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:

• City: 1093 (as of March 11th, 2011 it was 1055 ; +3.6%)
• Town: 16213 (as of March 11th, 2011 it was 16106 ; +0.7%)
• Suburb: 29642 (as of March 11th, 2011 it was 24913 ; +19.0%)
• Village: 301638 (as of March 11th, 2011 it was 278691 ; +8.2%)
• Hamlet: 238717 (as of March 11th, 2011 it was 184326 ; 29.5%)
• Isolated dwelling: 9064 (new in my stats)

The results showed that of the total 301638 village entries for Europe in the database, about 154445 (51%) (in March 2011 it was 55%) have not been detected or mapped yet. Further it is possible that the places are tagged incorrectly (e.g. villages vs. hamlet). Anyway, the following figures show the distribution of the values for each country (in different scales).

It is nice to see, that Austria (-688), Czech Republic (-633), France (-1978), Georgia (-721), Germany (-1192), Italy (-926), Poland (-2364), Spain (-1472) and the United Kingdom (-829) were able to reduce their “unmapped places” in a quite solid way. As usual you can find my results as a GPX-overlay here: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org

(Remarks for http://resultmaps.neis-one.org: Not each and every country is available as an overlay. Some countries such as France or Poland showed longer browser loading times to display the GPX-overlays!)

UPDATE: Download the complete GPX-files of this analysis here.

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

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.

Personally, I like the graph of the “daily active members”. Did you know that in the majority of cases more relations have been modified then created? You can see this in the relations “daily created/modified/deleted” graph.

I’m sure you will find some other interesting trends. Notice: It seems that they started this site at the beginning of October 2011, thus most of the information is only available starting at this particular date. Up to now I only knew of the “official” stats webpage here. However, a really big thanks to the “lost” guys (aka Santos & El Loco) … 🙂

The website is online here: http://osmstats.altogetherlost.com

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

During my really great vacation in Sweden I had some time to do some further adjustments to the well-known “Your OSM Heatmap“-webpage. For the new readers: “Your OSM Heatmap” shows the contributions of an OpenStreetMap user as a heatmap overlay. You can find my blog post with some more information here.

However, I think it would be a fantastic idea to add a time slider to the webpage. You can find it now below the map! The year of your first and last contribution is on the left and right end of the slider. With the slider you can visualize your OSMtastic-work over time. The following image shows the webpage including the time slider:

As a second feature you can now use, beside your OSM heatmap-link, the permalink of the map to point to an individual position of your heatmap! Finally I have updated the data for the webpage with the latest OSM changesets. Overall the heatmaps for about 150 000 contributors are available. Remember: Not *every* registered OSM member did contribute to the project.

So, who has an awesome OSM HeatMap time-travel? >> http://yosmhm.neis-one.org

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

Last week Stephan released the neat “Where Did You Edit?” webpage. A world map indicates where in the world you have been editing OpenStreetMap (OSM) nodes. Unfortunately it is based on a full history OSM planet dump which is nearly two months old. Also, the map does not include any tools to zoom into or drag the map. However, Stephan mentioned that he is working on these functions. Keep up the good work, Stephan!

Based on my OSM changeset table of “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap ?” I created a slightly different webpage and used a different approach. I used the weekly OSM changeset files and I presented the results in an OpenStreetMap including zoom and drag functions. Your contributions are indicated by a “Heat-Map-Overlay”. For this overlay I am using Bjoern’s OpenLayers addon. For better performance I generalized the total changesets of each OSM contributor. This means that it is possible that not every little contribution from a member is taken into account and displayed in the map. Anyway, I think the results are quite impressive, aren’t they?

The following picture shows the heat map of Harry’s OSM contributions. Really nice! But honestly: Harry, did you visit all places in person? 🙂

I think you will find other incredible OSM Contributors Heat Map stories?! You can find “Your OSM Heat Map” (aka Where did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?) here: http://yosmhm.neis-one.org . I can update this website every week if you like …

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

Most of you might already know that the OpenStreetMap project will celebrate its 7th Anniversary this month. Several events will take place on Saturday, 20 August 2011 at different locations around the world! You can read more about it here.

