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Landmark - Best Practices US

Post by coldblaze
Is there a plan to produce a best practices guide for landmark editing for the US servers? Last time I checked the wiki it was blank.

The reason I ask is because I see more and more large blocks of area marked off as parking lots by various editors. They will include entire buildings, parks and more as a parking lot. Similarly, I am starting to see equally large area's being tagged as gas stations where no gas station even exists.

Some of these are created by admin(6) which I assume is an automated bot, but most are not.

I am also curious what effect landmarks have on waze when attempting to route to a gas station via your current route? Does it use landmarks for this purpose, or does it perform some other method of identifying these landmarks? If the latter, what purpose does identifying landmarks on waze have on the actually routing system?

Thanks
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Post by CBenson
AndyPoms wrote:What I quoted above was from the US guidelines in the post I linked to... It seems that the landmark will allow Waze to search for the Name of the station & navigate to it, but not enable gas prices. The gas prices come from a different database...
I think that the quote is unclear at best. I guess the biggest problem is that I don't really understand how waze searches and navigates to landmarks.

For example, if I search for "The White House" under the waze tab I currently get two entries for "White House, Washington, DC" and one entry for "White House, NJ" (and a bunch of garbage related to Rutter's). Are any of these really related to the "The White House" landmark. Seems unlikely to me as the landmark has the "The" in the name.

If I search for "Sherwood Forest Golf Course" (the name of the landmark I linked to above as a erroneous default gas station), I get back a ton of results with "Golf Course" or "Sherwood Forest" in the name ranging from local to Wisconsin and Alabama, but none seem to be the actual landmark.

AndyPoms wrote:I've been adding gas station landmarks in the US because of the gas price function that is on the way & the simple fact they suppress traffic jams & problem reports of people looping through the station...
Seems dangerous to me. I don't trust waze to merge the gas stations that exist in the landmark layer with the imported list of stations with price data in a coherent efficient manner.
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Post by CBenson
mapcat wrote:In the US there is already a TOTALLY SEPARATE gas station landmark layer that has NOTHING TO DO with the gas stations that may exist as visible landmarks in WME. Please don't add (or delete) any gas stations in WME in the US.

We can't edit the real gas station layer. (Yet.)
Opps, sorry didn't get the warning that I was overposting. I do appreciate the clear answer to whether we should be adding gas station landmarks.
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Post by CBenson
daknife wrote:And with one near my house I found that until the landmark was big enough to appear, the option to report gas prices for it was also not available.
This really surprises me. Many of the gas stations that waze routes me to and for which I then enter prices have no landmark at all in the landmark layer. What is the current relationship between the price database and landmark layer in the US?
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Post by CBenson
I'd contact Made2Map regarding why it was added before I'd delete it.
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Post by CookeCity
Relatively new editor (but hopefully getting much better)...Okay, I've read this entire thread, plus the guidelines and looked at enough MPs to get an idea of how things work (or don't work). In the areas I'm working in, I see *plenty* of business parking lots...but this leads to my questions:

(1) If an editor isn't supposed to map each lane in a parking lot, but isn't supposed to generate a landmark parking lot, it seems that the accepted result is a potentially steady stream of auto generated MPs that talk about roads being missing due to the unexpected route. This leads to the assumption that Waze is designed to generate a certain number of "acceptable" MPs rather than place parking lots in areas that generate the MPs to suppress their generation.....correct?

(2) So, what is the consensus about "extra" landmarks? Do we as "good" editors go into an area an nuke 'em? I'm sure that other editors that aren't up on the threads won't be pleased...but...it's one thing to say they shouldn't be mapped; I just want to make sure that deleting them is the accepted norm. As I've read through the threads in the forum, I'm still a little confused as to what to do...

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Post by CookeCity
bgodette wrote:
CookeCity wrote:(1) If an editor isn't supposed to map each lane in a parking lot, but isn't supposed to generate a landmark parking lot, it seems that the accepted result is a potentially steady stream of auto generated MPs that talk about roads being missing due to the unexpected route. This leads to the assumption that Waze is designed to generate a certain number of "acceptable" MPs rather than place parking lots in areas that generate the MPs to suppress their generation.....correct?
If drive's last segment before separating from mapped segments is a Parking Lot no MP is generated. This is why you only need to map the ring around the lot (to contain snap-to) and along the store-fronts and backs.
Which is why I am confused...what you say makes sense to me...but in the Landmark Guidelines it states:
Please note that parking lots at businesses are not mapped.
and that the only parking lots that should be mapped are:
Park & Ride/Commuter Lots are mapped at the fence line
With the mapping of pay parking lots under consideration.

If I follow the guidelines, and don't map business parking lots, I see the MPs generated because people go into/through the parking lots and generate the MP.
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Post by CookeCity
Okay, I apologize if I'm "not getting it", but I'll try to recap what I'm getting from this thread...it sounds like my initial understanding is correct. We are *not* supposed to draw in parking lot landmarks for businesses, and we are *not* supposed to map the individual lanes in a parking lot, which means MPs will be occasionally produced that we are to ignore (marked solved) in these lots as this is a normal consequence of the above guidance.

I'm still wondering what an editor is supposed to do when they find existing parking lots that violate the above guidance, is it accepted to start deleting them?
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Post by CookeCity
Thank you! That is exactly what I was looking for, and it has helped a lot. It sounds like mapping a parking lot road road/perimeter for businesses is the best bet then. It also sounds like for small businesses, an occasional MP might be generated when turning from a street (I've seen this sometimes), but your advice makes a lot of sense.
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Post by Daknife
Also landmarks for smaller stores won't even appear in the client. Your average McDonalds, Wendy's etc aren't big enough. Heck I've had to really play with the bondaries of a couple smaller gas stations to get them to appear. And with one near my house I found that until the landmark was big enough to appear, the option to report gas prices for it was also not available.
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