Inaccurate POIs

Each contributor has his own method of geolocating the POI. If you know a better position, notify the maintainer on his contact page, including the coordinates.

My method for locating safety cameras is Google Earth. Zoom in to a matter of feet and drop a pin.

There are various reasons why the pin would not be right on the actual location. For example, the entrance of a shopping center.

Due to the huge number of entries in some of these files, some maintainers rely on websites that list business locations. These can often be inaccurate due to changes in street addresses, entrance locations, etc. that occur over time.

The best way is to use the method described by Dobs above, but in files with thousands of entries, this isn't always possible.

Even using Google Earth to "vet" these POI locations, there can still be errors due to the lag in imagery dates. It can also be difficult to spot one way roads or entrances and those that are sometimes blocked off.

As mentioned above, we can all help improve the usefulness of these POI files by reporting inaccuracies to the maintainer.

I once maintained the file for KIA Canada and they had sent me the adresses for all of their dealers. Unfortunately, the city was often incorrect, because the dealer used a postal address, not the true city address.
Dobbs is totally correct. Google Earth is one of the best tools, but until you actually create a large POI file, you can't totally appreciate how much effort is involved.

Depending on what type of POI file you're creating, beware of using street addresses. For instance I have a file of county parks. A couple of parks' addresses are actually the parks' county office. If the creator gets lazy and just uses the street address he could be off by miles.
FWIW, I use Google Earth for every single record and I probably have created over a thousand lines of POI records. For consistency's sake I use the "Get Directions" function of GE, use my home address as the starting point and the target's given address as the destination. I use the Directions function so that in the event of multiple entries into the target I use the one that I would encounter first. Then using GE's pointer I fine tune it to the exact point of entry, which for me is in the middle of the driveway, off the road by about six feet. Is it tedious? A little, but it's a hobby and I enjoy it.

Phil

I do much the same and use Google Earth, as well, to find the location and then use Street View to fine tune it.
I like your idea of using Directions to find the location. Most of the POIs that I create these days, is to create a travel route for vacations, etc. I then drag the route to roads that I want to use, instead of just letting Google or Basecamp create the route.
I appreciate your thoughts.

Good point. It's helpful for POI maintainers to not just enter a street address or drop a pin on top of the mapped location but try to check the validity of the location of each POI for people driving to it.

It's even more important for maintainers to be open to user feedback that a particular POI in their file isn't working right and try to modify it to work better.

Although some folks used a popular site that you input street addresses in, to get the GPS coordinates - it seems that it was wrong a lot. (???????izer - i can't remember)

Many of the older files here have not been updated/corrected and have inaccurate data, and the list of willing maintainers is decreasing.

I maintain the Bank of America file and BoA has been trying to keep me from helping their customers. I use the location of the ATM, as most people driving are going to use the ATM. After checking about 50 or so locations, the BoA site becomes almost unusable. The list of cities in a state becomes incomplete, The list of locations in a city will become incomplete and so on.

It seems that I throw someone's data off (hits on locations). I have developed a work-around that has been working. For how long, I don't know.

Yes, I know that the BoA file needs updating - its coming.

In addition to checking the POI location in Google Earth, you also need to make sure the pin is placed on a road that shows on the map version you're using in Basecamp and your GPS.

If the road isn't shown, routing to the POI will be inaccurate and you may get the "Navigate Off Road" message.

It is a small file and doesn’t take a lot of time so I use Google Earth to search for the location and then I zoom in on the location to get coordinates of the entrance to the location. Years ago, I was looking into taking over the Marathon Gas file, but after working on it for a couple of hours, I found that I didn’t have the time to do it. That file was a complete mess. I am glad that someone did finally take it over. It is a pretty good file now even though I don’t use it as much as I once did because of them eliminating their credit cards.