Temporal Analysis of Activity Patterns of Editors in Collaborative Mapping Project of OpenStreetMap

In the recent years Wikis have become an attractive platform for social studies of the human behaviour. Containing millions records of edits across the globe, collaborative systems such as Wikipedia have allowed researchers to gain a better understanding of editors participation and their activity patterns. However, contributions made to Geo-wikis_wiki-based collaborative mapping projects_ differ from systems such as Wikipedia in a fundamental way due to spatial dimension of the content that limits the contributors to a set of those who posses local knowledge about a specific area and therefore cross-platform studies and comparisons are required to build a comprehensive image of online open collaboration phenomena. In this work, we study the temporal behavioural pattern of OpenStreetMap editors, a successful example of geo-wiki, for two European capital cities. We categorise different type of temporal patterns and report on the historical trend within a period of 7 years of the project age. We also draw a comparison with the previously observed editing activity patterns of Wikipedia.Comment: Submitte

Proceedings of the Academic Track at State of the Map 2019 - Heidelberg (Germany), September 21-23, 2019

State of the Map featured a full day of academic talks. Building upon the motto of SotM 2019 in "Bridging the Map" the Academic Track session was aimed to provide the bridge to join together the experience, understanding, ideas, concepts and skills from different groups of researchers, academics and scientists from around the world. In particular, the Academic Track session was meant to build this bridge that connects members of the OpenStreetMap community and the academic community by providing an open passage for exchange of ideas, communication and opportunities for increased collaboration. These proceedings include 14 abstracts accepted as oral presentations and 6 abstracts presented as posters. Contributions were received from different academic fields, for example geography, remote sensing, computer and information sciences, geomatics, GIScience, the humanities and social sciences, and even from industry actors. We are particularly delighted to have included abstracts from both experienced researchers and students. Overall, it is our hope that these proceedings accurately showcase the ongoing innovation and maturity of scientific investigations and research into OpenStreetMap, showing how it as a research object converges multiple research areas together. Our aim is to show how the sum total of investigations of issues like Volunteered Geographic Information, geo-information, and geo-digital processes and representation shed light on the relations between crowds, real-world applications, technological developments, and scientific research

Cartographic Vandalism in the Era of Location-Based Games—The Case of OpenStreetMap and Pokémon GO

User-generated map data is increasingly used by the technology industry for background mapping, navigation and beyond. An example is the integration of OpenStreetMap (OSM) data in widely-used smartphone and web applications, such as Pokémon GO (PGO), a popular augmented reality smartphone game. As a result of OSM’s increased popularity, the worldwide audience that uses OSM through external applications is directly exposed to malicious edits which represent cartographic vandalism. Multiple reports of obscene and anti-semitic vandalism in OSM have surfaced in popular media over the years. These negative news related to cartographic vandalism undermine the credibility of collaboratively generated maps. Similarly, commercial map providers (e.g., Google Maps and Waze) are also prone to carto-vandalism through their crowdsourcing mechanism that they may use to keep their map products up-to-date. Using PGO as an example, this research analyzes harmful edits in OSM that originate from PGO players. More specifically, this paper analyzes the spatial, temporal and semantic characteristics of PGO carto-vandalism and discusses how the mapping community handles it. Our findings indicate that most harmful edits are quickly discovered and that the community becomes faster at detecting and fixing these harmful edits over time. Gaming related carto-vandalism in OSM was found to be a short-term, sporadic activity by individuals, whereas the task of fixing vandalism is persistently pursued by a dedicated user group within the OSM community. The characteristics of carto-vandalism identified in this research can be used to improve vandalism detection systems in the future

Recent Developments and Future Trends in Volunteered Geographic Information Research: The Case of OpenStreetMap

User-generated content (UGC) platforms on the Internet have experienced a steep increase in data contributions in recent years. The ubiquitous usage of location-enabled devices, such as smartphones, allows contributors to share their geographic information on a number of selected online portals. The collected information is oftentimes referred to as volunteered geographic information (VGI). One of the most utilized, analyzed and cited VGI-platforms, with an increasing popularity over the past few years, is OpenStreetMap (OSM), whose main goal it is to create a freely available geographic database of the world. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the latest developments in VGI research, focusing on its collaboratively collected geodata and corresponding contributor patterns. Additionally, trends in the realm of OSM research are discussed, highlighting which aspects need to be investigated more closely in the near future

Open source data mining infrastructure for exploring and analysing OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap and other Volunteered Geographic Information datasets have been explored in the last years, with the aim of understanding how their meaning is rendered, of assessing their quality, and of understanding the community-driven process that creates and maintains the data. Research mostly focuses either on the data themselves while ignoring the social processes behind, or solely discusses the community-driven process without making sense of the data at a larger scale. A holistic understanding that takes these and other aspects into account is, however, seldom gained. This article describes a server infrastructure to collect and process data about different aspects of OpenStreetMap. The resulting data are offered publicly in a common container format, which fosters the simultaneous examination of different aspects with the aim of gaining a more holistic view and facilitates the results’ reproducibility. As an example of such uses, we discuss the project OSMvis. This project offers a number of visualizations, which use the datasets produced by the server infrastructure to explore and visually analyse different aspects of OpenStreetMap. While the server infrastructure can serve as a blueprint for similar endeavours, the created datasets are of interest themselves too

Quality Assessment of the Canadian OpenStreetMap Road Networks

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) has been applied in many fields such as participatory planning, humanitarian relief and crisis management because of its cost-effectiveness. However, coverage and accuracy of VGI cannot be guaranteed. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a popular VGI platform that allows users to create or edit maps using GPS-enabled devices or aerial imageries. The issue of geospatial data quality in OSM has become a trending research topic because of the large size of the dataset and the multiple channels of data access. The objective of this study is to examine the overall reliability of the Canadian OSM data. A systematic review is first presented to provide details on the quality evaluation process of OSM. A case study of London, Ontario is followed as an experimental analysis of completeness, positional accuracy and attribute accuracy of the OSM street networks. Next, a national study of the Canadian OSM data assesses the overall semantic accuracy and lineage in addition to the quality measures mentioned above. Results of the quality evaluation are compared with associated OSM provenance metadata to examine potential correlations. The Canadian OSM road networks were found to have comparable accuracy with the tested commercial database (DMTI). Although statistical analysis suggests that there are no significant relations between OSM accuracy and its editing history, the study presents the complex processes behind OSM contributions possibly influenced by data import and remote mapping. The findings of this thesis can potentially guide cartographic product selection for interested parties and offer a better understanding of future quality improvement in OSM

An assessment of citizen contributed ground reference data for land cover map accuracy assessment

It is now widely accepted that an accuracy assessment should be part of a thematic mapping programme. Authoritative good or best practices for accuracy assessment have been defined but are often impractical to implement. Key reasons for this situation are linked to the ground reference data used in the accuracy assessment. Typically, it is a challenge to acquire a large sample of high quality reference cases in accordance to desired sampling designs specified as conforming to good practice and the data collected are normally to some degree imperfect limiting their value to an accuracy assessment which implicitly assumes the use of a gold standard reference. Citizen sensors have great potential to aid aspects of accuracy assessment. In particular, they may be able to act as a source of ground reference data that may, for example, reduce sample size problems but concerns with data quality remain. The relative strengths and limitations of citizen contributed data for accuracy assessment are reviewed in the context of the authoritative good practices defined for studies of land cover by remote sensing. The article will highlight some of the ways that citizen contributed data have been used in accuracy assessment as well as some of the problems that require further attention, and indicate some of the potential ways forward in the future