much data will be added): Spiky buildings, Polygon is not closed and Polygon has self-intersection. Currently we have no plans for the other challenges. Let me know if you have any more questions!
@Luzandro @mcliquid just wanted to let you know that we created a new challenge Connect Isolated Highways which I've added to this page and which I've posted about in the Austria community forum.
Thanks @mcliquid we really appreciate your efforts! I know you enjoy MapRoulette so do let me know if you have any suggestions for challenges you think would be interesting.
The 'Sources for editing' section updated with the below information-
- Removed Maxar Premium Imagery from the list as it's not available anymore in OSM
- Added a description of proprietary sources to support editing
