OpenStreetMap Contribution Analysis

A research collaboration with Mapbox

Welcome!

This website is a collection of tools and utilities for analyzing and visualizing contributions to OpenStreetMap. I am building these tools as a Research Fellow with Mapbox during the summer of 2016.

I am also talking about some of the analysis results on my OpenStreetMap Diary page.

More information

Country Level User & Edit Analysis

Shadowed Edits

Exploring Road Quality

Exploring Object Types

Co-Editing Networks: North America

User Editing Summaries

Annual Edit Recency Map

Editing Density Map

About This Work

I am currently a computer science PhD student at the University of Colorado Boulder and a Research Fellow with Mapbox. My interests are in developing tools and methods to explore and better understand the production of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). As the largest VGI project, OpenStreetMap presents a great research platform. Here are a few FAQ style facts, if you'd like to learn more, please be in touch!

-Jennings Anderson

Where do these numbers come from?

Using the osm-qa-tiles and the tile-reduce processing framework, I calculate a number of statistics on a per-year basis using the historical snapshot tilesets of the qa-tiles.

It is important to note that these historical tilesetse are snapshots of what the current map looked like at the end of each year. As a result, the numbers reported here could be an under-representation of edits.
For example, if a contributor makes an edit to a map feature early in the year and another contributor updates that feature later in the year, only the second contributor's edit on that feature is going to be present in the tileset.

After running tile-reduce, I feed the results back into tippecanoe, the vector tileset building utility. I then use Mapbox to host the tilesets and use their open source mapbox-gl javascript library to build and display the interactive maps here.

Why?

A discussion on exploring geospatial quality metrics with OpenStreetMap data