Towards quality metrics for OpenStreetMap

Abstract

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is currently a "hot topic" in the GIS community. The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project is one of the most popular and well supported examples of VGI. Traditional measures of spatial data quality are often not applicable to OSM as in many cases it is not possible to access ground-truth spatial data for all regions mapped by OSM. We investigate to develop measures of quality for OSM which operate in an unsupervised manner without reference to a "trusted" source of groundtruth data. We provide results of analysis of OSM data from several European countries. The results highlight specific quality issues in OSM. Results of comparing OSM with ground-truth data for Ireland are also presented.

Can Volunteered Geographic Information Be a Participant in eEnvironment and SDI?

“…Leveraging those dynamic updates (indicated in Table 1) is a key step to making the most of VGI. It is necessary that the VGI community can demonstrate that issues such as data quality (see Mooney and Corcoran [15]), scale and harmonization problems (Figure 2), etc can be detected effectively and efficiently. We agree with Budhathoki et al [1] that is "unlikely that VGI will completely replace SDIs".…”

“…One of the key questions in relation to GIS is how VGI will interact with this community? As Budhathoki et al [1] (and Mooney and Corcoran [15]) remark "VGI is unlikely to satisfy the vast majority of institutional and professional GI producers whose requirements in terms of data quality, timeliness, and completeness are very strict". Can a suitable middleground between professional GI producers and VGI can be found?…”

“…As a consequence the amount of VGI available on the Internet today has grown enormously in the past few years. Initiatives such as Wikimapia, Google Mapmaker, OpenStreetMap (OSM), geotagging in Flickr, geolocation in Twitter, Geonames, etc have seen VGI become a "hot topic in GIS research" [15] and is now one of the rapid growth areas of GIS. Recently VGI (such as OpenStreetMap) has begun to provide an interesting and feasible alternative to traditional authoritative spatial information from National Mapping Agencies and corporations.…”

“…Recently VGI (such as OpenStreetMap) has begun to provide an interesting and feasible alternative to traditional authoritative spatial information from National Mapping Agencies and corporations. However the fact that VGI is a spatial form of the user-generated content in Web 2.0 has raised serious concerns and reservations within the GIS, Geomatics and Environmental Science communities [15,14] about its quality, accuracy, sustainability, and fitness for use/purpose. Kessler et al [11] points out that compared to other projects building on user contributed content, such as Wikipedia, VGI remains on the GIS periphery and consequently has been restricted to web-based mapping applications [8] and not considered for involvement in "serious geomatics applications" [17].…”

Analyzing the Spatial-Semantic Interaction of Points of Interest in Volunteered Geographic Information

“…Several researchers have studied the quality of Volunteered Geographic Information over the last years [2][3][4]. Tools assisting users in constraint checking, attribute enrichment, or the cleaning of large data sets become more important [5][6][7].…”