Mod 1.3: Road Network Completeness Assessment

 How are roads monitored and maintained? 

The United States has a very intricate and developed road system that has continuously evolved over the years. As changes occur roads may become worn down, unused, or discontinued. The road can be repaved and also adjusted to the new development of buildings in the years. 

In this week's lab, we learned how to calculate road completeness and analyzing its completeness in excel using reference data to determine how much percentage difference between the analyzed data to the reference. We were given a segment of road data from the TIGER road network from the U.S Census Berua and compared it to the local road centerline dataset from the Jackson County orgeon.

To prepare the data given we had to clip the Centerline roads and the TIGER roads to the Jackson, OR county borders. I then split both roads datasets by whichever GRID box they fell into so I could properly calculate the percentage of the difference between the roads per grid. I created a new FIELD to calculate the lengths and it is important to recalculate after each toll is run. Data is not always recalculated after tools are run and many data discrepancies can occur as I learned through this lab. Additionally, it is important to understand what unit your data calculations are in. I had to calculate from kilometers to miles and managed to not get the right values, but I understood the process to get the percentage of differences. 

According to our reading, if the values are positive then the Centerline road network was more complete than the TIGER road network in certain GRID boxes, but negative values meant the TIGER road network was more complete. 





References 
Haklay, M. (2010). How good is Volunteered geographical information? A comparative study of OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey Datasets. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design. 37(4), 682-703. 

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