Measuring Completeness of Building Footprints in OpenStreetMap over Space and Time

Abstract

Due to financial or administrative constraints, access to official spatial base data is currently limited to a small subset of all potential users in the field of spatial planning and research. This increases the usefulness of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), in particular OpenStreetMap (OSM), as supplementary datasets or, in some cases, alternative sources of primary data. In contrast to the OSM street network, which has already been thoroughly investigated and found to be practically complete in many areas, the degree of completeness of OSM data on buildings is still unclear. In this paper we describe methods to analyze building completeness and apply these to various test areas in Germany. Official data from national mapping and cadastral agencies is used as a basis for comparison. The results show that unit-based completeness measurements (e.g., total number or area of buildings) are highly sensitive to disparities in modeling between official data and VGI. Therefore, we recommend object-based methods to study the completeness of OSM building footprint data. An analysis from November 2011 in Germany indicated a completeness of 25% in the federal states of North Rhine-Westphalia and 15% in Saxony. Although further analyses from 2012 confirm that data completeness in Saxony has risen to 23%, the rate of new data input was slowing in the year 2012.

A review of volunteered geographic information quality assessment methods

“…In addition to their categorization, we have also found methods based on the data mining approach. Schmitz et al(2008) Mummidi&Krumm (2008) Hasan et al (2009) Kounadi (2009) Ather (2009) De Longueville et al (2010) Bishr&Janowicz (2010) Mendoza et al (2010) Haklay (2010) Ciepluch (2010) Corcoran et al (2010) Girres&Touya (2010) Haklay et al (2010) Poser&Dransch (2010) Brando&Bucher ( (2014) Hollenstein&Purves (2014) • Arsanjani (2015) Vandecasteele&Devillers (2015) Hashemi&Abbaspour ( Hecht et al 2013, Jackson et al 2013, Fan et al 2014, Tenney 2014, Brando and Bucher 2010, geometric accuracy (Girres and Touya 2010). For geometric accuracy OSM objects of same structure were manually matched.…”

Assessing VGI Data Quality

“…Koukoletsos et al (2012) present a method that holds promise for such contexts, combining geometric and attribute constraints to match road segments in OSM with those found in an authoritative dataset, and to achieve a tile-by-tile completeness assessment. In another study, Hecht et al (2013) proposed an object-based approach to assess the completeness of building footprints. Haklay (2010) identified a bias in UK OSM data coverage towards more affluent areas, and relates this to the fact that socially marginal (and less-mapped) areas may be the very locations where charities and agencies requiring free data are operating.…”

The Urbis Project: Identification and Characterization of Potential Urban Development Areas as a Web-Based Service

“…Also building footprints from OSM are considered as an information source, but their use for URBIS is restricted to selected cities, as the coverage of mapped buildings has been still lacking in recent years also for several larger cities (Hecht et al, 2013). Additionally, for the determination of more specific criteria it is necessary to integrate ancillary data which might not always be openly available.…”