2016-03-22

They just released HIFLD Open Data: A National foundation-level geospatial data within the open public domain that can be useful to support community preparedness, resiliency, research, and more.

I was curious what HIFLD Open data looked like compared with OpenStreetMap.

I had a free lunch hour so...

I did a small case study in Pennsylvania

I took one of the 250+ layers (hospitals) that has a well defined attribute naming convention and compared it with OpenStreetMap version using Turf.js. I modifed the code in the Mapbox example

The HIFLD Open Dataset Filtered for only PA converted to geojson using geojson.io

Locations= 255

The OpenStreetMap Hospitals Filtered using the OverPass Turbo API

pois: 232

HILFD OPEN vs OSM Hospital Map



*Blue = HIFLD Open

*Red = OSM

You can see HIFLD looks more complete in the rural areas


Looking at the urban areas OSM looks almost complete

Conclusion: From what I am seeing HIFLD Open has a few errors (such as closed or mislabeled hospitals) and OpenStreetMap has an issue in areas (mostly rural) that users have yet to map in. HIFLD Open is useful for adding data to OSM but cautiously since with a quick look I already see some errors.

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