OSM Science—The Academic Study of the OpenStreetMap Project, Data, Contributors, Community, and Applications

Abstract

This paper is an Editorial for the Special Issue titled “OpenStreetMap as a multidisciplinary nexus: perspectives, practices and procedures”. The Special Issue is largely based on the talks presented in the 2019 and 2020 editions of the Academic Track at the State of the Map conferences. As such, it represents the most pressing and relevant issues and topics considered by the academic community in relation to OpenStreetMap (OSM)—a global project and community aimed to create and maintain a free and editable database and map of the world. In this Editorial, we survey the papers included in the Special Issue, grouping them into three research perspectives: applications of OSM for studies within other disciplines, OSM data quality, and dynamics in OSM. This survey reveals that these perspectives, while being distinct, are also interrelated. This calls for the formalization of an ‘OSM science’ that will provide the conceptual grounds to advance the scientific study of OSM, not as a set of individualized efforts but as a unified approach.

Public transport access to drug treatment before and during COVID-19: Implications for the opioid epidemic

“…OpenStreetMap is a spatial data source data driven by a global community of volunteers to create a free, maintainable, and editable map of the world. ( Grinberger et al, 2022 , Klinkhardt et al, 2021 ) A year-on-year comparison of travel times from every DA centroid to every clinic is calculated using r5r. Year-on-year comparative approaches to public transport service changes have been used in prior studies to measure accessibility disruptions, such as in Deweese et.…”

Forest Sharing® as an Innovative Facility for Sustainable Forest Management of Fragmented Forest Properties: First Results of Its Implementation

“…OpenStreetMap (OSM) has emerged as a global project and community operating with the objective of creating and maintaining a free and editable database and a world map based on the contributions of volunteer mappers [36]. More detail about the potential use of OSM can be found in Grinberg et al [37]. From the OSM we extracted the streets/roads dataset in the form of vector GIS line features.…”

Bridges and Barriers: An Exploration of Engagements of the Research Community with the OpenStreetMap Community

“…These included 7 abstracts or short papers with less than 4 pages, one presentation, one poster, 3 documents available online but not published in any scientific journal or conference proceedings (one of them was a master thesis), 4 non-English papers, 3 papers not pertaining to OSM, and one paper whose full text was not accessible. The raw dataset including metadata of the remaining 200 papers which were further analyzed as described in Section 2.1 was published by the authors [43] as well as the code used to produce the outputs below [44]. The results found from the review of the attributes listed in Table 1 are described in the following.…”