Improving the Quality of Citizen Contributed Geodata through Their Historical Contributions: The Case of the Road Network in OpenStreetMap

Abstract

OpenStreetMap (OSM) has proven to serve as a promising free global encyclopedia of maps with an increasing popularity across different user communities and research bodies. One of the unique characteristics of OSM has been the availability of the full history of users' contributions, which can leverage our quality control mechanisms through exploiting the history of contributions. Since this aspect of contributions (i.e., historical contributions) has been neglected in the literature, this study aims at presenting a novel approach for improving the positional accuracy and completeness of the OSM road network. To do so, we present a five-stage approach based on a Voronoi diagram that leads to improving the positional accuracy and completeness of the OSM road network. In the first stage, the OSM data history file is retrieved and in the second stage, the corresponding data elements for each object in the historical versions are identified. In the third stage, data cleaning on the historical datasets is carried out in order to identify outliers and remove them accordingly. In the fourth stage, through applying the Voronoi diagram method, one representative version for each set of historical versions is extracted. In the final stage, through examining the spatial relations for each object in the history file, the topology of the target object is enhanced. As per validation, a comparison between the latest version of the OSM data and the result of our approach against a reference dataset is carried out. Given a case study in Tehran, our findings reveal that the completeness and positional precision of OSM features can be improved up to 14%. Our conclusions draw attention to the exploitation of the historical archive of the contributions in OSM as an intrinsic quality indicator.

OSHDB: a framework for spatio-temporal analysis of OpenStreetMap history data

“…In recent years, several studies utilized the history of the OSM dataset, e.g., for conducting intrinsic quality assessments in cases where comparison datasets do not exist [26,27]. Intrinsic quality indicators have been developed to evaluate the fitness for purpose of OSM data [13,17,18,24].…”

OpenStreetMap history for intrinsic quality assessment: Is OSM up-to-date?

“…Gröchenig et al [50] developed an intrinsic approach for the assessment of OSM completeness through the analysis of community contributions over time. A novel approach for improving the positional accuracy and completeness of the OSM road network using the OSM history was proposed by Nasiri et al [51]. Barron et al [52] developed a comprehensive framework for OSM intrinsic quality assessment, which includes more than 25 methods and indicators exclusively based on OSM history.…”

Checking the Consistency of Volunteered Phenological Observations While Analysing Their Synchrony

“…This is a crucial step of abovementioned checks. The integration of historical and independent sources of geoinformation with VGI has been found to be an effective approach to improve the quality of VGI [40,41]. In phenology, there is contextual environmental information (e.g., temperature) that plays a key role in many phenological studies.…”