Assessment of OpenStreetMap Data - A Review

Abstract

The meaning and purposes of web has been changing and evolving day by day. Web 2.0 encouraged more contribution by the end users. This movement provided revolutionary methods of sharing and computing data by crowdsourcing such as OpenStreetmap, also called "the wikification of maps" by some researchers. When crowdsourcing collects huge data with help of general public with varying level of mapping experience, the focus of researcher should be on analysing the data rather than collecting it. Researchers have assessed the quality of OpenStreetMap data by comparing it with proprietary data or data of governmental map agencies. This study reviews the research work for assessment of OpenStreetMap Data and also discusses about the future directions. General Terms:Assessment, OpenStreetMap

Green Apartheid: Urban green infrastructure remains unequally distributed across income and race geographies in South Africa

“…This may open up potential to provide national accounts of more nuanced aspects of urban green infrastructure such as shape, structure and function. This data can also act as an important supplement to crowdsourced geographic information on urban green spaces (OpenStreetMap; OSM) which has known quality issues that may lead to biased maps of green infrastructure distribution (Haklay, 2010;Sehra et al, 2013). Indeed, less affluent areas often contain less formal, small green spaces which may not be mapped by OSM and which may have exacerbated the inequities recorded in our analysis.…”

“…openstreetmap.org/) were used to define parks using geometries with attribute descriptions including 'park', 'playground' and 'protected area'. Although OSM data are volunteered geographic information, and thus data quality is a concern, they have been widely used as a proxy for recreational area (Haklay, 2010;Sehra et al, 2013). The park polygons we extracted were also visually inspected against Google street maps and the South African protected area database as a reference to ensure data quality over major cities in South Africa.…”

Analysing OpenStreetMap data for topological errors

“…The users provide additional information about the collected data by adding attributes and store the final results in the OpenStreetMap database. Users do not require any specialised GPS receiver for mapping, as it has been tested that smartphones can be considered as device for mapping (Sehra et al, 2013;Golicher, 2013). The accuracy of GPS has been checked and found satisfactory, but the accuracy depends upon the quality of GPS chip.…”

“…Governmental mapping agency's way of collecting the information is slow and is also not available for public visualisation. The crowdsourced OpenStreetMap platform can work as a framework for fast changes with quick response, like in case of disaster like Haiti City (Sehra et al, 2013). This paper has been divided into different sections.…”

Assessing the Topological Consistency of Crowdsourced OpenStreetMap Data

“…The most common approach is recording map data using a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver and editing the recorded information using one of the various freely available editors such as JOSM or Merkaator (Sehra et al, 2013). The users provide additional information about the collected data by adding attributes and storing the final results in the OpenStreetMap database.…”