A Methodology for Assessing Openstreetmap Degree of Coverage for Purposes of Land Cover Mapping

Abstract

ABSTRACT:The data available in the collaborative project OpenStreetMap (OSM) is in some locations so detailed and complete that it may provide useful data for Land Cover Map creation and validation. However, this degree of detail is not uniform along space. Therefore, one of the first requirements that needs to be assessed to determine if the creation and validation of Land Cover Maps using data available in OSM may be feasible, is the availability of data to provide a relatively complete coverage of the region of interest. To provide a fast and automatic quantitative assessment of this requirement a methodology is presented and tested in this article. Four study areas are considered, all located in Europe. The results show that the four regions presented very different coverages at the time of data download and its spatial distribution was not uniform. This approach enabled the identification of the most problematic regions for land cover mapping, where low levels of data coverage are available. Since the proposed methodology can be automated, it enables a fast identification of the regions that, in a preliminary analysis, may be considered fit for further analysis to assess fitness for use for Land Cover Map creation and/or validation.

Using Latent Semantic Analysis to Identify Research Trends in OpenStreetMap

“…Others reported on the analysis and implementation of frameworks for the assessment of OSM data [102][103][104][105]. The research trend "land-use patterns" (T50.6) was reported in thirteen articles that were focused on the use of OSM in remote sensing applications, particularly land use mapping [106][107][108][109][110][111][112][113][114]. Another trend that emerged was "indoor navigation" (T50.2), which focused on mobile enabled indoor navigation in transport services [65,66,115] and their augmentation with floor plans [68].…”

“…This effect may be attributed to the use of dominating keywords in these articles. For instance, the topic "land-use patterns" (50.6) revealed thirteen articles [106][107][108][109][110][111][112][113][114][132][133][134][135]. From these, eleven articles emerged from "quality assessment and analysis" (T5.1), whereas two of the papers were focused on "assessment of contributors' behavior" (T5.2) [110] and "indoor navigation models" (T5.5) [107], respectively.…”

Mapping land use impact of photovoltaic farms via crowdsourcing in the Province of Lecce (Southeastern Italy)

“…Other authors (i.e., Cipeluch et al, 2010) overlay OSM cartography to the main desktop web mapping services, like Google Maps or Bing Maps, revealing the abundance of detail in OSM. On these basis, several recent studies (i.e., Ribeiro and Fonte, 2015;Brian and Kotaro, 2016) report about the opportunity to use OSM in order to create Land Cover Maps.…”

Towards Seamless Validation of Land Cover Data

“…Thus far, however, the coverage of the contributed data does not allow for exhaustive validation of large region datasets. In contrast to that, the OSM contributors are very actively collecting a broad range of thematic data with close to complete spatial coverage in certain areas (Ribeiro and Fonte 2015). Thus, utilizing the OSM as a source for land cover ground truth data is a promising approach.…”

“…Since the OSM data is not specifically tailored to the needs of land cover map validation, various methods for transforming the original data to a more suitable representation have been developed . While only a portion of the OSM attributes is valuable for a derived land cover map, the coverage is still high enough to be usable, especially in urban areas (Ribeiro and Fonte 2015). In our research, we implemented a method for deriving a land cover reference map from the OSM database as shown in Fig.…”