Comment by kelseydh

Missing data and incomplete layers I'd say.

I know the areas from Alice west to the coast and north to the equator fairly well.

Rail lines are missing, it appears to be just "big" power lines and that's 'accurate' in the sense that South Australia doesn't share power across the Nuallabor to Western Australia and many northern towns are 'independant' of any state or territory grid, running on a local generation basis.

Doesn't show Pine Gap or the Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt base either . . . :-)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Gap

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Communication_Station_Ha...

(Ground to space and Ground to underwater communications)

Yeah, I see some data in my city where a plant was closed and demolished 4 years ago and is still listed on there.

It is possible and likely that some data was not yet mapped in OpenStreetMap. So it is missing in OpenStreetMap-based map.

Feel free to edit it if you can!

(even if this specific data is not possible to be added by you - feel free to add say nearby shop or park)

ad: if you have Android I can recommend StreetComplete (great for newbies)

if you have iPhone - GoMap!! is great though a bit more complicated to use

Vespucci is more complicated and more powerful than StreetComplete editor for Android phones

or you can edit directly on osm.org from desktop

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disclaimer: I am a walking conflict of interest as far as OSM goes (for start, I am StreetComplete contributor)

Australia is miniscule by global standards and Alice Springs is miniscule by Australian standards. Alice Springs isn't connected to the grid servicing most of Australia's population crammed up along the East coast and doesn't have much in the way of heavy industrial users nearby. The difficulty for OSM mappers is the low-capacity above-ground power lines in Alice Springs have no more pixels as the trunk of any 20 year old tree so at satellite imagery resolutions of >30cm you may need to find an image taken at sunrise or sunset where the long shadow of a pole is visible on the ground. I also think it is preferred in remote locations such as Alice Springs to run lines underground (particularly along roads) due to decreased total cost of ownership of not having to worry about bushfire and flood damage to infrastructure.

The ACT government provides ~10cm aerial imagery of Canberra and surrounds a few times a year and from this imagery, unless a minor power pole is obscured by trees or a building, it is generally easy to identify most poles. Evoenergy (distribution operator for the ACT) also publicly provide detailed maps of poles and lines no matter how minor they are. The reason this detail won't be mapped in OSM is lack of interest and availability of mappers to micro-map every minor power pole from aerial imagery, and OSM's very conservative approach to importing datasets, particularly from a licensing perspective (e.g. attempting to apply European database directive concerns in countries like Australia which don't have equivalent laws, and even have opposing case law precedents).

Australia is one of the most open countries when it comes to supplying electrical grid data. Even underground conduit locations are available publicly for most distributors, as well as designed summer/winter constraints for each transmission line (e.g. maximum kA per line). See [1] for some links to maps and other data that is made publicly available.

[1] https://query.wikidata.org/#SELECT%20%3Foperator%20%3Foperat...