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

Country Editing Details

Explore the patterns between daily editing activity and total number of edits. Also compare annual counts for new vs. edited and named vs. unnamed objects per Country.

Shadowed Edits

Where and when are edits are shadowed?

In an annual snapshot of the map, user-editing attributes such as who, what, and when of map objects only exist for the most recent edit, previous edit information is only represented by the version number. This map explores this.

Exploring Road Quality

Where are roads named? Where are they edited most?

This map renders all of the LineString objects with a highway tag. It allows filtering based on the version number, length of road segment, and whether or not it includes a name tag.

Exploring Object Types

Where are the buildings, roads, and amenities edited each year in OSM?

This map is rendered based on the number of buildings, kilometers of roads, or number of amenities edited on each tile in any given year.

Co-Editing Networks: North America

Who is editing on the same tiles, and what are they editing?

An interactive network of contributions in North America. Contributors are connected if they have edits on the same tile. Thresholds for the number of buildings, kilometers of roads, number of amenities, or simply the number of edits can be set.

User Editing Summaries

Where are your edits?

This tool allows you to load per-tile summaries for any OSM contributor. Choose a user from a tile or type in a user name to get started and then load multiple contributors onto the map to see whoe else is contributing near you!

Annual Edit Recency Map

Where and when do edits happen?

This map renders tiles of varying colors based on the latest edit on that tile in the given year.

Editing Density Map

Where are the most active areas of OSM?

This map renders annual tilesets that represent the number of edits and contributors active for each tile at zoom level 12.

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