A small gift that I would like to contribute is a website which allows you to get some information about your “OSM-Age“. The functionality is similar to “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap ?“. Type in your or any other OSM username and your or the corresponding user’s OSM-Birthday will be displayed. To be more specific the website will show your OSM-Age and your rank within the OSM contributors list. Remember: Not every OSM member contributed to OSM (cf. „Nominal Members“ of OSM). So it is possible that your rank is better than you might have expected. The date of a user’s birthday was collected from each users OSM User Wiki page (“Mapper since: …”).

The following image shows an example search result:

Additionally you can find the oldest and newest contributors in the boxes below the search results. Further you can see whose birthday it is on that specific day, or within the previous or following three days.

Soooo, what is your birthday? Check it out here: http://osmbirthday.neis-one.org

Additional information: Today (Aug. 2011) the OSM project has about 143 000 contributors with at least one edit in the database. Remember that officially the project has over 446 000 registered members (cf. OpenStreetMap stats report). I will announce more about this topic here in my blog in the near future … so stay tuned! Or you can read the blog post from last year (2010): „Nominal Members“ of OSM

thx @ *Fab* for the user-interface
and thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

Maybe some of you remember that I conducted a comparison analysis between three OpenStreetMap (OSM) routing engine APIs (CloudMade, MapQuest Open and OSRM) and G**gle Maps API last week. You can find the results in my blog post here. As I mentioned in the article, I wanted to try to do a second analysis with more routing engines.

Thus, I added Bing Maps and two OSM engines (YourNavigation/YOURS and Routino/Roadeeno) to the comparison. All services have a continental coverage with the exception of OSRM. The following table shows an overview of (1) the request-response time of the service, (2) the calculated distance for the test-route and (3) the file size of the service response:

As you can see in the following diagram does the OSM routing engine (OSRM) give the fastest results. A little bit strange is that the Routino/Roadeeno service returns no valid route responses for requests which are longer than 600 km.

The same diagram in a more detailed view:

The routing engines have different ping times (round-trip time). Almost all services have a round-trip time off about 25 ms. You can see the times for each engine in the following diagram:

If you take those ping times into account and use a logarithmic transformation, the result look as shown below:

The above diagram shows in a quite impressive way the results of this comparison that allow the following conclusions: OSRM (OSM) shows the fastest results followed by G**gle Maps (Tele Atlas). Bing (Navteq), MapQuest (OSM) and CloudMade (OSM) are nearly equal in most cases. YOURS (OSM) and Routino (OSM) seem not to be the right choices at least for long route calculations (>600km). Maybe a second comparison with several routes between 10 and 500 km could be an enhancement?

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis 🙂

Currently I am working on a research paper about the OpenStreetMap evolution of Germany. For the last AGIT conference in Salzburg and the upcoming State of the Map Europe (SotM-EU) conference in Vienna I did a similar analysis about the OpenStreetMap Evolution of Austria. You can see the results in the following posters in English and German:

The OpenStreetMap Evolution of Austria (2007–2011)

Die OpenStreetMap Entwicklung in Österreich (2007–2011)

A further nice visualization of the OpenStreetMap data in Austria for the year 2010, can be found in a blog post by Max Kossatz.

Ok, you want it, you’ll get it! Maybe some of you know the nice website: www.googlefight.com. You can enter two keywords and after that it starts a funny fight between these keywords. Based on the database of “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?” I created a similar website where you can set up a “fight” between OpenStreetMap contributors. The following picture shows an example fight:

I am very sure you have some ideas for further fights, don´t you?
“Let´s get ready to rumble!” >>  http://osmfight.neis-one.org/ <<

thx @ Frederik for idea during a talk
thx @ *Fab* for the user-interface
and finally thx @, you know it: maɪˈæmɪ Dennis 🙂

In Salzburg (Österreich) fand dieses Jahr wieder vom 6. bis zum 8. Juli die AGIT statt. Die AGIT ist eine Konferenz für angewandte Geoinformatik, welche bereits seit 1989 stattfindet. Dieses Jahr dürfte sie wohl wieder einen neuen Besucherrekord erreicht haben, mit angeblich knapp 1200 Teilnehmern.

