OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a well-known crowdsourcing project which aims to create a geospatial database of the whole world. Intrinsic approaches based on the analysis of the history of data, i.e. its evolution over time, have become an established way to assess OSM quality. After a comprehensive review of scientific as well as software applications focused on the visualization, analysis and processing of OSM history, the paper presents "Is OSM up-to-date?", an open source web application addressing the need of OSM contributors, community leaders and researchers to quickly assess OSM intrinsic quality based on the object history for any specific region. The software, mainly written in Python, can be also run in the command line or inside a Docker container. The technical architecture, sample applications and future developments of the software are also presented in the paper.
ABSTRACT:OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the most popular crowdsourced geographic information project. The main factor that still limits the practical use of OSM is the lack of quality assurance. OSM quality assessment is thus a well-studied topic in literature, with most of the studies evaluating the quality by comparison against reference datasets. In contrast to these extrinsic approaches, OSM intrinsic assessment evaluates the quality by only analysing OSM itself. This study contributes to OSM intrinsic assessment by introducing an open source procedure to evaluate the temporal accuracy, up-to-dateness and lineage of OSM. Two workflows are presented: the first allows accessing the historical evolution of single OSM objects through an interactive web application, while the second aggregates and stores results on a user-defined grid to enable further GIS processing. The methodology is applied on the OSM nodes in the city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, by computing the following measures on the cells of an hexagonal grid: total number of nodes, average date of creation and last edit of nodes, average update frequency of nodes, average number of versions of nodes, average and total number of different contributors on nodes. Results highlight the mapping dynamics driven by the Dar Ramani Huria project, focused on increasing flood preparedness and resilience. When moving from the peripheral areas to the city centre, OSM is characterized by a progressively higher density of nodes, created earlier in time and updated by a higher number of contributors, which are all indexes of a general higher data quality.
The software development for the control system of the cryogenics in the LHC is partially automatized. However, every single modification requires a sequence of consecutive and interdependent tasks to be executed manually by software developers. A large number of control system consolidations and the evolution of the used IT technologies lead to reviewing the software production methodology. As a result, an open-source continuous integration server has been employed integrating all development tasks, tools and technologies. This paper describes the main improvements that have been made to fully automate the process of software production and the achieved results.
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