April 29th, 2012 § 10
Since past Friday the OpenStreetMap project has more than 600 000 registered members. As many of you may know, not every new registered member starts contributing to the project right away. Based on my “How did you contribute to OSM?” database I created a small (but neat) webpage which shows where the newest registered OpenStreetMap (OSM) members made one of their first edits. The following image shows a screenshot of the new webpage:
April 6th, 2012 § 12
Some of you might already know that OpenStreetMap released a first bulk GPS point dataset last weekend. It contains almost 2.8 milliard (or for readers in the US 2.8 billion) points and is provided in its raw format, which means that only coordinate information is available for each point. Unfortunately it does not include any additional information or metadata. You can read more about it at the OSM Foundation Blog.
März 11th, 2012 § 3
Many blog posts reported in the last few weeks about Google’s changes to their Google Maps API and the new usage limits. If a website that implemented the Google Maps API receives too much traffic or hits e.g. more than 25,000 per day, charges will apply [1]. This news caused some websites to start looking for alternatives and some of them switched to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project. You can read more about how and why you should also switch to OSM on the great switch2osm.org webpage.
Januar 15th, 2012 § 2
The OpenStreetMap project will possibly finalize its license change on April 1st 2012. There are certain concerns in the community about possible data losses and to keep them as little as possible, several remapping activities have been started. A really nice overview of “Remapping principles” and “Tools to help you” can be found here.
Frederik’s OSMInspector (OSMI) and Simon’s CLEANMAP are two very handy remapping tools. Both display data that will likely be removed after April 1st due to the fact that this data was collected by contributors that did not accept the license change. In Germany you will find several areas that are affected by these changes and might even leave some new blank spots in the map. But what impact do these changes have on the total length in kilometers per street category in Germany?
Januar 7th, 2012 § 4
Last weekend Frederik and Richard asked me if I could give some additional information on the „How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?“ webpage. So here we go. Below the prior, familiar chart which shows the contributions per month, you will find two new charts. The first one shows the number of changesets per weekday and the second one the number of changesets per hour.
Additionally I added an output that roughly estimates what type of mapper the contributor is, based on his/her number of contributions (changesets). However, I will give no warranty regarding the group or type of mapper that each individual contributor falls into and I think you will figure out the different groups of mappers by yourself anyway 
Januar 4th, 2012 § 6
Due to some requests by some German OpenStreetMap contributors, here a German blogpost about the results of the article: “The Street Network Evolution of Crowdsourced Maps: OpenStreetMap in Germany 2007–2011.” By Pascal Neis, Dennis Zielstra & Alexander Zipf. 2012. Future Internet 4, no. 1: 1-21. (doi:10.3390/fi4010001) Link: http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/4/1/1/
Bemerkung: Im Folgenden sind ausgewählte Ergebnisse und Diagramme aus dem englischen Artikel dargestellt/zusammengefasst. Bei weiterem Interesse bitte das Original Journal Paper lesen. Es beinhaltet bei weitem mehr Informationen und Abbildungen!
November 19th, 2011 § 2
The German OpenStreetMap project webpage has been online for three years now. During these years several small updates have been made to the page. But it is about time to create a complete new webpage with a “state of the art” layout and style. Jonas created the first drafts of a possible new design of the site a while ago. Unfortunately he hasn’t had enough time to finish his work, but luckily Fabian and Pascal came up with a new webpage. Both of them considered Jonas first draft during the development and expanded it with their own ideas.
November 13th, 2011 § 4
Really great news for all our non-European OpenStreetMap.org Mappers: Since last month, the OSM Routing View is available for the whole world. You can read more in Frederik’s blog post. Yesterday he sent me the latest results of the view and I did some analysis with it. To all new readers: you can find more information about the OSM Inspector (OSMI) here. The Routing View within the OSMI “shows problems in the data, related to routing and navigation” (direct link).
However, here are the new *worldwide* stats for November 2011: we have a total of about 1,3 Mio errors. We can divide them into the following groups:
November 6th, 2011 § 13
The last unmapped places analysis for OpenStreetMap that I conducted is nearly eight months ago. So I figured it was about time to create a new one. You can read in the last blog post how my algorithm exactly works.
However, at the moment (Nov. 4th. 2011) we have (according to the Geofabrik extract) about 597 000 entries in OSM for places that are located within “Europe“. This means we have an overall increase of about 90 000 places within the past eight months. We can separate them into several types with different values:
Oktober 30th, 2011 § 0
Last weekend I discovered that two guys created a new statistic webpage for the OpenStreetMap project. Both guys did a really nice job! You can find a bunch of information about OSM members, nodes, ways and relations (1) on their webpage. In particular you can find sums of registered or active OSM members or amounts of OSM nodes, ways and relations and their daily activity (2). Further, for most of the information, you can find weekly, monthly and yearly graphs (with tooltips!)(3). The stats are created every night.