Wie im letzten Jahr gab es auch dieses Jahr am Mittwochnachmittag wieder ein Spezialforum für OpenStreetMap mit insgesamt drei Sessions. Sie bestanden jeweils aus drei Vorträgen über/mit oder wegen OpenStreetMap. Aber nicht nur innerhalb dieses Forums, auch in einigen anderen Sessions, wovon es teilweise insgesamt 10 parallel über die Veranstaltungstage verteilt gab, wurden OSM Daten immer wieder in unterschiedlichen Varianten verwendet. Angefangen von der Verwendung zur Erstellung von Karten, wie auch als Datengrundlage für Routenplaner, die Verwendung von GPS-Tracks zur Ermittlung des Verkehrsaufkommens oder wie in meinem Vortrag, zur Darstellung von Verkehrswarnmeldungen.

Für mich persönlich war es gerade am Mittwochnachmittag interessant zu hören, dass in Wien noch weitere amtliche Geodaten freigegeben werden und andere Ämter, zumindest in Österreich, über die Freigaben ihrer Geodaten nachdenken. Auch im Vortrag vom LVG-Bayern über die Luftbildfreigabe in Bayern, die unter anderem auch für das Abdigitaliseren für OSM verfügbar waren/sind, gab es Aussagen das gerne immer wieder neue Orthopohots freigegeben werden.

Was meiner Meinung nach vor ein paar Jahren irgendwie noch undenkbar war, wird langsam Realität: Behörden in Österreich oder auch Deutschland geben ihre Geodaten frei oder sprechen zumindest offiziell darüber sie zu veröffentlichen!

Ich sehe hier ein wirklich großes Potential gerade für OpenStreetMap im Bereich der Qualitätsvervollständigung, Qualitätsanalyse und vor allem in der immer wieder nachgefragten Qualitätssicherung. Aber nicht nur OpenStreetMap würde davon profitieren, so wie im LVG-Bayern Vortrag von offizieller Seite zu hören, haben auch die Ämter viele positive Effekte durch die Verwendung von OSM Daten bei ihrer Arbeit. Ingesamt also eine absolute Win-Win-Situation? Warten wir mal ab, was sich bis zur nächsten AGIT 2012 in Salzburg noch so alles ergibt …

This article was written in the ICE720 from Munich to Frankfurt, with a delay of 22min.
Thanks for travelling with Deutsche Bahn!

In the past blog post I wrote about the newest changes and encoding techniques that have been implemented in the Open Source Routing Project (OSRM). So I think it is time do a little comparison analysis about the request/response time of several routing APIs. The main question I wanted to answer was: “Is an OpenStreetMap direction service faster than G**gle?” I tested the following direction APIs for cars (fastest): MapQuest, CloudMade, G**gle and finally OSRM. For the analyses I wrote a small Java tool, which measured the time to get a result of a routing-service. I did all tests at home with a “regular” 12kbit/s internet connection. I tested several distance levels and the results can be seen in the following table. It shows the average times of five requests for each route with a delay of 3 seconds between each request/response. Overall I did this analysis three times.

The results are quite impressive. OSRM calculates the fastest route for all five test routes! Unfortunately we do not have any information about the server infrastructure at G**gle, MapQuest or CloudMade but the OSRM engine is running on a virtual server with limited hardware resources. It seems that the CloudMade directions service does not like Paris very much, as can be seen in the following image 😉

I will try to do a second comparison with Bing Maps, YOURS and Routino. So stay tuned …

— Update —

>> The second blog post is here: Comparison of (OSM) routing-engines – Reloaded <<

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis 🙂