Recently some new posts on the German OpenStreetMap-Mailing-List regarding the coverage of yet undetected regions in OpenStreetMap have been accumulating, caused by the current clearance of the BING-aerial images.

In one of my former blog posts that I wrote back in August this year, I introduced an analysis that included the search for “places” such as small villages etc. in Germany that probably had not been mapped in OSM at that time (the post in German language can be found here).

However, I repeated this analysis using the database of the routing view. This time I expanded the research area to entire Europe. In total there are 477591 places in Europe covered in OSM (at the moment). They can be separated into the following place-types:

• city=1045
• town=16032
• suburb=23563
• village=271147
• hamlet=165804

During my analysis I *only* used those places that had a corresponding “village-tag”. For the case of Germany it can be assumed that places with “higher” place-type tags such as “town” or “city” have already been mapped. In the special case of the “hamlet”-tag there were too many “false=positives” included, thus they could not be considered during the analysis.

The results showed that of the total 271147 villages, about 156940 villages (58%) who are located within Europe, have not been detected or mapped yet (corresponding to the Geofabrik extract). The following diagram shows the distribution of the numbers by country.

The results can either be displayed as a GPX-overlay on an OSM-map which can be found http://resultmaps.neis-one.org or they can be downloaded as a *.zip file that includes the results for all countries that have been included in the analysis (see at the End!).

Remarks for http://resultmaps.neis-one.org :

1. Not each and every country is available as an overlay.
2. Some countries such as France, Poland and Ukraine showed longer browser loading times to display the GPX-overlays.

There is a possibility that some of the “places” have been mapped by now. Currently there is a lot of work being contributed to OSM with the help of the new BING aerial images!

thx @ VBA Dennis 😉

Download Unmapped Places GPX *.zip file: 20101205_results_unmapped_eu.zip